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 مجلة صوت المرأة، منبر الاتحاد النسائي، في عيدها السبعين (1955) كتبه عبد الله علي إبراهيم
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08:30 AM May, 28 2025 سودانيز اون لاين
عبدالله علي إبراهيم-Missouri-USA
مكتبتى
رابط مختصر
هذا ملخص ورقة علمية تقدمت بها لمؤتمر جمعية الدراسات السودانية بالولايات المتحدة في مناسبة العيد الخمسين لصدور "صوت المرأة" منبر الاتحاد النسائي. وكانت فاطمة أحمد إبراهيم على سدة هيئة تحريرها. وعربتها في كتابي "فاطمة أحمد إبراهيم: عالم جميل" (دار عزة) ونشرتها في Academia.edu والرابط بأسفل الصفحة.
Swat al-Mara: A Woman’s Voice in Public
Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim
History, University of Missouri-Columbia
Sawt al-Mara (Woman’s Voice, SM), the monthly magazine of the Sudanese Woman Union (SWU), began publishing in 1955 under the editorship of Ms. Fatima Ahmad Ibrahim. To its credit women were largely given suffrage by the 1964 popular Revolution in recognition of its unrelenting fight for national and women causes against Aboud junta (1958-1964). The SM has never been the same since. Its span of publication was cut short by various dictatorships and the influence of the SWU itself waned.
SM was a "veiled" enterprise in its early years of publishing. It had to put on the veil to cope with the agonizing reality pioneers for women's rights suffer in a Muslim culture in which, according to Afkami, “the personal is political." Ms. Ibrahim was scared even to put her name on the front page of the magazine as required by the authorities. To avoid social nakedness, she put her initials instead. Furthermore, the stories in SM are rarely acknowledged. Behind this mask, the effacing of the personal, these feminists carried out their subversive praxis.
What strikes one about SM is that it does not smack jargon typical of mouthpieces of leftist organizations. In the stories, written largely by female journalists, women are presented as subjects of their own lives. Their culture is discussed sensitively as legitimate and coherent. The few women authorities in social service figure prominently on its pages. Importantly, SM strikes a rare balance in addressing the concerns of homemakers, most of the women population, and the emerging constituency of working women. A balance was also struck between the concerns of rural and urban women.
The gender focus of the magazine is unrelenting and unsparing. The case it made for women's education health, and women is argued from the vantage point of women as women as well as citizens. The case for expanding girls’ education is made in deliberate, skillful interventions contrasting it to a privileged boys’ education. The magazine came with ingenious ideas to get more education for girls. It proposes allowing co-education in rural areas that cannot afford separate schools for boys and girls. In a gender-informed move the magazine calls for beginning a girl's education earlier to provide her with as much education as possible before it is interrupted by an early marriage.
Similarly, women's terms of service are addressed in strict gender terms (cartoon). SM successfully fought against the policy of mushahra by which government relegated woman employees to temporary service after being married. In terms of women health, SM's dominant focus was childbirth commonly held to be a door to death for women. An illustration of the grass root nature of SM's work for women was the well-attended lecture organized in a working-class neighborhood entitled “Is Childbirth a Door to Dying؟” The lecture was given by the woman dean of the Nursing College and enhanced by slides. Unfortunately, the rain cut it short. To bring the shortage in women's health services home, SM attaches boxes to its stories with meticulous, thoughtful statistics.
Work of rural women occupies center stage in the SM's outlook of rural life. An interesting debate on the nature of rural women work took place on the pages of the magazine in the early Sixties between Ms. Ibrahim and a young woman activist. The latter argues that this work does not constitute an injustice except in the estimation of rebellious, elite city activists. The student eventually converted to the view that it is a rewarded effort after a few exchanges with Ms. Ibrahim.
The stories of the magazine dealing with women culture are largely nonjudgmental. The journalists are awed or puzzled by the practice of Zar. This led them to base their stories about its rituals, shunned by patriarchy, on eyewitness accounts. To better serve the reader, the editor provided two boxes along with a Zar story; one devoted to explaining the terminology of Zar and the second contains Zar songs. Participants’ viewpoints on the ritual are invited. A journalist even confesses to her vulnerability to a certain Zar tune and wanted to dance to it.
The magazine, however, is extremely intolerable toward Hid (a code of mourning through wearing coarse clothes), Feki’s “superstitious” healing recipes sought by women, and the flagrant materialism surrounding marriage transactions and ceremonies. Nevertheless, the magazine engages women in debating these cultural artifacts. An uninhibited woman disagreed with the cheerlessness of Hid and called it “the hyena that devours women.”
The magazine engaged Islam to further women cause by playing an inclusive Islam against an exclusive patriarchy. It devoted a page for woman issues effectively used by Sheik Muhammad Abd al-Magid al-Saraj as a vehicle of a “theology of women liberation."
SM was social movement journalism at its best.
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عبدالله علي إبراهيم
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