Nihad Alaeddin, better known by her stage name Igraa, may seem a little long in the tooth to be an article's Hot Strafor Babe, but I couldn't find another picture of her, yet her story is illuminating and she deserves the well-earned honor.
In the 1950s she traveled to Cairo with her sister where a promoter renamed them Seduction (Igraa) and Charm and launched them on a highly successful belly dancing career. By the 1970s her sister took to the veil and became a conservative Muslim while Igraa began to make films. In her first big film, The Leopard, she did the region's first nude scen. The movie created a lot of controversy, but was well received by the public.
She went on to appear in numerous other films, and wrote 25 screenplays. She was unapologetic about her work, and often critical of the sexual mores of the area. “My films criticized the double standard of the Eastern man,” she said. “He studies in Europe, but he comes back East and returns to his old attitudes. If he could lock his wife and sister up, he would.”
You can read more about her in the NY Times article Syrian Actress Tests Boundaries Again.
MAKING SENSE OF THE SYRIAN CRISIS
By Reva Bhalla, May 5, 2011
Syria is clearly in a state of internal crisis. Facebook-organized protests were quickly stamped out in early February, but by mid-March, a faceless opposition had emerged from the flashpoint city of Daraa in Syria's largely conservative Sunni southwest. From Daraa, demonstrations spread to the Kurdish northeast, the coastal Latakia area, urban Sunni strongholds in Hama and Homs and to Aleppo and the suburbs of Damascus. Feeling overwhelmed, the regime experimented with rhetoric on reforms while relying on much more familiar iron-fist methods in cracking down, arresting hundreds of men, cutting off water and electricity to the most rebellious areas and making clear to the population that, with or without emergency rule in place, the price for dissent does not exclude death. (Activists claim more than 500 civilians have been killed in Syria since the demonstrations began, but that figure has not been independently verified.)
A survey of the headlines would lead many to believe that Syrian President Bashar al Assad will soon be joining Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak in a line of deposed Arab despots. The situation in Syria is serious, but in our view, the crisis has not yet risen to a level that would warrant a forecast that the al Assad regime will fall.
Four key pillars sustain Syria's minority Alawite-Baathist regime:
-Power in the hands of the al Assad clan.
-Alawite unity.
-Alawite control over the military-intelligence apparatus.
-The Baath party's monopoly on the political system.
Though the regime is coming under significant stress, all four of these pillars are still standing. If any one falls, the al Assad regime will have a real existential crisis on its hands. To understand why this is the case, we need to begin with the story of how the Alawites came to dominate modern Syria.
The Rise of the Alawites
Syria's complex demographics make it a difficult country to rule. It is believed that three-fourths of the country's roughly 22 million people are Sunnis, including most of the Kurdish minority in the northeast. Given the volatility that generally accompanies sectarianism, Syria deliberately avoids conducting censuses on religious demographics, making it difficult to determine, for example, exactly how big the country's Alawite minority has grown. Most estimates put the number of Alawites in Syria at around 1.5 million, or close to 7 percent of the population. When combined with Shia and Ismailis, non-Sunni Muslims average around 13 percent. Christians of several variations, including Greek Orthodox and Maronite, make up around 10 percent of the population. The mostly mountain-dwelling Druze comprise around 3 percent.
Alawite power in Syria is only about five decades old. The Alawites are frequently (and erroneously) categorized as Shiite Muslims, have many things in common with Christians and are often shunned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims alike. Consequently, Alawites attract a great deal of controversy in the Islamic world. The Alawites diverged from the mainstream Twelver of the Imami branch of Shiite Islam in the ninth century under the leadership of Ibn Nusayr (this is why, prior to 1920, Alawites were known more commonly as Nusayris). Their main link to Shiite Islam and the origin of the Alawite name stems from their reverence for the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, Ali. The sect is often described as highly secretive and heretical for its rejection of Shariah and of common Islamic practices, including call to prayer, going to mosque for worship, making pilgrimages to Mecca and intolerance for alcohol. At the same time, Alawites celebrate many Christian holidays and revere Christian saints.
Alawites are a fractious bunch, historically divided among rival tribes and clans and split geographically between mountain refuges and plains in rural Syria. The province of Latakia, which provides critical access to the Mediterranean coast, is also the Alawite homeland, ensuring that any Alawite bid for autonomy would be met with stiff Sunni resistance. Historically, for much of the territory that is modern-day Syria, the Alawites represented the impoverished lot in the countryside while the urban-dwelling Sunnis dominated the country's businesses and political posts. Unable to claim a firm standing among Muslims, Alawites would often embrace the Shiite concept of taqqiya (concealing or assimilating one's faith to avoid persecution) in dealing with their Sunni counterparts. [continued after jump]
