A Yemeni expatriat's view of the changes in Yemen

Excerpts from an interesting article in the Globe and Mail entitled "A Yemeni Memoir - from bikinis to burkas."  Preface: "In his childhood, Toronto writer Kamal Al-Solaylee recalls a cosmopolitan, secular family from southern Yemen. Today his sisters and brothers are close-minded Islamists. As one middle-class clan loses its own struggle with extremism, so goes the country."

The photo [family in swimsuits and bikinis] captures a moment of bourgeois life in the Middle East, before the region became associated in the Western collective psyche with exporting terror or the subjugation of women. It's an image of a large and admittedly privileged family, led by enlightened, secular parents from southern Yemen.

Yes, the same Yemen that, since Christmas Day, has been reintroduced to the world as a second Afghanistan or the third front in the war on terror – where my family still lives, in the capital, Sanaa. But the Yemen of today is nothing like the one where my older siblings came of age in the 1950s and 1960s. And when I speak to my family now, they have changed so much that it's hard to believe we are even related.

I paid a visit to my family in the spring of 1992, my first in almost six years, and was shocked to see how just a few years changed us both so dramatically. There was a defeatist quality to their lives, while mine had hopes of a better future...  Returning again in the summer of 2001 – my first visit since I had moved to Canada in 1996 – I encountered a family that was a lot closer to the stereotype of regressive Muslim culture than I had ever known...

Collectively they have become television addicts. Satellite TV, featuring hundreds of channels from the Arab world and beyond, has taken over from reading and socializing as the main form of entertainment. Why? Because among the many channels you can watch are the more Islamist ones (Hezbollah's Manar TV, for example) that promote a rigid version of the faith...

The real danger is the tacit acceptance – an acceptance that has been building slowly for more than two decades and has claimed even progressive families like mine...

Much more detail at the link, and over a hundred comments; Reddit comment thread here.  Photo: author Kamal Al-Solaylee and his family.  "Kamal Al-Solaylee is an assistant professor at Ryerson University's School of Journalism. He is a former theatre critic for The Globe and Mail."

Update:  I was going to post this story without editorializing on the subject, but while eating breakfast I couldn't get it out of my mind, so here are some quick thoughts.  First of all, if you are going to comment on the topic, please read Mr. Al-Solaylee story in full at the link - not just my excerpts.

My knee-jerk response is to echo the sentiments of the author - that it is unutterably sad that his family has "regressed" from liberal Western values to the restrictive covenants of Islam.  The opposite viewpoint, of course, would be that of the mullah who would tell you that before the family went "from bikinis to burkas" then went "from burkas to bikinis," and that that change was equally sad.  To say that one of these sets of behavioral standards is a priori more ethical than the other is fraught with difficulty. 

I know someone will want to reply that the West may have seduced them to join our standards, but that doesn't justify the violence of the committed Islamist.  To that one has to append a reminder that the U.S. (and other "Western" countries) have been active participants in Middle East social policy every since the discovery of oil there.  We overthrew Iran's democratically-elected (note!) president Mohammend Mosaddeq and set up the Shah (and the violence of the SAVAK) in his place.  We have supported Israel for 50 years, have tried to Westernize Egypt, and backed Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran.  Many of these policies have led to violence in the Middle East.  I won't say here that these actions were right or wrong, but a claim that the West is as pure-minded and innocent as the wind-driven snow would be a reflection of profound ignorance.

Mr. Al-Solaylee's essay is poignant and commendably restrained.  He doesn't condemn his family (or the mullahs and the Islamist media).  As a journalism professor he takes note of his observations and presents them for the edification of the public.  My thoughts on the subject are more complex than I can present in a brief blogpost, and I don't pretend to have an answer.  I just wanted to present his essay to the TYWKIWDBI audience.