Beyond The Arab Spring

July 22, 2014 4:54 PM

Stories of Change: - Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia.
An inside perspective from local visual storytellers on everyday life in North Africa.
The Storytellers.
Timeline.
The Stories.
posted by adamvasco (3 comments total)

This is really information dense. So far, I have only gotten through the story about Beard Phobia.

I was drawn to it in part because of conversations in years past with a middle eastern friend and conversations on a public forum around the same time. At the time, Americans were talking about how beards were a "middle eastern thing" basically. I asked him for some feedback as to how true that was because he was a native of the region and still lived there (I knew him online). He told me that mustaches were definitely more common than in the U.S. but beards were not as common as we seemed to think.

I have mixed feelings about seeing these photos of these men who were basically terrorized into shaving their beard. I am struck by how much more "western"/normal the non-bearded images read to me. But knowing that they shaved to avoid violence and harassment does not sit well with me, so I am not entirely comfortable with feeling more comfortable, in some sense, with their shaved visage.

Thank you for posting this.
posted by Michele in California at 7:21 PM on July 22, 2014

I wish Amira and her students success. I tmust be doubly hard for women in the Middle East to establish themselves.
posted by Cranberry at 12:19 AM on July 23, 2014

This is wonderful, thank you.
posted by BinGregory at 7:49 AM on July 23, 2014