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BILL MOYERS:
Did they support your getting your Ph.D.?
AZZA KARAM:
Very much so. After a while.
BILL MOYERS:
After a while?
AZZA KARAM:
After a while.
AZZA KARAM:
It wasn't the initial, "Sure, go for it." It was more like, "Hmm, you're going to be living alone. Hmm, how long is that state going to last? Hmm, OK."
BILL MOYERS:
And would they have preferred you to do it at the University of Cairo?
AZZA KARAM:
Absolutely, of course they would. And at least I would have been a few minutes from home everyday. I think the fact that I would be living in another city, in another country was a little bit disconcerting. It took a bit of getting used to I would say.
BILL MOYERS:
Did they want to select your husband for you?
AZZA KARAM:
No. They wanted to. They would have wanted to out of, and I understand that, many, many years later, out of a sense of wanting to make sure that I was going to be OK. Not so much because it was a controlling mechanism, or because they felt it was something they had to do. But just to make sure that I made the right choice, so to speak, so that I would be safe.
BILL MOYERS:
I have to tell you, I sense your honor of your mother and father. You respect your parents. You're holding something back. How did you establish your own independence? What was it?
AZZA KARAM:
Insistence. Just determination. What my father sometimes used to call stubbornness, but I insist was determination. Just using exactly the same arguments that they used with me. Using exactly the same lessons they taught me. I didn't get anything from the outside world.
BILL MOYERS:
But did they ever tell you that you're doing something that Allah did not want you to do?
AZZA KARAM:
No.
BILL MOYERS:
Women should not do. That you should honor your place in society?
AZZA KARAM:
Sure. Surely they told me that I had to honor my place in society. But it wasn't said as a restricting thing. It was more like, "OK, well, if you're going to go and do Ph.D., make sure that you do a good job of whatever it is you do." I think my mother's only advocacy was, "For the love of heaven, do not say anything negative ever about your religion. Because that's the one thing that will always sustain you." And she's absolutely right.
BILL MOYERS:
It still sustains you?
AZZA KARAM:
Absolutely--yes, it does. Completely.
BILL MOYERS:
What happened when you went to Europe? How did Europeans react to this independent Egyptian woman?
AZZA KARAM:
Well, there were different kinds of reactions I would say. But one predominant reaction was something along the lines of, "But surely you're an exception to the norm." Which is what used to goad me endlessly, because I knew very well that I was not an exception. I was only one of many. But that was one of their reactions--that they're not all like you.
BILL MOYERS:
It's still a shock, you know, for Americans to see, in the film, the simple images of the woman Fatma, the marketing--
AZZA KARAM:
Yes, yes, the marketing director--
BILL MOYERS:
--guru. I mean driving a car in a veil and long skirts, that's still strange to me.
AZZA KARAM:
Yes. It's interesting, because, right now, a good amount, if not the majority, of women drive--of which there are plenty by the way--in many parts of the Arab world. But a good amount of them are veiled women. And some of them are totally veiled--when I say veiled, I mean like Fatma in the movie. They show their face, and their hands, and they wear different things.
But there's the other kind of veil that only shows that part of your face, you know, the eyes. But even they will--I've seen several in a number of Arab cities, in Kuwait and the Emirates, all you can see from the outside is the eyes. And they drive, and they drive pretty OK too.
BILL MOYERS:
What happens when you go home? Do you put the veil on?
AZZA KARAM:
No. No.
BILL MOYERS:
You don't?
AZZA KARAM:
No.
BILL MOYERS:
You're truly Westernized when you go back.
AZZA KARAM:
It's got nothing to do with being Westernized, it's got a great deal to do with the fact that there are many women in my part of the world who are simply not veiled. My mother was not veiled.
BILL MOYERS:
She wasn't?
AZZA KARAM:
No.
BILL MOYERS:
Devout? She was devout?
AZZA KARAM:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS:
So do you identify in any way with those eight widows?
AZZA KARAM:
Oh, in many ways. Many, many ways.
BILL MOYERS:
How?
AZZA KARAM:
Let me just first say that I identified enough to have tears in my eyes on a number of occasions. Because I was not only seeing myself, I saw myself and my cousins and my family members and my friends. Again, I keep coming back to this, because it means a great deal. But it's that sense of determination. It's that sense of life that throws a lot of very difficult things your way, but you go on with it. And I was moved by the lady who was so upset about not being able to see her daughter, because--
BILL MOYERS:
Yeah.
AZZA KARAM:
--her husband, the daughter's husband and his family had kept her away. And I appreciated very much that she took a few days off, so to speak, but she managed to come back. And she was revived by seeing her daughter. It didn't impede her, all these difficulties did not impede her from going on with her life. And I think that those are the kinds of things that I would be very heartened to see. But also that fuel my own sense of determination.
I identified with them because they managed to break a couple of taboos, which I think is always a fine thing to do every now and then. They did break a few taboos. They were widows. They really should not, according to their culture, not be seen too much, or in the public view. And yet somehow they were. They did go out. They did work. They did tackle a number of different things that they perhaps wouldn't have been expected to.
BILL MOYERS:
Do you think that the dynamic among them, and in their story, is more from religion, culture or economics?
AZZA KARAM:
I think it's very difficult to make the distinctions too clearly. I think there's definitely an element of religion, or its interpretation. Or interpretations of it. There is definitely culture. In our part of the world, the religious forms a very important component of the cultural.
And certainly the economic. I mean they needed to have a business. They were hopeful that they were going to make a profit, and be able to live better. And at the beginning of the film, they said, "We'd like to be able to go out, and have a life, and take a vacation," and whatever.
And so they needed that. So the economics definitely does play a role in why people decide to do that. And I think I definitely see that the best answer to your question, though, is all three factors are intertwined. And all of them impact on why people behave the way they do.
BILL MOYERS:
Now you are a very empowered individual. Did you find anything empowering in that story, and about those women?
AZZA KARAM:
Yes, for the same reasons that I identified with them. I found ironically, I think, again, this double-edged sword kind of thing. But you referred to it in the very beginning when you said, "Did you notice that they had difficulty getting that one lady to be their head?"
BILL MOYERS:
The foreman, forewoman.
AZZA KARAM:
The forewoman, exactly. And now, interestingly enough, I find that these are exactly the kind of difficulties that we confront when we work together as women. But these are also empowering because, at the end of the day, they were--I wouldn't say man enough--but they were big enough to come around and say, "Well, we actually do need her. She would make a difference if she were to come back."
BILL MOYERS:
And make a stab at starting something.
AZZA KARAM:
They did.
BILL MOYERS:
I've often been in the position of the two Jewish women who were shooting the film.
AZZA KARAM:
Yeah.
BILL MOYERS:
They go back to their life in Tel Aviv, I go back to my life in New York, and the story that we covered, for those people, it goes on. We don't know what--
AZZA KARAM:
--what happened.
BILL MOYERS:
What had happened to them? I wonder what they are doing today.
AZZA KARAM:
That's exactly the thought that I had.
Well, the film ends on a good note. It shows you that at least one of them decided to keep on the business and try her hand at it again. Which I think is great. They would have gone on with their life. I think if that experience would have taught them anything it clearly brought them closer together as a group of friends.
When they were having that social day out--they were saying that the village celebrates every now and then, and people go out and they enjoy. They didn't stay together necessarily as widows, they stayed together because they were the group of women who had worked together, had developed this friendship, and developed a common purpose in life. And I think that those things they have with them anyway, no matter whether they have the pickle factory or not. What they've learned from the experience of the pickle factory, they will keep with them and take with them and move forward.
BILL MOYERS:
Try an acrobatic act of empathy. Imagine an American audience, unfamiliar with the world you come from, looking at that film. Is there a danger in an American audience misreading what we saw? Stereotyping the women?
AZZA KARAM:
Well, I don't think it would be an acrobatic act of empathy, but it would certainly be an act of empathy. I think that it would be difficult to stereotype anything in particular. Because, if anything, that movie counters quite a few of the existing stereotypes about women not being able to do things. About women generally being incapable of articulating themselves. I think the movie showed their strength as well as the weaknesses. So it really did go against a number of the stereotypes.
And, if anything, I read the movie, not just as an Arab woman, but as a researcher on women's issues. As a person who's knowledgeable about issues of political Islam. In all the different parts of my identity I saw that movie. I didn't only see it for my eyes as an Arab woman. And I would have thought that it actually presented a very, again, nuanced reality of Arab women. It would be difficult for me to understand what could be misunderstood in--
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Azza Karam, Senior Policy Research Advisor for the United Nations Development Program and Coordinator for the U.N. Arab Human Development Report
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