Sometimes you feel out of place, but being in the middle is not a loss. It’s the point from where you can see two worlds, while others see only one. I feel I’m a crescent that doesn’t need to become sun to shine. 

These were the words of Tamara Al Zool, the 23 years old who goes by her art name TÄRA. She has reached millions of Italians through the mainstream TV-program Le Iene in May with a monologue on identity that soon became viral on social media. 

A week later, her debut EP “Zefiro” went out on a date that could not be more important for her: May 15, the day of the Nakba, a day and a history she has always known from her parents and grandparents who lived it. Today, touring Italy and Europe with concerts and events, she is taking on the Italian music scene with a style that, according to Rolling Stone MENA, “Italy has no category for”. 

To learn more about her artistic journey, UntoldMag sat with TÄRA for an exclusive interview. 

 

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Born in Italy to Palestinian parents, TÄRA is making waves with her own genre. She calls it Arab&B, a new type of R&B where she mixes Arabic, English, Italian (and at times also French) in such a natural way that one would not imagine that at one point in her life, she had challenges in feeling her identity.  It would not seem so either when, two years ago, at her very first appearance on TV for the music program X Factor Italia, she made it very clear why she was there: “I came to X-factor to represent, to be a voice”, she said, wearing a keffiyeh as she performed Ariana Grande’s song 7 Rings with some parts reinterpreted in Arabic. 

Palestine – and all that comes with it, from the ongoing genocide to resistance and memory –, the Arabic speaking world, and the Mediterranean as a whole are constant themes in her songs, through which the listener can soon appreciate that TÄRA makes music with universal messages. Like in “Diaspora”, which draws a line between the Palestinians expelled from their land and the Southern Italians who leave their homes behind out of necessity. 

In the “Petra” music video, shot in Tunis, within 3 minutes the music takes the listener through a romantic journey from Maghreb to Mashreq. Not to mention her rendition of Ya Helwa Ciao, her Arabic rendition of Bella Ciao, the song adopted by the Italian Resistance calling for freedom and an end to fascism, so popular among Palestinians (and generally among minorities fighting for their rights). 

Stefano Nanni: Identity is a recurrent topic in your songs. But who is TÄRA before and after becoming the artist, and has that helped in affirming your own identity?

TÄRA: The beauty of all that I’m living is that before, during and after, it’s always me. I can definitely say that my public persona is not a ‘character’ but genuinely who I am, expressing my values without fear. 

It has not always been easy to belong to different worlds at the same time, but I learned with time that being in the middle is an additional perspective rather than a deficiency. And I think I grew in awareness and courage to translate my innate self into art. Being able to represent all these middle lands is certainly not an easy task, but it’s like my whole world is made of many different points of view. 

For example, in the song “Petra” we chose Tunisia as a destination because it perfectly encompasses my multifaceted world, highlighting the beautiful similarities among seemingly different cultures and transcending societal divisions.

SN: Still on identity, in the very powerful music video “Beauty standards”, you seem to affirm something also about the type of aesthetic you want to embrace. 

T: With this EP I am going through a whole journey, including certain beauty standards because it is a theme that I have personally experienced, having felt ‘not beautiful enough’ according to certain norms imposed by society. 

I am sure many other girls have experienced and continue to experience this type of ‘discomfort’ – that’s what I call it. With that video I wanted to represent, through a short monologue, how the beauty you have today, even if it may not conform to mainstream models represented by the media, actually carries history and tradition. 

It is important to acknowledge and remember that the people before you have fought to make you be here, so you have to bring these unique features, with pride, not shame.

SN: Do you feel somehow that your music is able to represent people who often had no one to identify with? And can it contribute to more unity?

T: Let’s say that my goal is precisely to represent those often unrepresented: The too many Italians with foreign roots caught in the middle like me. If in my own small way, my music succeeded in attracting even two or three persons who feel I am doing something positive for them, then I am very happy and I hope it will go even better. 

I don’t want to sound too utopian, but it would be nice to get to a point where we don’t even have to make all these divisions among all of us anymore, and then be able to live in unity simply as human beings. I have a strong desire for my music to foster unity among all people, dreaming a world without such divisions, where cultural beauty is celebrated by all humans. I hope that my art will play a role in all this.

SN: How are you handling success? Did your direct relations with fans change by becoming so popular? 

T: When it comes to my relationship with fans I think it is even improving, as I continue to live the direct connection with them through social media, receiving immense support and love. I think it is a very beautiful way of living this experience. 

At the same time, it is obvious that social media can be a double-edged sword, as the toxicity of certain users brings also a lot of negativity. Sometimes it’s hard to confront that, especially hate speech and comments about Palestine, but I am learning to use indifference as a more effective strategy, because in the end, those who want to hate stick to anything in front of them.

Generally, about success, I think I’m living a fairly quiet relationship with it, actually. I see it as a means, I have the privilege to access a wide audience, to share the messages I want to transmit, especially about Palestine and the genocide we’re still suffering. So why not do it? Indeed, in certain places like on mainstream TV there seem to be certain rules about not talking about certain topics, but I am approaching them, as much as possible, with my naturalness and my identity, without hiding anything. 

SN: On the power to use popularity to take a stance, recently in Italy there were some controversies about the words of Francesco De Gregori, a very popular singer, who said that he “feels embarrassed when an artist takes a political position”. What do you think of that?

T: I have honestly not read what he said, and I don’t want to decontextualize his words, but my opinion is a totally different one: I want my art to give a voice to the voiceless and to minorities. 

As an artist, I believe I have the power and responsibility to educate younger generations and empower those who might otherwise feel silenced. I don’t want to live in a world where somebody grows up fearing that exposing themself is something that leads them to something negative. I don’t want that, I want something different.

The post Giving Italy a Sound It Has No Category For: An Interview with Palestinian-Italian Singer TÄRA appeared first on Untold.

Through free-form writing and illustration, the contributors reflect on what divestment can mean for academics of color within knowledge-producing institutions across the Global North. Grounded in the urgency of documenting the present moment and its reverberations in academia, the series reveals how the dehumanization of the “other” has always been structural and systemic.

This story is by Watfa Najdi, with illustrations by Pascale Ghazaly. 

What does it mean to think beyond extractivism in times of war?

I was invited to speak at an event. At the time, I was feeling vulnerable and constantly worried about the situation in Lebanon, and I rarely felt like leaving the house. 

However, it was an important event, so I said yes.

That night, as I was sitting on the stage speaking, a strike hit al-Nuweiri neighborhood in Beirut. Among the martyrs, there was a family with the same last name as mine: Najdi. I didn’t know, and I kept talking about the importance of moving beyond the North/South paradigm that casts certain populations as perpetual beneficiaries or aid recipients in need of Western expertise… I remember saying something about care, holding space, and listening to voices from the majority world. I didn’t look at my phone until the panel ended.

When I finally did, I saw several messages about the strike, the victims, the names.

“Israeli air strikes on central Beirut have killed 22 people and wounded at least 117, Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health said… The strikes appear to have hit densely populated residential areas as flames and smoke rose from two residential blocks.” (Al Jazeera, October 2024)

For a few minutes, everything inside me froze until my dad finally answered his phone and said they were okay. I then texted a friend who lived close to the targeted area. She replied briefly that they were still trying to process what happened, but they were okay.

After that, I put on a smile and said I needed to leave early. So, while everyone went upstairs to continue the conversation, I slipped out and rushed back home. That day I realized that academic conversations feel impossibly small during war, and the world you come from suddenly becomes too heavy to carry into these spaces but also too real to just put on hold.

Excerpt from Megaphone’s X account posted the following day (October 11, 2024):

“Hussein (51) and Lara (40), along with their twins Bassam and Zakaria (15) and Fatima Najdi (4), were laid to rest on Friday in their hometown Srifa, as well as their grandmother Inaam Saqlawi, her brother, and his wife. The death toll from the Noueiri massacre has now reached 22 martyrs, with over 117 others injured.”

How are you doing? How’s your family?

A professor asked me how I was doing. Over the past months, I’ve learned not to answer those questions fully. Most people ask because (I assume) it would be impolite not to, and what they expect is a short confirmation that your family back home is “doing okay,” even while surviving a war. So, I usually say exactly that: “they’re okay” then I smile and nod.

But this time there was something in his tone that made me believe he actually wanted to know more about what’s happening. So, I let myself say a little more. “It’s terrible,” I said. “Last night I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up following the news… watching which buildings were being bombed…”

I was tired and angry, so the words kept coming. “They hit a building close to my neighborhood in Beirut. It’s just…”

I don’t remember what I said after that, only the moment he gently cut in: “Can you walk with me? I need to grab my coffee from inside.”

I froze for a second but then nodded and walked beside him towards the class. It took me a minute to put a smile back on… I stood there as he grabbed his cup and checked something on his desk.

He then turned back to me and said, “…you were telling me about the situation in Beirut?”

I felt ridiculous sharing, even if for a few seconds, something very personal to me with someone who preferred to listen to a conversation about war while sipping coffee. I smiled again and said, “oh, that was it. The situation is difficult. Hopefully it will end soon.”

He smiled back, warmly. I don’t think he was pretending. But this is probably as far as he could go. Not because of lack of empathy, but because news about war, suffering and pain from the other side of the world can only be acknowledged briefly, never long enough to interrupt the rhythm of (academic) life.

The post Diaries of an Academic of Color: On the Limits of Academic Spaces, and Life in Two Places appeared first on Untold.

This story was produced under the Feminist Journalist Fellowship, it is part of a series highlighting the work of our fellows, developed in collaboration with UntoldMag and Noor.

LGBTQ+ individuals in Egypt face daily incidents of online violence, including threats, harassment, defamation, and blackmail. Much of this abuse comes from conservative and religious segments of society and often spills over into offline risks—or begins offline and later escalates online. 

The boundaries between digital and physical harm are increasingly blurred.

A few years ago, Noha Abeer, a pansexual Egyptian in her late twenties, became a target of online violence because of her identity and sexuality. The digital attacks soon translated into offline threats that put her life at risk.

“Yes, I was subjected to harassment, defamation, and online threats,” Noha recalls. “Between December 2021 and January 2022, people used photos and personal information from my account after I filed a harassment case against a driver,” she adds.

Targeting Nonconformist Persons in Egypt

When Noha filed the complaint, she refused to disclose her personal address and information to the prosecutor in front of the accused. The prosecutor insisted. Shortly afterward, anti-LGBTQI+ groups launched a defamation campaign against her, denying her right to exist in both digital and public spaces.

Those who are nonconformist or who simply do not obey the traditional gender divisions and social attitudes always face restrictions on their freedom, as they threaten the conservative social ethics, this applies especially to members of the LGBTQI+ community. For many like Noha, harassment flows seamlessly between online and offline spheres.

“I went to the cybercrime unit,” Noha recalls, “and the treatment was terrible. After a lot of persistence, a report was filed, but nothing happened. I couldn’t follow up because I couldn’t leave the house due to the defamation campaign in my neighborhood.”

She adds, “I was subjected to hundreds of instances of online harassment in the form of text messages and hateful, threatening comments. Sometimes I shared these messages and other times I just ignored them.” 

Noha had rejected advice about staying safe online, such as restricting messaging and commenting to friends only, not posting personal photos, and blocking abusers. She explains that she considers that all these steps are equivalent to asking, “What was the girl doing to be harassed?” or “Why did she go to that place?”, comments that blame the victim and do not solve or address the real problem.

Days before writing this article, Noha was subjected to a new smear campaign because of her opinion on a recent harassment incident that sparked public outrage in Egypt. A young woman was harassed on a public bus, and according to MadaMasr, “She said in a video she published on her social media accounts she faced three incidents of verbal harassment and assault on the road she takes to work, all by the same stranger.” 

Noha’s views were met with a hate campaign against her, with attackers sharing what they considered inappropriate photos of her taken from her personal account, including photos of her supporting LGBTQI+ people.

Noha is currently living outside Egypt, and it’s difficult for her to pursue or file reports against the ongoing abusive comments and threats she receives.

“The process of reporting harassment and online blackmail against women could be made easier and the state could allow for electronic reporting,” she explains.

LGBTQI+ Rights Rejected

In a report published in January 2025, a group of women’s rights organizations and initiatives submitted a joint submission on the status of women’s and girls’ rights in Egypt for the period 2019-2024.

The report revealed the situation of the LGBTQI+ community, from trapping and harassment to digital targeting and targeting in the public sphere, to the poor quality of medical services provided to them. According to the report, “transgender women are 50% more likely to receive harsher sentences than gay men.” Judges in ‘debauchery’ cases usually issue defendants with a single sentence for all charges.”

In January 2025, 137 countries submitted more than 370 recommendations to Egypt to improve its human rights situation. According to its response, the government decided to support 264 of the recommendations in full (77%), partially supported 16 (5%), and “noted” 62 (18%).

Some of the recommendations made to Egypt regarding improving the conditions of the LGBTQ community included Chile, Spain, Canada, and Iceland raising the issue of prosecuting and criminalizing individuals based on their sexual orientation or actual or perceived gender identity and the need for Egypt to commit to stopping forced anal examinations and amending the debauchery article used to criminalize consensual sexual conduct between adults.

The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) released a report in July 2025 a day before the final report of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Egypt’s human rights record, criticizing the Egyptian government’s response and commenting on the recommendations received during the review held last January.

According to EIPR: 

“This time, the Egyptian government decided not to respond to any recommendations with an overt rejection, as it had done in the three previous reviews, instead using the term ‘noted’ to refer to all the recommendations it did not accept and is therefore not committed to implementing. The government rejected any allegations of restrictions on civil society activities, any form of arbitrary detention, or requirements that limit the right to peaceful assembly or demonstration or freedom of traditional or digital media or that Egyptian laws are used to punish individuals for their sexual orientation.”

Why All These Waves of Hatred?

Mohamed Zarea, a researcher at the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), believes that the recent wave of anger is not new to the LGBTQI+ community; “they suffer from hatred and discrimination from society and through media outlets indirectly controlled by security agencies.” 

“I would say that this wave of hatred has been escalating since 2014, when the community faced unprecedented arrest campaigns,” Zarea adds, “my explanation for this is related to the closure of freedom spaces that opened up after the 2011 revolution, including spaces specifically for the LGBTQI+ community and within the framework of the state’s control over the concept of morality.”

Zarea doesn’t believe that Islamist movements are solely responsible for this: “I don’t deny their hatred of the LGBTQI+ community, but they are not the only ones responsible; the state also has a very conservative regime.”

Zarea explains that Egypt has signed numerous human rights agreements, but it has not adhered to any of them. It consistently places a reservation, namely, “the stipulation of non-conflict with Islamic law”, in all the agreements it has signed (such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, CEDAW, and others). 

However, according to him, when it comes to LGBTQI+ rights, Egypt does not merely place reservations; it actively undermines any recognition of their rights. This is evident in its role within the Human Rights Council when opposing any resolution related to LGBTQI+ rights. “For example, in 2016, Egypt expressed its concern regarding the adoption of the deeply flawed draft law L.2. Rev.1, which aims to establish new rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people”, Zarea explains. 

“Egypt emphasised that the Council does not have the legislative authority to create new rights. Egypt will not recognise or cooperate with the independent expert established pursuant to L.2. Rev.1,” he adds. 

Zarea explains that Egypt consistently forms alliances to support opposing resolutions aimed at protecting the family as the fundamental unit of society. This is clearly demonstrated in its recommendations to countries that grant freedom to LGBTQ+ individuals through the UPR mechanism. 

Zarea confirms that Egypt consistently submits recommendations with almost identical wording: “Strengthen policies to support the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society.” This recommendation was submitted by Egypt during the fourth (current) cycle of the UPR to countries such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland, and France.

This official broader pattern reflects a deeper and structural cause for the hostility faced by LGBTQI+ people like Noha in Egypt. These are not only shaped by social attitudes but also by a wider political and legal environment that leaves little room for protection. In such a context, harassment does not remain confined to one space. Hate speech, smear campaigns, and threats often move easily between social media and everyday life and the judicial system. For many LGBTQI+ people in Egypt, the result is a continuous cycle in which online and offline violence reinforce each other rather than exist separately.

The post Online and Offline Violence are Two Sides of the Same Coin for LGBTQI+ in Egypt appeared first on Untold.

Through free-form writing and illustration, the contributors reflect on what divestment can mean for academics of color within knowledge-producing institutions across the Global North. Grounded in the urgency of documenting the present moment and its reverberations in academia, the series reveals how the dehumanization of the “other” has always been structural and systemic.

This story is by Myriam Dalal, with illustrations by Pascale Ghazaly. 

Having a conscience is making everything much harder.

As if we needed one more layer of complication to add to our “survival of the fittest” battle as Arab academics in the west.

Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, and the war on Palestine, Lebanon, bits of Syria and bits of Yemen in October of 2023-which coincided with my appointment as a research associate at a university in Europe- my work plan started incorporating multi-level scrutiny measures:

For the places I’m invited to speak at, the funding that I seek for my activities and projects, the people I collaborate with, the researchers I interact with, the university where I work, and our center’s preexisting/ongoing/future collaborations, as well as the research projects conducted here, the way the university communicates about its international collaborations, etc.

And when you’re already in a space where your very being is attacked every single day, from the moment you open your door in the morning till the moment you go back to bed at night, this means you’re adding to your already achy shoulders a new reason to shrug.

You say it’s the mattress that got you this back and shoulder pain, but you know deep inside that it’s Orientalism, you just don’t know how to explain it to the white physician.

Being an Arab woman of color comes with all its “shades of anger” as the amazing Rafeef Ziadeh would say. The orientalist machine starts from the very state administration to the individual level that seeks to discredit you, belittle you, and fetishize you or in its most positive manifestation, save you…

The post Diaries of an Academic of Color: All Shades of Anger – Notes from an Arab Woman in European Academia appeared first on Untold.

This story was produced under the Feminist Journalist Fellowship, it is part of a series highlighting the work of our fellows, developed in collaboration with UntoldMag and Noor.

Years before Jan (preferred pronoun he), a 33 year-old Egyptian non-binary, came out or even knew about the LGBTIQ+ community, he would search online for people like him. He often found himself deceived by strangers on social media – people pretending to be LGBTIQ+,  or men posing as women. 

Like many queer Egyptians, he was searching for connection in a digital landscape designed to expose him.

A few years ago Jan adopted a new name for safety, deleted all his old social media accounts and rebuilt his online presence from scratch. The fear of being tracked — by security forces, anti-LGBTIQ groups, or far-right actors — shaped every decision he made online. On an earlier account, he happened to encounter members of the community who guided him through basic digital protection practices. For the first time, he felt a degree of safety.

Homosexuality in Egypt: a dangerous secret

According to a report by Transat, , transgender and gender non-binary people in Egypt live under a repressive system that perpetuates violence, discrimination, and stigma in various areas of life. This includes the private sphere, where domestic violence and deprivation of family support are prevalent, as well as the public sphere, where discrimination in education and the labor market persists. It also includes systematic legal and societal harassment that exposes LGBTIQ+ individuals to direct targeting through the state’s repressive laws and practices.

Egypt criminalises same-sex relations, according to the Law on the Combating of Prostitution (No. 10 1961), and in recent years, also on cybercrime laws such as the Law on Anti-Cybercrimes and Information Technology Crimes in  Egypt’s economic courts.

According to the Transat report, there is an increase in cases where online morality laws are applied: 

“The Egyptian media is a key partner in adopting and disseminating hate speech and incitement against women, minorities, and the LGBTQ+ community in particular. It consistently participates in stigmatizing LGBTQ+ individuals by perpetuating the stereotypes that have been nurtured about them over decades in artistic productions and media programs”.

The telecommunication law has been under the Economic Courts since they were created in 2008, and the cybercrime law was added to the Economic Courts by decree in 2019. With this addition, the Economic Courts began exercising influence over public life by reinforcing digital surveillance and by policing digital morality.

For Jan, digital safety became urgent. Other LGBTIQ+ individuals stepped in early on, teaching him how to protect himself online. This was guidance he needed because, by his own admission, he was once too bold and dismissive of the dangers. Today, his greatest concern is keeping his identity from his family, as they respect him so much and though he’s religious.

“I was harassed online by both women and men, within and outside LGBTQ+ circles. This harassment was not always direct or explicit perhaps, meaning if the conversation escalated, I would stop it, but it still happens” Jan recalls.

In a disappointed tone, he recounts a time when he was shamed by his closest friend, who was also part of the LGBTIQ+ community. During an argument between them, she threatened to go to his house and out him with his mother.

These threats reflect the broader precarity facing LGBTIQ+ Egyptians: vulnerabilities compounded by policing, stigma, and the absence of legal protections.

How to protect LGBTQ+ persons online?

In 2022, an organized anti-LGBTIQ+ campaign known as Fetrah emerged across social media, especially on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Telegram. The name, which translates from Arabic as “human instinct,” was adopted by religious and far-right networks. Using the slogan “Fetrah is an idea,” the campaign launched coordinated posts and Twitter threads in Arabic urging users to promote its core message: that only two genders exist and that homosexuality is deviant and contrary to human nature. 

M.A, a researcher and gender activist who preferred to keep his real name hidden, believes that the Fetrah campaign promotes the outdated idea that homosexuality is an illness or a perversion. This is a great injustice to the LGBTIQ+ community, which is fighting for its rights. “The Fetrah campaign uses religion to fuel hatred and discrimination and legitimize violence against the queer community”, the researcher adds. 

For Jan, the violence and threats he experienced online led him to isolate. “I practically have no friends”, he says. “I stopped trying to make friends or form relationships online.” After closing his social media accounts he is even isolated from the LGBTIQ+ community which is increasingly under attack online — a choice many queer Egyptians feel increasingly forced to make. 

“The LGBTIQ+ community isn’t an isolated island from larger society; it’s a reflection of it to varying degrees”, M.A. explains. “I have seen somewhat similar experiences, some people withdrew, not always out of fear, but sometimes to protect their mental well-being. Others persevered and confronted the situation regardless of the consequences,” he adds.

“When people like Jan are threatened, they certainly won’t go to the police for protection”, M.A. explains. This is why the queer community must be a more compassionate place, or at least more aware of the dangers of male-dominated and patriarchal actions like harassment. 

“The presence of violations within the community necessitates that all entities, individuals, and activists re-evaluate themselves, not justify their actions”, M.A says. “They must work on building a genuine culture of accountability that protects people instead of silencing them or causing them to withdraw,” he adds. 

Though Jan cannot represent the experience of the entire LGBTIQ+ community in Egypt, he reflects a vital part of it, as he and many others have faced—and continue to face—digital challenges and risks that limit their access to safe online spaces. 

While social media offers visibility and connection, it also exposes the vulnerables to digital violence, blackmail, and state surveillance. These threats force many of LGBTIQ+ individuals to navigate the internet with fear and caution, restricting free expression and access to support. Understanding these struggles is essential to recognizing both the power and dangers of online spaces on queer groups in Egypt.

The post For LGBTQ+ People in Egypt, the Internet is Both a Lifeline and a Trap appeared first on Untold.

“We have fasted from joy for ages,

and now we break our fast upon the plate of dignity.

Record, O time of victory, record,

Damascus is ours until the Day of Resurrection.”

He quickly added a clarification, as if aware of the exclusion already implied:

“When we say ours, we mean everyone of every race, faith, and from every origin to every horizon.”

Yet the contradiction is already inscribed in the moment itself. Even in its gesture toward inclusivity, the speech evoked a purified, exalted Damascus, a vision of triumph rooted in a timeless Arab-Sunni imaginary rather than in the fractured present.

Capital of the Umayyads

Within hours, the clip circulated widely across social media. The verses became a digital anthem for the “new Syria”, often paired with a single, gleaming phrase that seemed to hold the promise of rebirth: “Damascus, capital of the Umayyads.”

The Umayyad Caliphate or Umayyad Empire (661–750 CE) was the second caliphate in Islamic history and, at its height, one of the largest states of the medieval world. Its territories stretched from the western frontiers of China to southern France, encompassing North Africa, the Maghreb, al-Andalus, the Sind, and Transoxiana. 

Centered in Damascus and marked by the Arabization of state administration under ʿAbd al-Malik, the Umayyads left a lasting political and cultural legacy that continues to be invoked and romanticized in contemporary Syrian and Arab imaginaries.

The expression itself was not new. Bashar al-Assad had used the same words years earlier to court the nostalgic imagination, portraying the city as “the beacon of the Umayyads and the cradle of Arab civilization.” Yet in the post-Assad imaginary, the phrase acquired a different resonance. It became both nostalgic and redemptive, a dream of authenticity after decades of humiliation and dictatorship.

In this evolving rhetoric, “Damascus, capital of the Umayyads” is more than a slogan. It is an affective myth: a promise of purity and resurrection projected by an Arab-Sunni imaginary trying to restore coherence amid collapse.

The Umayyad dream no longer belongs to power or opposition alone; it is deeply embedded in the moral and spiritual imagination through which many Syrians – particularly from the Arab-Sunni community – envision their place in history. Far from being a passing rhetoric tied to the fall of Assad or argumentatively the ascent of ”the majority” again’, it has become a framework for self-recognition, a way of reconstituting “the nation” as a moral community destined for restoration.

Orientalism from within

In this imagination, victory and virtue are inseparable. The nation’s rebirth is conceived not only as a political project but as an act of moral purification, a return to an untainted origin where faith, masculinity, and honour align. 

This is the same grammar that once structured cultural myths like Bab al-Hara  (the gate of the neighbourhood), a hugely popular Syrian TV drama series, first aired in 2006, that nostalgically imagines a 1930s Damascus neighbourhood as a tightly knit, patriarchal community of “honourable” men defending “tradition” and the homeland, and has been broadcast across the Arabic speaking region for 13 seasons. The yearning for an immaculate past, the masculine guardianship of a virtuous community, and the exclusion of difference as the condition of purity.

Here, Orientalism no longer arrives from the West. It emerges from within, through the desire to idealize the self by imagining it as both sacred and victimized, timeless and threatened. The Umayyad dream, in this sense, is a form of self-Orientalism: an internalized gaze that seeks redemption not through transformation, but through resemblance to an imagined essence of the Orient itself.

If the Umayyad dream shaped the ideological vocabulary of the new political order, it also found powerful expression in the media and digital public sphere. Figures in pro-government media and among online influencers began invoking “Banu Umayya” (Umayyad people) not merely as a historical dynasty but as a moral lineage, a metaphor for honor, continuity, and faith.

One striking example came from Qutaiba Yaseen, a widely followed influencer aligned with regime narratives, who shared a video titled “Men of Dignity from Sweida stand alongside the sons of Banu Umayya in Damascus.” The clip showed a group of Druze men celebrating what he called “the liberation of the land of the Umayyads.” While his caption emphasized unity and brotherhood, the very choice of imagery – where belonging is validated through the Umayyad idiom – reveals how deeply this moral geography structures the imagination of “the new Syria.”

Visual grammar

Across social media, dozens of Facebook groups and pages now carry names such as “Syria al-Umayyah” or “Banu Umayya.” Their posts blend patriotic iconography with religious overtones, producing a digital landscape where history is both sanctified and aestheticized.

Even episodes of misunderstanding highlight how emotionally charged this symbolism has become. During the July 2025 sectarian violence in Sweida, a predominantly Druze city, in which hundreds of people were killed and members of Syria’s defence and interior ministries were later detained on suspicion of abuses against civilians, a banner reading “Sweida without ummiyyah” (illiteracy) was mistaken for “Sweida without Umayyads,” triggering outrage among armed groups and their supporters. 

The intensity of the reaction spoke not to confusion alone, but to the extent to which Umayyah now functions as a sacred signifier, an emblem that fuses history, faith, and national legitimacy.

The romanticization of the Umayyad dream unfolds through gendered imagery that fuses purity, heroism, and faith into a single visual grammar. Viral videos set to the song “Banu Umayya, their origins are gold” portray men as guardians of a sacred lineage. 

One shows Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of the transitional government, riding a horse in a slow, cinematic sequence, a tableau of masculine virtue and divine favor. Another, filmed in Damascus’ Umayyad Square, features a masked horseman carrying the tawheed flag, a black flag bearing the Islamic declaration of faith (the shahada) in white, echoing the same melody of glory and moral renewal.

While variants of such flags have existed historically as religious symbols, in contemporary Syria and the wider region this specific black shahada flag has become strongly associated with jihadist and Salafi-jihadi groups, and therefore carries militant and sectarian connotations rather than being a neutral religious emblem.

These scenes are not merely political symbols; they reveal how moral imagination is gendered, sanctified, and aestheticized. The horse, the flag, the disciplined body, all perform a yearning for order through the image of the righteous man. This visual culture does not imitate anyone’s gaze; rather, it springs from within, from a longing to see the self as pure, elevated, and whole.

Such imagery invites a question rather than an accusation:

What does it mean when a society envisions its rebirth through these codes of purity and virility?

Perhaps the “Umayyad dream” is less about reclaiming power than about reimagining the self, a collective effort to restore coherence through an idealized reflection of what it believes it once was.

The fiction of the moral past

In this expanding media ecosystem, the Umayyad dream operates less as nostalgia for empire than as a mode of moral self-fashioning. It provides an affective grammar through which the Arab-Sunni imaginary reclaims virtue and coherence amid collapse, a language of sanctified belonging that transforms loss into purity.

But the Umayyad dream is not the only vessel of nostalgia or self-Orientalism.

Years before the revolution – and still today – the TV series Bab al-Hara built another dream: one that turned “Old Damascus” into a mythical homeland for an entire Arab imaginary. 

As noted once in The Guardian, the series “has been an extraordinary phenomenon from the moment it was launched,” watched “from Morocco to Kuwait” and becoming a shared ritual of Ramadan evenings. Beyond entertainment, it crystallized a collective fantasy of what “authentic Arab life” once looked like, a Damascus of honour, piety, and masculine solidarity.

What distinguishes Bab al-Hara from other television dramas is not only its popularity but its power to shape collective memory. It became a reference point for how millions imagined Syrian – and by extension, Arab- identity. Danny Makki observed once that the series “misconstrues the history of what Syria was during the mandate era,” yet paradoxically defines how that history feels. 

For viewers across the Arab world, the Hara (the neighbourhood) became shorthand for virtue, resistance, and rootedness, an imagined moral homeland that transcended geography and class.

In this sense, Bab al-Hara did not just represent nostalgia; it manufactured it. It offered Arabs from Rabat to Riyadh a mirror in which to see a purified version of themselves, turning Damascus – remote, complex, and plural – into a moral epicenter of the Arab world.

In Bab al-Hara, purity is not only spiritual but domestic. The home becomes a miniature nation, ruled by paternal wisdom and feminine modesty. The neighborhood is a moral microcosm where every deviation – a woman’s defiance, a man’s betrayal – threatens the order of the whole. Through its melodrama of virtue and shame, the series transforms social hierarchy into moral truth.

A ritual of belonging

This is not merely nostalgia for a simpler past; it is an aesthetic theology of purity.

The men of Bab al-Hara embody the same disciplined masculinity seen later in the post-2011 Umayyad revival, vigilant, protective, and righteous. The show taught generations to feel authenticity as something lost and endangered, and to imagine moral restoration through obedience and gendered order.

Bab al-Hara does not simply reproduce Orientalist clichés of the “Arab patriarchal society.” It performs them from within, as a cultural desire. The Damascus it imagines – pure, communal, and morally intact – is a mirror of how the self wishes to see itself: uncorrupted by modernity, yet triumphant in its own virtue.

The Umayyad dream and Bab al-Hara reveal two distinct yet converging temporal imaginations through which the Arab-Sunni self performs its own “purity.” Both rely on what Ghassan Moussawi calls fractal Orientalism, a process through which societies reproduce the same binaries of progress and backwardness, purity and corruption, not between East and West but within themselves. 

Rather than a Western gaze imposed from outside, this is a local hierarchy of virtue: a self-sustaining taxonomy that distinguishes the “authentic” from the “deviant,” the “moral” from the “fallen.” It is constantly rehearsed through media, memory, and ritual performance, allowing communities to define themselves by continually reasserting who belongs and who does not.

In the Umayyad imaginary, history is compressed into a single, sanctified century. The Umayyad Caliphate – just one among many civilizations that flourished in the region – becomes reimagined as the timeless essence of Syria’s identity. What came before and after – Aramaic, Byzantine, Abbasid, Ottoman, and modern plural histories – fades from collective memory. 

The brevity of the Umayyad period paradoxically strengthens its symbolic power: its scarcity becomes proof of purity. This moralized temporality underpins contemporary political and religious discourse, where the call to restore “the Damascus of the Umayyads” becomes not an historical project but a ritual of belonging.

Historical fabrication

Bab al-Hara performs a similar manipulation of time, but within the domestic and social sphere. The series constructs a Damascus that never existed, erasing the city’s real modernity during the early 20th century. The show’s central motif of “gated neighborhoods” is a historical fabrication: “It was never the case that Damascus neighborhoods had gates. 

Damascus has seven main gates, known to this day. The character of the Aqid – the paternal leader who rules the neighborhood – is likewise an invented tradition, unknown to actual Damascene social structures. Historian Sami Moubayed noted that Bab al-Hara’s Damascus erases the city’s modernity: its tramways, newspapers, intellectual clubs, theaters, and publishing houses vanish, replaced by the simplified archetypes of the “Shamian setting” established in earlier dramas: barber, baker, vegetable seller, policeman.

In both imaginaries, the past is not remembered but rebuilt; time is aestheticized and moralized. The Umayyad past is purified into faith and conquest, while the Bab al-Hara past is purified into patriarchal virtue and social order. Each constructs a closed moral chronology that excludes historical complexity: one through divine authority, the other through domestic hierarchy. 

Together, they illustrate how some Syrians and Arabs perform self-Orientalism not by imitating the West, but by staging its own ideal self, the pure, disciplined, and timeless Orient it longs to inhabit.

If temporality in both Bab al-Hara and the Umayyad dream collapses history into a purified origin, their social and political dimensions translate that origin into hierarchy. Both imaginaries depend on the repeated performativity of authority – patriarchal in one case, and theocratic in the other – as the guarantor of purity.

In Bab al-Hara, patriarchy is not only a narrative structure but the moral axis of the world itself. As mentioned earlier, the Aqid as well as the Abadayat (strong men), stand as embodiments of collective virtue: decisive, self-sacrificing, and untainted by doubt. The stability of the neighbourhood depends on their ability to preserve honor through control, to punish deviation through violence, and to restore moral equilibrium through obedience. 

Female characters, in turn, serve as moral signifiers, either preserving communal dignity through modesty or threatening it through disobedience. Violence, far from being chaotic, is ritualized; it performs justice as purification. The show’s moral universe thus reduces social complexity to a binary between discipline and decay, mirroring “a theater of virtue.”

The Umayyad imaginary scales this logic upward. The masculine ethos of the neighbourhood – the man who protects his neighborhood and restores its honor- becomes the figure of the righteous man of the nation. What Bab al-Hara staged as domestic virtue now returns as public theology: a call for moral guardianship at the scale of the state.

This transformation is not merely rhetorical; it is enacted. Across social media and public gatherings, performances of faith and virility merge into a shared script of revival. The “pure man” of the neighborhood becomes the “defender of the Ummah,” the guardian of a faith imagined as both wounded and sovereign. Within this discourse, reclaiming moral order also implies reclaiming political legitimacy for the idea that the nation’s rightful rule, historically associated with Arab Sunnis, was “lost” under ”the non-Sunni Assad authority” and must be restored.

These notions have taken performative and embodied forms. Ahead of the coastal clashes in March 2025, Damascus authority-aligned preachers and local figures called for al-nafir (mobilisation) – a term rooted in jihadist lexicon – framing mobilization as a sacred duty of protection and purification. Ending up with massacres against the Alawite community there. 

With the July assault on the Druze in Sweida, tribal networks in Syria invoked al-faz‘a – traditionally a communal call for mutual aid – but here transformed into a performative act of aggression. In both cases, the vocabulary of purity and defense migrated from the household to the battlefield; the moral economy of the Hara became the national grammar of mobilization.

Performing the past: From the Baath to the Ummah

It is important to note, however, that the Baathist regime itself was an early architect of this self-Orientalizing grammar. As researcher Husam Itani observes, “the Umayyad revival draws from the same well as Baathist ideology, which turned the past- too- into a dream meant to guide the future.” The continuity is not merely symbolic: both frameworks reimagined moral order through the disciplined masculine body and the myth of civilizational resurrection.

Rahaf Doghli also demonstrates in her book Romanticizing Masculinity in Baathist Syria, Baathist rhetoric recentered the figure of the man as soldier-citizen, the disciplined, sacrificial masculine body whose loyalty, obedience, and willingness to wield ‘legitimate violence’ constitute the very essence of belonging. 

This legacy of moralized masculinity survives today in both the rhetoric of Islamist governance and the popular culture that preceded it. The Umayyad imaginary does not replace the Baathist one; it inherits and re-performs it, translating the soldier-citizen into the believer-warrior, and loyalty to the leader into devotion to God.

In this sense, social and political self-Orientalism in Syria is not a passive inheritance but an active practice. It is sustained through gendered performance and emotional investment, through rituals of loyalty and moral speech. Authority here is not imposed from above, it is lived, rehearsed, and believed in.

Across this imagined spectrum – from the Hara to the “Umayyad capital” – the yearning for origin reveals itself not as a national sentiment shared by all Syrians, but as a project rooted in the Arab-Sunni imaginary of moral restoration. It envisions not a plural Syria but a purified ummah, a spiritual polity redeemed through discipline and faith. 

Today, this imaginary finds its most visible expression in the rhetoric and performance of Islamist factions such as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, whose call to moral and territorial “liberation” extends the same logic that once governed the Hara: the defense of community purity through masculine virtue and divine order.

In this vision, the past is not recovered, it is rehearsed. The Umayyad century, brief and distant, becomes the horizon of eternity; the Damascus of Bab al-Hara, fictional and domesticated, becomes its emotional blueprint. Both transform history into a theater of redemption where belonging depends on the exclusion of difference.

Too often, Orientalism has become a convenient scapegoat, a totalizing explanation that attributes all the region’s distortions to Western power, leaving little room to interrogate the failures within. By locating domination exclusively outside the self, this reading absolves the internal hierarchies, mythologies, and desires that sustain oppression from within. 

Here, the notion of internal/self Orientalism becomes more revealing: it exposes how communities construct their own “Others,” reenacting the same logics of exclusion and moral superiority once ascribed to the West. In this sense, what is performed today is not merely resistance to Orientalism, but its domestication, the reproduction of its gaze in the mirror of the self.

The post From Bab al-Hara to the Umayyad Dream: How Nostalgia Shapes Syria’s New Moral Order appeared first on Untold.

For much of teta’s life, she covered her hair with a headscarf, mostly white in color, beige, but also black after the death of her husband and then son. She preserved it underneath the colorful soft fabric because hair is sacred and needs to be protected.

When I was little, my grandmother’s hair had already begun its transformation—streaked with white, though sometimes, she coaxed it back to brown with henna before she moved to modern dyes, leaving the roots pale and the ends burning copper in the sun. 

Like many Palestinian women before her, she washed it with olive oil soap, worked warm oil through it with her fingers. And despite the wildness of her hair, it was always soft, almost as soft as the creases in her palms. She braided it back before heading to the land, her hands busy with watering the soil beneath her, planting another pomegranate tree, or plunging them into soapy water, scrubbing clothes clean. 

She smelled of home, of earth, of olive trees and time.

Inherited Threads

My mother, aunts, and older cousins inherited traces of her stubborn hair, echoes of its texture, but never quite the same. There was always something missing, something altered—until me. I believe I was her 18th grandchild, the first she wanted named after her. But it didn’t happen. Her name, Sadika, was deemed too heavy, too old-fashioned, and was set aside by my sister. 

Yet she lived on in me—in my despise of tomatoes, in my grumpiness, and indeed, in my curls. In the way I carried them, untamed and bold. A crown I had to learn to control, but never to diminish.

The knowledge of tending to hair was passed down, from my grandmother to my mother, and from my mother to me—an act of love, nourishment, and quiet resilience. My mother carried the ritual forward—scrubbing my scalp with steady hands, cultivating strength and growth. After washing, she worked olive oil into my scalp with tenderness and patience. As she braided my hair each morning before school, I felt the comfort and power of womanhood flowing through her touch. 

When my grandma was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018, her hair began to change. When I was diagnosed with a desmoid tumor in 2020, mine did too. Her curls loosened; mine abandoned me altogether. At one point, we found ourselves on the same hormonal drug—tamoxifen. 

I was a fraction of her age, yet walking a path that mirrored hers. She recovered, though her hair thinned and turned completely white. I would look at her and think: At least one of us is still holding onto the curls. That, of course, until mine slowly grew back in 2021.

We were bound by more than blood. By loss. By renewal. 

Living Memory

On 8 April 2024, as a great total solar eclipse darkened the sky and Ramadan neared its end, Teta, who had been bedbound for some time, took her final breath. When she passed, my father’s voice on the phone was heavy, my mother’s cries trailing behind him. I ran my fingers through my curls, tracing their shape, feeling her there in every strand.

There are a thousand ways to remember her, a thousand stories I could tell, but my hair will always be ours alone. A thread spun through generations, a gift from the women before me. It is wild, fearless, unapologetic—stubborn and beautiful, just like her.

Palestinian women have always braided their hair in devotion and defiance. They have combed olive oil through the strands, just as they have tended their trees—both symbols of resilience, of roots that refuse to be displaced. Hair loss comes with autumn, like leaves surrendering to the wind. Even as a child, I noticed how much more hair I shed in the fall, a quiet reminder that I am part of nature, that the weak strands must fall away to make room for stronger ones. 

In the spring, cutting the ends is essential, like pruning branches so they may bloom again. Every February, we would trim our hair, trusting that it would grow back healthier, fuller—another lesson in patience and renewal.

Resistance, Return

However, right now, as I write this piece, I am once again losing my hair from chemotherapy. This time, my Teta is not here to witness it. She is not here to brush her hands over my head, to whisper prayers, to remind me that what falls will grow again. She has passed, and with her, the stories she carried, her braid falling down her head, her wrinkly hands and face, and the quiet strength of a woman who lived, endured, and gave.

I refuse to believe she’s completely gone. I carry her story now. Every curl that grows back is a verse, every strand a memory woven into my being. I carry her with me, in my hair, in my roots, in the land that shaped us both, and in the soil in which her body currently inhabits. But my grandmother’s loss was not just personal—it was woven into a greater history of displacement.

Like countless Palestinian women, my grandmother carried both personal and collective grief. She was fourteen when her family was forced to flee their home in the village of El-Mzer’a during the Nakba of 1948. They walked for days, searching for refuge after their land was taken and their village destroyed. She witnessed a world she once knew crumble before her eyes–the orange orchards, the narrow pathways of her village, and the old structures. Today, only one remains: a Roman mausoleum, later converted to a mosque dedicated to Al-Nabi Yahya (John the Baptist).

But even after all that devastation, teta held onto traditions—farming, embroidery, and careful rituals of hair and skin care. These were not just acts of survival but acts of defiance, of persistence, of love.

Occupation, like cancer, has robbed us of our identity, land, and parts of ourselves. But we persevere. We persist, filled with resilience, finding other parts of ourselves connecting us to our land, heritage, bodies, and ancestors.

My hair will return, stronger than ever—a promise to my grandmother, to the women before her, and those yet to come.

Allah yerhamik ya Teta.

The post Teta’s Hair: A Story of Palestinian Women’s Resilience, Resistance, and Renewal appeared first on Untold.

Giulia Crisci together with Emmanuelle Bouhours have interviewed the Algerian feminist filmmaker on her cinematography for the Sicilia Queer filmfest in Palermo (Italy), which dedicated the Eterotopia section to Algerian cinema in 2023.

Giulia Crisci: The context from which we speak is always significant. Can you tell us where you are speaking, observing, and writing from??

Habiba Djahnine: I came to cinema as a young girl through film clubs, out of cinephilia, let’s say. With a very strong desire to discover not only Algerian cinema, but also world cinema, which I did thanks to the Algerian Cinémathèque. We were fortunate to have this Cinémathèque that strongly supported Algerian and world cinema; while other cinemas in Algeria were distributing blockbusters and films for the general public, the Cinémathèque held its line to bring art-house cinema to life. 

At the same time, poetry and literature occupied our lives. I started writing poetry and collaborating with a few magazines and poetry events at the Béjaïa theatre. Up until my thirties, I had never thought about making a film, I was more focused on publishing my texts. However, I still had a very cinephile attitude, I was thinking of distributing films and organising festivals. A cultural activist’s spirit, in short. 

In 1994, together with my sister Nabila Djahnine we organized a festival called Images and Imaginaries of Women in Algerian Cinema, organised by the association Thighri n‘’mettouth (Cry of Woman), of which Nabila was president, in Tizi-Ouzou (a city in Kabylia 100 km from Algiers). 

These events allowed us not only to discover cinema but also to cultivate an encounter with the audience. In fact, I think an audience is built, it does not exist per se. I put a lot of energy into creating film clubs, even in completely isolated places, in the mountains of Kabylia, for example, or in some villages in southern Algeria, even in difficult situations, with very few means. 

The aim has always been to engage an audience and to learn to debate, to discuss, to confront different ways of thinking. We started with women’s film clubs because women did not have access to cinema and cultural spaces in our hometown of Béjaïa. Later, we opened them up to everyone so that we could also discuss political and social issues, in addition to discovering films. This is where I come from. 

GC: How did you decide to go behind the camera?

HD: I don’t like to constrain myself  into categories or labels.  However, I can say that poetry has always accompanied me since I was a little girl: it provides a strong way of looking at the world and of taking care of very complex things. Poetry allows us to create a distance with things while allowing us to speak honestly about our own depths, about what touches us deep inside. 

It was the desert that helped me find my way back to poetry. When I was 25, I took my backpack and went to live in the Algerian desert. I encountered other ways of thinking and began my work of deconstruction. 

The only station I have never left is that of feminism. Since then, I have spent my life deconstructing the chains, the cages, the ones they put us in, but also the ones we are responsible for.. From there I began to reflect on the medium I wanted to use to speak, and then cinema and more specifically the creative documentary came to the fore. What really interests me is to draw from reality to turn it into something  and thus offer a personal and subjective view, a bit like it was for poetry.

I also started writing my first film: Lettre à ma sœur (2006) at the beginning of my training while attending important documentary film festivals). 

At the time, I was working in France,  in exile. I devoted  myself to the creative documentary, I began to learn and find a true form, an experience that transformed and shook me, because I was in a real confrontation with the others. It was together with these other protagonists that I wrote my first film. 

Of course there was, as always, preliminary writing work and intentions, but in fact the film is made in the field, with people. That is, with all the components of reality, with its difficulties, misunderstandings, subtleties. From the experience of Lettre à ma sœur, I met so many people who were reflecting on the importance of the image, on how it can transform our gaze and thus construct it. Expressing things in duality, in dialectics, in complexity… It is about reappropriating the self-image as a strategy of disalienation. That’s how I got the idea to start giving workshops in Algeria.  

GC: So this is where your educational work starts?

HD: Starting with my first film and all the meetings I had, I decided to work in broadcasting and educating people who wanted to try their hand at documentary filmmaking. It was interesting because we were in a daze, we had just come out of the 1990s civil war without really being out of it. 

It’s always like that when you think you’re coming out of a war and you’re never really out of it. There are always things that remain, that are there and you don’t really know what to do with them. We found each other in the cinema, in the analysis of the films, able to reflect on what had happened, and it was of great help. I created a space of freedom where we could experiment in our own way, while at the same time leaving room for discovery, a real workshop. 

Very interesting things came out of it, as these film objects were totally imbued with freedom. I started with these workshops in 2007, even though I had already been working on image education since 2003 and, immediately afterwards, we organised an annual workshop on the creation of documentary films. 

The methodological axes that I follow are always linked to the idea of freedom, of not belonging to any institution, always questioning the constraints imposed, deconstructing the way of creating images by proposing some others, although often clumsily and taking a long time. Sometimes also with a lot of suffering, because traumas and buried histories are faced. Despite everything, they remain intense and very strong experiences, every time.

Emmanuelle Bouhours: To stay with the topic of workshops, you felt the need to think about how to represent the world and, as you said, ‘take off your straitjackets’. But wasn’t it also about the need to rethink ways of producing cinema? Collectives in cinema have always existed, what you propose in the workshops is also a collaborative and horizontal approach.

HD: We couldn’t organise the workshops without resorting to a new production model. Participatory workshops have always existed. There are very famous ones, the Medvedkine group, the Varan ateliers, the feminist groups in France in the 1970s, many experiences in Latin America, in Iran, and in Arab countries. I was inspired by all these methods. 

I did a lot of reading, even attending workshops. Of course, then we created our own recipe. The Algerian context is complicated and we still had to adapt production models. We experiment with a participative model where everyone provides their own means, even if it is the Cinéma Mémoire collective that provides most of the resources, materials, work spaces and invites people to intervene, etc. 

Materials are managed collectively, they circulate freely, without a central unit that collects them and where people come to find them. On the contrary, this material circulates because films are made in several cities. In the workshops, some people come from Oran, some from Kabylia, some from Constantine, some from Sétif.. So we had to find a system that would allow not only the circulation of means, but also mutual help. 

How can we support each other in making films? Each time and over all these years, the outgoing group helps the incoming one. Even today, many people work together. This creates an interesting group and production dynamic.

I also wanted to show that films can be made even with very small means. When we film misery, the most complicated and violent situations, it is unseemly to have large resources, as is the asymmetry between what we have and what we are filming. We have to create a balance between who we are and what we are filming. It is what I call the depth of the gaze, your positioning, where you stand.

EB: You have talked about feminist perspectives in your workshops and in relation to current struggles. What is your relationship with feminism?

HD: Feminism has always been part of my life. Since I was 14 or 15 years old, I have considered myself a feminist. I discovered feminism as a form of thinking and with my sisters we developed our knowledge and practices primarily among ourselves. 

We talked a lot about feminist ideas and literature. We were very committed. Over time, with the murder of my sister and my exile, feminism somehow became part of my DNA, something completely natural. I often forget to say that in all my work there is a strong feminist dimension. It is a contradiction and I realised it later. It is so integrated that I don’t feel the need to say it. 

Later, when I met young feminists, I realised that no, it is not obvious. Things have to be reaffirmed. Everything I do is imbued with feminism. It is not just a way of thinking, in fact I cannot imagine the world otherwise. It constitutes who I am. 

People and the media often presented me first and foremost as a feminist-filmmaker. It was their gaze that made me aware of it. For 20 years I didn’t say it, not verbally, even when I made Lettre à ma Sœur, even though it was a deeply feminist film. And in all my films there is a feminist dimension that takes precedence over everything else. The issue is much broader than just a woman’s gaze.

GC: The entry of women into Algerian cinema is often linked to films such as Leila et les autres by Sid Ali Mazif (1978), about women workers in Algeria, or La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua (1977) by Assia Djebar. Your cinema is also strongly linked to feminist commitment. It began with Lettre à ma Sœur and continues by giving space to the feminisms of other generations, which is the case of the authors you welcome in your workshops. Do you recognise yourself in this genealogy?

HD: As I said before, in 1994 with my sister we created the festival Images et Imaginaires de femmes dans le cinéma algérien. We could only do one edition, because the following year my sister was assassinated. 

Only after a while do I realise that it was no accident that this first festival was focused on feminist thought. We were already questioning the discriminatory representations of women in our societies. The only film that I found really powerfully feminist was the one by Assia Djebar. La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua was the first film directed by a woman director in Algeria, in 1977. 

It is impressive that this film poses not only the question of women’s place but also their experience during the war of liberation. The character of the journalist and teacher who can ask questions immediately positions herself as a leader, a woman in the vanguard. 

The limit is pushed even further, because this woman’s partner has a motor disability. To a certain extent, she is thinking of the world of men as a world with a disability. Assia not only makes the first film by a woman in Algeria, but the first feminist film and, even more, she creates something totally new in terms of form. A formal freedom. 

This provoked the anger of filmmakers who attacked the film for not corresponding to the usual format of the time. To answer your question, yes I do recognise myself in this genealogy, but not only in this one, as I do not like categories I feel that my influences also come from elsewhere. Algeria is not the only reference in my journey.

We asked Habiba Djahnine for a filmography that tracks her most significant works:

Tahia ya Didou (1971), Mohamed Zinet

La Nouba des femmes du Mont de Chenoua (1977), Assia Djebar

La Zerda ou le chant de l’oubli (1979), Assia Djebar

Une boite dans le désert (1978), Brahim Tsaki

La moitié du ciel d’Allah (1995), Djamila Sahraoui

Combien je vous aime (1985), Azzedine Meddour

Roma Wala N’touma (2006), Tariq Teguia

Je suis mort (2015), Yassine Benalhadj

Bîr d’eau a Walkmovie (2011), Djamil Beloucif

El Atlal (2016), Djamel Kerkar

Dans ma tête un rond point (2015), Hassen Ferhani

Abou Leila (2019), Amine Sidi-Boumédiène

Films she has collaborated on or produced include:

Harguine Harguine (2008), Meriem Achour Bouakkaz

EL Berrani (l’étranger) (2011), Bouba

La grande Prison (2014), Razik Oumeziane 

Nnuba (2019), Sonia Kessi

Hey Djamila, si je meurs comment feras-tu ? (2019), Leila Saadna

Kouchet el Djir (Four à Chaux) (2014), Boukraa Moussa

Retour vers un point d’équilibre (2009), Nadia Chouieb

Bnet el Djeblia (Les filles de la montagnarde) (2019), Wiame Awres

El Sitar (Le rideau) (2019), Kahina Zina

J’ai habité l’absence deux fois (2011), Drifa Mezenner

Fi Rayha (Selon elle) (2019), Kamila Ould Larbi

The post The Depth of the Gaze: A Conversation with Habiba Djahnine on Algerian Feminist Cinema appeared first on Untold.

The first image etched into eleven-year-old Aya’s mind was a dark, powerless room and women screaming over her uncle’s burned body—an airstrike by the U.S. left only a burnt limb the size of a palm. From that moment, she adapted her mind to the image of a shattered, grieving woman in Baghdad. Just like Fida from Palestine, Maya and Diana from Lebanon, Oula from Syria, and Mazda and Zoya from Afghanistan—these women are activists and journalists who spoke about the experiences of women in wartime. Although foreign forces claimed to be ‘liberating’ them, what these women received instead was devastation, occupation, and deep social divisions.

Now, one of the world’s most violent military leaders, Benjamin Netanyahu, is citing Jina Mahsa Amini and the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” to justify his attack on Iran with a cloak of justice, turning “women’s rights” into a weapon to legitimize war and occupation—the same leader responsible for killing thousands of women in Gaza over the past two years. An all-too-familiar pattern of imperialist exploitation repeated across the region.

For Aya and other Iraqi women, the US occupation was never a source of liberation. Women were arrested alongside their children, and husbands were killed in front of their families—often by soldiers who spoke of peace while carrying weapons. What occurred was not a rescue, but another form of devastation. Iraqi women were not freed; they were caught between tyranny and the foreign fire that arrived with empty promises. Today, each of these women activists who have emerged from war and destruction represents not only her personal experience but also a collective voice—the voice of women who have lived through resistance and have refused to be ‘liberated’ by bombs.

From Iraq: Fake liberation, real chains

Aya, an Iraqi journalist and women’s rights activist, once tried counting how many women she had lost over the years—but gave up quickly, fearing her heart might collapse from grief. Her childhood began with the memory of her uncle’s burned limb and the women’s cries in that powerless room. From then on, the image of the broken woman was etched in her mind: a woman forced to bear the burdens of war, execution, disappearances, and discrimination in an oppressive system.

Under Saddam Hussein, young boys might be executed in front of their mothers for having a religious or communist book. After 2003, the scene didn’t change—only the methods did. Men were executed or disappeared; many never returned, not even as bodies. What mothers received was their absence.

Aya says that after the US invasion in 2003, that violent system against women did not collapse—it grew stronger: “Saddam needed to go, but the way he left only deepened the destruction. The US decided how Iraq would ‘change,’ chose new rulers, and imposed priorities with no link to the wishes of the people. Iraq was neither liberated nor secure; it was another form of prison—and remains so.”

Aya believes that the US not only failed to free Iraqi women but handed power to men who hate women: “The laws allow child brides, men kill women in the name of ‘manhood’ and escape punishment. What we have is legalized violence against women, not reform.”

She says the rhetoric of ‘education for women’ and ‘civil society’ during occupation was simply a facade for failure: “On the surface, workshops and seminars happened, but in practice, women remained vulnerable in a patriarchal society. Women activists, translators, and journalists were all labeled as traitors or collaborators. We received neither support nor voice.”

Aya says this pattern of deception is a familiar US tactic: “The slogans remain the same: freedom, human rights, saving women. Yet behind these words always lies a political agenda. Deprived of hope, we sometimes fall into believing them.” She is certain that occupation never leads to liberation: “The only real resistance is refusing to let our suffering be exploited as a weapon. When foreign powers invoke feminist slogans, they strip them of meaning and turn them into war propaganda; this is not rescue—it’s a takeover.”

When Netanyahu speaks of “Woman, Life, Freedom,” Aya says it serves only as a façade for atrocity—the same recurring pattern, the same slogan, the same lie: “They present us as symbols rather than human beings. They showcase us at strategic moments to legitimise  a policy, only to abandon us when we cease to be of use.”

She expresses her unwavering solidarity with women in Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan: “My solidarity is unconditional. I urge the women of Iran: do not let anyone dictate your story. These narratives are our invaluable assets. But today they’re being taken from us; we are being used, without any concern for our lives.” She warns: “When we ask the international community to acknowledge our plight, the response is often ‘it’s an internal matter.’ But if it suits their interests, all of a sudden, our lives matter to them. This selective approach to our suffering is the worst form of exploitation.”

From Gaza: “We know how to resist ourselves”

Fida is a woman forged by war—a gender studies researcher born and raised in Gaza. She has lived through the horrors of war for as long as she can remember, constantly overshadowed by bombs and occupation. However, the devastation of the past two years marks a profound escalation: complete destruction, profound loss of friends and loved ones, and even erasure of her hometown. For her, women suffer the most amidst the rubble. 

When Fida heard Netanyahu invoke “Woman, Life, Freedom” to justify attacks on Iran, she was not surprised—“this is what the Israeli regime has always done: instrumentalize the suffering of others to legitimize its own violence. This reflects a colonial, racist mindset that dehumanizes others,” she says.

Fida places Netanyahu alongside politicians like Donald Trump—figures who only acknowledge movements they can co-opt: “Whenever a movement can feed their war machine, economy, or geopolitical interests, they seize it. Saying ‘we bomb to free women’ is nothing new—Afghanistan, Iraq—and now Iran. This discourse is acceptable in the West because Islamophobia, white supremacy, and racism are entrenched.”

In response, she emphasizes a simple but vital truth: “Yes, women in our region are oppressed, but this is our struggle. We know how to resist, organize, and fight. No state responsible for war, occupation, or resource plunder has the moral standing to speak of freedom.”

She warns many progressive movements risk being hijacked by imperial projects, shifting focus from justice and transgression to mere token representation in corrupt institutions: “That is dangerous—because countries like the US, Israel, and Germany use moral slogans to conceal their expansionist agendas.”

Fida argues that a common tactic employed by Western powers is to depict West Asian women solely as passive victims—figures presumed to be awaiting rescue by the so-called “civilized” white man. “This portrayal is not only demeaning,” she explains, “but also strategically useful, as it allows these actors to obscure their own roles in constructing systems of occupation and domination, while shifting responsibility onto ‘culture’ or ‘religion.’”

Fida has never looked to foreign governments for support in achieving liberation, and she contends that such expectations are misplaced. “When these states invoke ‘women’s rights,’ it is often not out of genuine concern or solidarity, but rather to legitimize military interventions.”

Importantly, her critique extends beyond the context of Palestine or Gaza. Fida warns that feminist movements in Iran must likewise be vigilant against the risk of co-optation. In her words, a movement rooted in popular struggle can only retain its authenticity and strength if it is led from within, not by the intervention of foreign powers. “We must have full autonomy over our movements. No state with a legacy of colonialism, violence, and war possesses the ethical authority to dictate the terms of our emancipation.”

From Lebanon: The same old tactic

For years, Lebanese women have borne the burden of violence, crisis, and poverty—women like Maya, who are not just storytellers of war but have lived it. A journalist and feminist who lived the crisis from within, she now speaks with experience and resilience of women who became the pillars of families amid destruction.

Maya describes her home in southern Lebanon—recently bombed again by Israel—where thousands of families lost homes and land. Many cannot return: “In crisis moments, these women cared for those around them. In crowded shelters, with bare hands they built kitchens, made play and learning spaces for children. They prevented families from falling apart.”

By late 2024, more than 50% of Lebanon’s 1.2 million internally displaced were women and children, including some 12,000 pregnant women without access to basic medical services. Economic and financial collapse since 2019, the COVID pandemic, and the Beirut port blast intensified pressure—especially on women in informal, small-scale work.

Lebanon, she notes, is a “country of consecutive crises.” Since the outbreak of the civil war in 1975, five successive generations have endured at least one major security or economic crisis. “Each generation held onto the hope that the next would live in peace,” she reflects, “but we have learned to remain in a constant state of readiness—always anticipating the next blow.” These protracted crises unfold within deeply patriarchal structures and legal frameworks that systematically marginalize women.

She describes a form of latent violence—one that does not destroy the body, but gradually erodes the spirit: “If the bullets don’t kill you, war finds a way to break you from within. Many older women continue to live with psychological trauma and a persistent sense of entrapment in the city. They are unable to return to their homes, lands, and gardens in the South; their sense of belonging has been violently severed. It is as if Israel seeks to erase women’s connection to the land through hostility.”

Maya recounts that until the early 2000s when the Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon was liberated, she was not even permitted to visit her birthplace. Against this backdrop, Netanyahu’s invocation of the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” to justify aggression toward Iran strikes her as yet another iteration of a familiar strategy: “It’s the same old tactic powerful states have used for years—washing women’s rights. They claim to champion freedom, but in reality, they instrumentalize such slogans to legitimize war, intervention, and the expansion of their [geopolitical] influence.”

She cites examples: Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, now Iran: “Whenever real decisions need to be made, these governments sideline women- unless they conform to official narratives. This selective use of women shows their real intent: they use women not to liberate them, but to advance military-political goals.”

For Maya, Netanyahu is the epitome of this hypocrisy—a politician directly responsible for killing women and children in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria: “For someone like him, responsible for so many crimes, to invoke the name of Mahsa (Jina) Amini—it’s a moral affront. If anyone still believes that Israel will liberate Iranian women, they need only look at Gaza or post-occupation Afghanistan.”

Her message to Iranian women is clear: “As long as war machines are active and driven by militarized men, women’s suffering will be instrumentalized. We must remain vigilant—liberation cannot begin with bombs.”

Diana, a Lebanese journalist, emphasizes how the layered realities of war have fundamentally reshaped women’s lives in Lebanon. Under what she refers to as “patriarchal peace,” survival has become a multi-generational struggle:: “Grandmothers managing homes amid bombardment, mothers rebuilding after displacement, daughters facing economic collapse and mass migration. Despite everything, women have held society together, yet structural transformation in laws and political representation remains elusive.”

She notes that women’s roles shifted significantly during the civil war and subsequent occupation—taking on responsibilities as caretakers, fighters, smugglers, and negotiators—often under duress. “In the occupied South, women played key roles in sustaining social life and participated in resistance networks, especially secular ones. But war left them vulnerable to violence from ‘the enemy’ and their own communities. As [Lebanese anthropologist] Souad Joseph puts it, war not only creates widows and mothers of martyrs, but deepens patriarchal norms that restrict women even after the weapons fall silent.”

Diana believes Netanyahu’s rhetoric about women in Iran mirrors Lebanon’s experience: powerful actors borrowing feminist language to conceal violence. “As some foreign institutions or politicians have used women’s rights to justify unrelated agendas. When feminism becomes propaganda, it becomes part of the war machine—not a means to peace.”

She argues that such appropriations deplete feminism, reducing struggles for justice to hollow marketing slogans and silencing the voices of real feminists on the frontlines whose language has been co-opted. Her message to women in other crisis zones, such as Iran, is clear: “You are not alone, and you are not merely victims. Your struggle is part of a broader, global movement—but its direction and meaning must be defined by you. Do not allow others to instrumentalize your suffering to justify further violence.”

From Syria: Patriarchy fights on there too

Oula, a Syrian feminist researcher, offers a one-word answer to why foreign armed forces invoke women’s rights during wartime: “Patriarchy.” 

“Whether it’s a regime, militia, or state, they all reproduce the same logic: that they know better than we do what is good for women, what rights we should have, what problems we face, and what our future ought to be.”

As the author of the study Paths of the Feminist Movement after 2011, Oula argues that speaking about women is easy—but truly listening would require relinquishing power, something patriarchy is rarely willing to do. “When Syrians rose up in 2011, they demanded dignity, freedom, and human rights. That was a revolution for dignity—and dignity without full women’s rights is meaningless.”

Despite war, displacement, and repression, feminist organizing in Syria not only persisted but flourished. Women led local initiatives, supported survivors, and created feminist spaces both within Syria and in exile—spaces rooted not in traditional institutions, but in solidarity, care, and everyday resistance.

Yet at the critical turning points, these same women were once again pushed to the margins. Oula, with a critical view of the political process in Syria after the beginning of the transitional period, says: “Despite years of activism and feminist leadership, out of 23 ministries in the transitional government, only one was assigned to a woman. These achievements are real, but fragile. These victories were not the result of the war, but were achieved in spite of it.” According to her, 14 years of war and displacement, while painful for all Syrians, brought specific forms of violence upon women: “From rape and sexual violence in detention centers to forced disappearances, public punishments by extremist groups, and the use of women’s bodies as weapons on the battlefield.” 

Despite this harsh reality, Oula’s account of Syrian women is one of resistance in the heart of the fire. In ISIS-controlled areas, women resisted forced disappearances, taught secretly, built support networks, stood against brainwashing. In areas under foreign or local militia control, documenting abuses, coordinating humanitarian aid, and creating safe spaces—even under bombardment—became everyday acts. To Oula, survival was also rebuilding, envisioning alternatives: “Resistance wasn’t always grand demonstrations—it was keeping society together and asserting women’s presence in shaping the country’s future.”

Asked whether she sees parallels between how women are used in Syria and the global portrayal of Iranian women’s struggles, Oula responds firmly: “Absolutely. War criminals and occupiers have long used our fights for their own goals. From the French in Algeria to the US Americans in Afghanistan, colonialism always posed as ‘saving women’ to legitimize violence. Today the pattern repeats—when Netanyahu uses Iranian women’s protests to justify aggression, it’s a continuation of that violent history.”

Afghanistan: Only the color of chains changed

In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan, promising to “free Afghan women”—a slogan that became the banner of the campaign, casting Afghan women as symbols of “salvation” from Taliban darkness. But the lived experience of women during 20 years of “the republic” tells a bleaker story.

Mazda, an Afghan women’s rights activist, speaks from that experience—from shiny storefronts whose veneer couldn’t mask the stench of obsolescence and violence. She says that freedom in Afghanistan was inflated and hollow, a balloon that popped. Over those 20 years, only a limited group of urban women accessed universities and jobs, but the societal reception remained sexist: “Appearances changed; women were no longer whipped in the street for not wearing the hijab, but abuse continued—verbal harassment, groping, unwanted touching—from street to presidential palace. Laws seemingly protecting women weren’t enforced, and the underpinning structure remained misogynistic.”

As she puts it, the US removed the Taliban’s beard from the streets, but left misogynistic structures intact: “The real voices of Afghan women were never the occupiers’ priority—not in politics, not in reconstruction plans.” Mazda says that the voices of the people—whether women or men—meant nothing to the occupying powers; they only listened to themselves and silenced everyone else with bombs, bullets, and violence: “We protested, we demonstrated, but the response was always the same: violence.”

What distinguishes indigenous feminism from imported versions is agency, Mazda says: “In local feminism, women are subjects, decision-makers—not objects for international institutions and armies to decide for.” The US‑NATO package of “democracy” implemented at Bonn conferences included a definition of women’s rights—but this was symbolic window dressing to legitimize occupation.” she says, with derision: “There was no real liberation—only the color of our chains was changed.”

She speaks about personal and collective experiences of the Afghan woman’s body as a battlefield and symbol of power, where women are blamed even when assaulted: “Society blamed her for her clothing, the law didn’t protect her; the police became perpetrators. In an environment without legal mechanisms to address femicide or sexual assault, any man in the street could act as an enforcer. The republic might have removed official hijab patrols—but patriarchy permeated society, controlling women’s bodies.”

There, Mazda says, women’s bodies became banners for regimes—republicans branded them as democratic symbols, the Taliban used them for “political Islam.” In both cases, women remain symbolic objects for legitimizing regimes. She asks: “Why do states speak so much about women in wars but never listen to them? Because women are seen as ‘honor,’ not humans. Political power always seeks means to reinforce dominance, not autonomous agents who can disrupt the status quo.”

When Netanyahu wields “Woman, Life, Freedom” to justify attacking Iran, Mazda sees a continuation of the same scenario that used Afghan women to justify occupation: “It’s laughable to think bombs bring freedom—amid bodies left in our hands. It’s absurd to consider child-killers as saviors.”

She has lived the experience of “imported freedom”: “Today millions of Afghan women have gained nothing but depression, isolation, and bans from that exported democracy. The danger of exploiting women’s suffering is more than disrespect—it gives excuses to warmongers and normalizes violence against women.”

Mazda’s message to Iranian women and others whose voices may be hijacked: “Be careful not to be used as tools. Peace is born from awareness, not bombs. No country has been liberated by bombing. All that changes is just the color of our chains.”

Zoya, a member of the AfgactivistCollective—a group of first- and second-generation Afghans aligned with the Global South movement—opposes both the US occupation and the Taliban. The collective works to link Afghan struggles with broader regional movements.

Calm yet confident, Zoya speaks of the West’s invasion under the banner of “saving Afghan women,” wryly remarking: “Twenty years of war just to replace Taliban with Taliban.”

For Zoya, the rhetoric of salvation served as a cover for economic and geopolitical interests—not women’s rights, but access to natural resources and Afghanistan’s strategic position. As she puts it, the hypocrisy was plain to see: “Everything happened in front of our eyes.” The Doha Agreement, she says, confirmed that behind the veil of liberation lay nothing but self-interest.

She states: “Our land is full of resources needed for capitalist war machines. Women’s bodies were just propaganda tools.” In her narrative, Afghan women’s resistance arose from within—from houses turned into secret classrooms, hands building progress uncontested by funding or support: “With all the money that flowed into Afghanistan, what was visible was our own effort—not international NGOs.”

She describes corrupt development models that dispossessed farmers, bought homes, forced dependence on processed food—food that created health and pharmaceutical markets for international profit. “Today’s Afghan crisis is the result of this profit logic,” Zoya says.

With the Taliban’s return, new forms of suppression emerged—religiously justified but without real basis: “From closing girls’ schools after sixth grade, banning women’s baths, to even requiring covered kitchen windows—these are all pretexts to distract us from resource extraction.”

She clenches anger at the question: “Who arms the Taliban? How did they gain power during 20 years of ‘struggle’? The same forces preaching freedom also profit from Afghan suffering—through pharmaceuticals, military, electronics industries.”

She doesn’t spare “white feminism,” openly criticizing Germany’s so-called feminist foreign policy: “Afghan women are ignored, Palestinian women are nonexistent, and Iranian women must be saved.” To her, this brand of feminism is colonialism dressed in progressive language: “They offer a false feminism—one that neither dismantles patriarchy nor challenges oppressive structures.” 

Her answer? Amplify grounded, authentic voices. “Only true narratives can withstand purple-washing—the use of feminist slogans to camouflage war and domination.” Her message to Iranian women—and to any women whose movements risk being co-opted—is clear: “We in Afghanistan, Palestine, Iran, Kurdistan, Congo, Somalia, Balochistan—we all share one struggle: against patriarchy, imperialism, and capitalism.”

The narratives of war-affected women across the region may differ in detail, but they speak in unison: liberation does not arrive through occupation or bombs, and slogans like “Woman, Life, Freedom” must not be turned into tools by powers that are themselves among the main violators of all three.

In a world where structural violence and imperialism continue to target societies of the Global South under the mask of “rescue” or “freedom,” it is more urgent than ever to listen to the voices of real women from within these communities.

They do not need saviors.

The post The Women Not Liberated by Bombs appeared first on Untold.

Overwhelmed by the love and connection, I prayed for everyone present, especially for the two recent arrivals from Uganda seeking asylum. We moved our blankets to a sunnier spot in Hirschgarten and danced to Luganda music, embracing the warm spring day with joy and solidarity.

Though we were far from home—over 5,000 kilometers away from Uganda—we had forged a strong, supportive community in Munich, a place where most of us were strangers. Ubuntu—the belief in collective well-being and mutual care—flourished even in this deeply individualistic, neo-liberal society. The spirit of “I am because we are, and we are because I am” anchored our relationships, strengthening the bonds between strangers turned friends.

During the picnic, Akenke shared her excitement about moving to new accommodation closer to Munich after months in a reception center. Having completed the first phase of her refugee status determination process, she looked forward to cooking her own meals again and escaping the repetitive German diet of bread, potatoes, and chicken. We discussed her plans to focus on learning German and pursuing a master’s in Legal Media Informatics. I wished her luck, feeling hopeful for her future.

The struggles of asylum: Life in Ottobrunn

A few days later, I was shocked to hear that Akenke was miserable in her new living situation. Though the accommodation was an improvement over the crowded reception center, she was horrified to find she had been placed in a room with a young man. For a woman seeking asylum based on her persecution for her sexual orientation and gender identity, sharing a sleeping space with a male stranger felt invasive and unsafe.

I recognized the name of her roommate and knew him to have previously made sexual advances on my teenage daughter and her friends, which worried me further. I advised Akenke to request a room change, especially since the facility had several unoccupied rooms. She contacted the administration, only to be told that her gender was misrecognized based on her name—an excuse that didn’t hold up since her official records clearly identified her as female.

She was eventually moved to another room, but it had only one bed and one mattress, which she had to share with another woman, a stranger. She feared the lack of privacy, the hygiene concerns, and the potential health risks, especially during the hot summer. We discussed options, including her staying with me temporarily, but she chose to remain where she was. I promised to assess the situation during her housewarming party that weekend.

A housewarming marred by conflict

On May 19, I traveled to Ottobrunn with a friend, bringing groceries for Akenke’s housewarming. Upon arrival, we encountered issues with the security guards, who insisted on speaking in German despite my repeated explanations that I only spoke English. The only man among the security guards insisted on raising his voice at me in German, so I eventually responded slowly in Luganda language, causing my friends to laugh at the absurdity of the language barrier.  

Eventually, a Black female guard from Nigeria spoke to me in English, referring to me as her “African sister.” She mentioned that all visitors needed to register, and, after checking our bags, allowed us to proceed to Akenke’s room.

During this interaction, I asked the guard about the mix-up with Akenke’s room and why she had been placed in a room with one mattress with a woman stranger. The guard responded dismissively, saying, “Many Ugandan women who come here are homosexual, so sharing a bed with another woman shouldn’t be a problem.”

I was appalled by her generalization and asked, “Is it okay if you and I go upstairs and share a bed?”

“God forbid!” she exclaimed.

Her comment exposed the discriminatory assumptions underlying the asylum system, reinforcing stereotypes about Ugandan women and trivializing the challenges Akenke faced.

She proceeded to tell me how she found a bible inside Akenke’s room and wondered how a queer asylum seeker could be religious. I told her it was unacceptable for her to make assumptions about Akenke’s religious practice or her sexuality. I stressed my disappointment that security guards in asylum shelters were not adequately trained to avoid re-traumatising the asylum seekers who were in their custody.

Frustrated, I took a photograph of the guards, intending to report the incident to the management.

Criminalized for seeking justice

The moment I informed the guards that I had taken their picture, the situation escalated. The Nigerian guard demanded I delete the photo. When I refused, citing the need for evidence, she and her colleagues threatened to call the police. Undeterred, I told them to go ahead and call the authorities, as I planned to file a report myself.

The police arrived and, instead of addressing my concerns, sided with the guards. They ordered me to delete the photos and, when I refused, confiscated my phone. I was handed a protocol citing criminal charges under the German Criminal Code for taking photographs without consent. To my shock, I was also issued a house ban, preventing me from entering any asylum accommodation in Bavaria.

Determined to expose the injustices, I shared my story in a Facebook Live video, questioning the legality and morality of prohibiting the collection of evidence in cases of abuse. I also launched the #Photo4AsylumDignity campaign, encouraging other migrants to document and report similar experiences of dehumanization.

Fighting for justice

Today, I face criminal charges for taking and sharing photographs that reveal the mistreatment of a queer Ugandan asylum seeker. I am also contesting the house ban in administrative court, a legal battle that has become as much a fight for human dignity as it is for justice.

These legal challenges raise crucial questions: How can one collect evidence of abuse in a system that criminalizes documentation? How do we expose the wrongs within asylum shelters when the law protects those who perpetuate harm?

I may be found guilty in court, but I refuse to let that silence me. If my conviction draws attention to the plight of queer Ugandan asylum seekers and the dehumanizing conditions they endure in Bavaria in 2024, then it will have been worth it. Should I be imprisoned for my actions, make some noise, when you hear about my imprisonment.

*Pseudonym used to anonymize and protect the identity of this individual who is still waiting for results of her refugee status determination.

The post An asylum system designed to silence: How documenting dehumanization becomes a crime appeared first on Untold.