FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

The Arabic News Site Empowering Women to Challenge Extremism

A new social news site “Akhbarek” is targeting young women to try to stir up a debate in the Arab world.
Illustration via Akhbarek

When a Jordanian man was arrested for having kissed his girlfriend on a public street in November, the Arab media largely ignored the story. The outlets that did choose to cover the news were not sympathetic.

"Personal acts shouldn't be performed in public. If this had happened anywhere else, it would have been acceptable, but not in the Arab world," said one resident quoted in the state-owned newspaper The Jordan Times.

Advertisement

One news website took a different tone, though.

"Congratulations, congratulations, the people of Jordan can finally sleep now that a dangerous criminal has been arrested," read the sarcastic opening line of a story about the incident written by Akhbarek, a recently launched social news site in Amman that aims to empower young women and girls throughout in the Arab world.

In a country where it's illegal to criticize the King and reporters are arrested over Facebook posts, engaging in this kind of journalism is a risky endeavor.

But the founders of Akhbarek, which is the feminine form of the phrase "Your News" in Arabic, are on a noble mission: to make girls and young women question the often narrow religious and cultural values they've been taught by their families, religious leaders, and society.

The site's founders believe that if they can teach women in the Arab world about progressive values and pluralism, they can empower them to become better citizens and change the way people think in the Middle East, a region where extremism has been on the rise in the vacuum of power left by the Arab Spring.

Akhbarek produces two or three original stories a day that present alternative takes on the news and encourage a conversation around the stories. "We try to create doubt and get our audience to pose questions and wonder," the site's co-founder and editor-in-chief Mariam Abuadas told me over smoothies in Amman on a recent afternoon.

Advertisement

For instance, when the story of an 18-year-old Syrian refugee who swam for three-and-a-half hours to reach Greece after her smuggler's boat started to sink made headlines in March, Akhbarek ran a story questioning why some Muslims believe that competitive swimming threatens a woman's virginity.

Illustration via Akhbarek

Akhbarek's satire about the kiss incident, "The Kiss That Destroyed Utopia," went on to question why the Jordanian authorities spend their time arresting teenagers for kissing in public when the Kingdom has so many more problematic issues, like the law that allows rapists to escape prosecution if they marry their victims. Or the fact that the government put a gag order on publishing any information about the mysterious alleged murder of two prominent businesswomen in Amman in November.

"Are these things more important than a kiss?" the story asked. "Definitely not, because an innocent kiss is the biggest problem facing Jordan right now."

Top illustration from "The Kiss That Destroyed Utopia" via Akhbarek

The response isn't always positive. Many of Akhbarek's commenters are religious conservatives who are offended by what they read on the site, Abuadas said.

One commenter on "Kiss That Destroyed Utopia" wrote: "Jordanian people are conservative. They have honor and religion, especially on simple issues like this. However you, dear writer, don't understand the value system of us Jordanians."

But stirring up a debate is the whole point: "When they comment, we engage with them, and debate them," Abuadas said. "And in the end sometimes they say, 'Okay, maybe I don't agree with you, but I can see where you're coming from.'"

Advertisement

To target a young demographic, Akhbarek creates stories that can be quickly and easily read on mobile phones and shared on social media. Akhbarek stories are seldom longer than a few paragraphs and are highly visual. The site employs a small number of in-house designers to create custom graphics for each piece.

The site averages 2,000-3,000 readers a day. But Akhbarek's Facebook page is where it reaches its biggest audience: In March, it had 2 million visitors, and 600,000 engagements over the course of the month, Abuadas said.

Since Akhbarek launched in January 2015, most of its readers have been between the ages of 15-24. About 60 percent are female and 40 percent are male.

"We're happy to have so many male readers because we feel men have some listening to do," said Abuadas.

Women are largely ignored by the Arab media. Yet it's women who are tasked with raising the next generation of leaders, Abuadas said, which is why it's so important to reach out to them. "Women are the ones who pass on the values and tradition of society."

Here in Jordan, and throughout the region, there are often two ideologies that get marketed to the majority of young people, said Naseem Tarawneh, a blogger and media entrepreneur who is a co-founder of Akhbarek, as well as Abuadas's husband.

"Young people [in the Middle East] are geared towards the religious identity on the one hand, or towards the militaristic, nationalistic identity on the other hand," which is often defined by loyalty to the ruling regime, Tarawneh told me. The problem, he said, is that "there's not a lot of pluralism with either one."

Advertisement

Jordan is a young country—more than 70 percent of the population is under age 30. Yet opportunity is scarce: Almost 30 percent of Jordanians between the ages of 15-24 who are actively looking for work are unable to find it. "This is what we call 'The Waiting Generation,'" political analyst Oraib Rantawi told me in Amman, while the call to prayer blasted from the minaret of a mosque next door.

"Those who have to wait 10 years after graduating before they can get a job or start a family become a soft target for jihadism."

It's not just men in the Muslim world who are at threat of joining the jihadi cause. ISIS recruitment cells have formed specifically to target women; women make up about 10 percent of the foreign fighters from the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia who travel to Syria and Iraq to join Islamic militant groups. Many of those who have been caught trying to join the caliphate are teenagers, some as young as 14-years-old.

"There are dangerous trends happening in the Arab world now," Abuadas said. "And there are only two ways to change that: education and media. And education is controlled by tyrants, so we are left with media."

Unfortunately, media in the Arab world is often controlled by the government, too. Many news outlets here are state-run, and those that aren't typically censor themselves to avoid being shut down or having their staff thrown in jail.

The result is that there isn't much news to read that's not mainstream—or that doesn't merely toe the party line.

Advertisement

But the rise of social media has changed that. It gives a publishing platform to anyone with an opinion and an internet connection, and has proven difficult for dictators to monitor.

"Technology in the hands of young people is outpacing the government's ability to track it"

"Technology in the hands of young people is outpacing the government's ability to track it," Abuadas said, pointing out that when Skype first came to Jordan in the mid-2000s, the government shut it down while they figured out how to monitor it, and then opened it back up to users a week later—presumably once they were confident that they could effectively regulate it.

"It's impossible to do that now, because there are new Skypes being created every day," Abuadas said.

Akhbarek is taking advantage of the boom in social media to advance its own agenda. Abuadas says that the staff plan to begin creating content specifically designed for Snapchat next. It's an attractive platform not only because its ephemeral messages likely evade government surveillance better, but because Snapchat is where Akhbarek's audience is.

"It's a tool in the hands of young women," Abuadas said. "It's the language they use. So we want to open that platform, and see what they'll do with it."

Illustration via Akhbarek

Akhbarek isn't the first news outlet in the Middle East with the mission of empowering women. At least as far back as the 1890s, when the magazine Al Fatah (The Girl) was founded in Egypt by a Syrian publisher to defend and advocate for women's rights, publications that target female audiences have popped up in many different countries in the region.

Advertisement

"Specialist feminist magazines—like Zanan in Iran, for example—are important because they can go into detail about women's issues in ways that mainstream media cannot touch, because those issues may be considered un-Islamic or culturally taboo," said Rothna Begum, Women's Rights Researcher for the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch.

"These kinds of magazines make a difference because oftentimes, 10 years later, the mainstream media begins talking about these issues as if they're normal," Begum told me.

In other words, media can be a tool to provoke debate and challenge stereotypes, with the goal of reforming some of society's darker attitudes.

"The core of our mission is to showcase these stories to the Arab world," said Abuadas. "To inspire women by telling them, if these women can do it, then you can too."

Silicon Divide is a series about gender inequality in tech and science. Follow along here.