Nigerian transvestite lives among Muslim women for seven years

According to a story by freelance Agence France Press reporter Aminu Abubakar out of Kano in northern Nigeria, a teenage boy who had been living as a girl was recently exposed.

Abubakar Hamza lived as "Kawajo, a young woman who sold magical charms and potions to the married women of Kano" after he ran away at age 12. "When my fathers disapproval of my dressing like a girl became unbearable I left home and lived with a family in a nomadic settlement, dressing and behaving like other girls in the family," he said.

Now 19, he has lived ever since among married women in purdah -- the practice of screening women from men or strangers by means of a curtain or all-enveloping clothes.

He even attracted unsuspecting suitors among the young men of the city of Kano, all the while struggling to conceal the attraction he felt towards his female hosts.

But his life fell apart on April 22, when a visitor from his home village recognised him at a naming ceremony held by one of the families which had been taken in by his winning performance.

He was forced to strip and the tissue paper padding his bra was discovered.

That must have been an embarrassing scene. Worthy of a summer comedy, perhaps.
"Kawajo? But but but... my daughters have been sharing a room with you! Saaay what's going on here?" Benny Hill type chase ensues.

Kawajo had such a fetching manner under her burqa that she attracted suitors who gave her gifts and money.

Abdullahi Ahmad, a 35-year-old man who asked for Hamza's hand in marriage, said: "There was no way one would differentiate Kawajo from any girl in the neighbourhood.

"She walked and talked like a girl and I could not resist making advances to her, although I knew she had rebuffed many such offers," he added.

"The competition between two friends in this neighbourhood over Kawajo degenerated into a quarrel and they stopped talking to each other for weeks.

"But when it became known that Kawajo is a man and not a woman they just laughed over it and resumed their friendship," Ahmad smiled.

Kawajo made a livelihood by accepting gifts from smitten suitors and by working her mojo for the women (and not in the dirty way you are thinking)

"I get my inspiration on medicine from spirits who work in collaboration with me to assist people. Their intention is just to help women," he said.

"I lived with my women hosts, cooked with them, ate with them. I slept on the same bed with them and plaited their hair," he said.

"They would change their dress in my presence, exposing their nakedness since they thought I was a woman. But I dared not sleep with any of them for fear that my true identity could be exposed," he explained.

"And whenever I sensed my disguise was threatened or I found my sexual need for my host becoming hard to control, I would leave because any attempt to make love to my host would blow my cover," he said.

According to one of his unsuspecting hosts, his self-control did not fail.

"She lived in my house for four years and never showed any trace of manhood and none of my three daughters who shared bed with her ever complained of any funny behaviour," Muhammad, a grocer, told the court.

After "she" was found out, a poster with her likeness was even printed up and is selling for 100 naira (70 cents). Since "she" faces a 10,000 naira (70 dollar) fine or a year in jail, she just has to sell, what? 100 posters to pay her fine off. Shoot, I'd buy one of those.
Which brings me to my final point.
A young man was caught disguising himself in order to get into the women's quarters, deceive them, see them naked, and sleep in the same bed with them. And he faces a fine or a year in jail according to the Sharia court.
A woman who was inappropriately close to a member of the opposite sex, with no deception on her part -- let us say she was forcibly raped -- faces death at the hands of her family.
If this cute little transvestite had managed to seduce anyone in the harem, do you think any woman would be stupid enough to admit it?

What kind of a "women's rights activist" works to marry a rape victim off to her rapist?

Rape victim marries jailed attacker to avoid Muslim shun
Shaikh Azizur Rahman In Calcutta

On the order of the court in Berhampur, Ahammad Shaikh, 30, tied the knot with Sabina Khatoon, 18, inside the local prison where he is serving his sentence.

Shaikh kidnapped Khatoon - the daughter of a daily wage labourer - from her village and raped her in a nearby forest in March this year.

Then, with permission from the court, an activist carrying out work among rural women, approached Shaikh inside the jail and informed him of the woman’s miseries after being ‘tainted’ by his rape.

The women’s rights activist suggested that Shaikh marry Khatoon.

Khatoon, who looked very happy after the marriage, said: "For that act [of rape] I hated him. Sometimes I felt like I wanted to tear him to pieces.

"But I have a different feeling for him now. I have forgiven him because he has chosen me as his wife. I have to love him now."

In recent weeks, at the order of the courts, at least three such marriages between rapists and their victims have taken place inside jails in eastern India.

Sigh.

• How Biblical. This is just what it says to do in the Old Testament. Why don't American courts enforce this?


• What kind of women's rights activist works to get a rape victim married off to her rapist? Does the international activist community know what this person is up to?


• The poor girl was delivered into the hands of her rapist by her very own parents. The man admitted "I took advantage of her weakness and assaulted her while she was alone." So now she gets to sit at her new in-laws' house waiting for the man has already taken advantage of her weakness once to come get her again. And the father who initially appeared to be on her side is the one that handed her over.

Abu Sayyaf: Good Muslims, unless the women captives are wearing something enticing

A former American hostage who returned to the Philippines to testify in court revealed that her Muslim extremist captors violated their own "code of honor" and abused women hostages, court documents showed Tuesday.

Missionary Gracia Burnham, from Rose Hill, Kan._near Wichita_testified in a local court last Thursday, but for security reasons journalists were not allowed to witness her testimony on her year-long nightmare in the jungles of the southern Philippines. The court released an official transcript Tuesday.

Burnham, 45, was abducted by Abu Sayyaf rebels with her husband, Martin, and 18 other people from a Philippine resort on May 27, 2001. She was wounded but was rescued during an army operation on June 7, 2002. Her husband and a Filipino captive were killed in the crossfire during the rescue and a number of hostages, including another American, were beheaded during the captivity.

"They were not true to their word," Mrs. Burnham told a prosecution lawyer. "One of the first things they told us on the speedboat was they were talking about their code of honor, how outstanding Muslim men they were."

She quoted one of the Abu Sayyaf leaders, Abu Solaiman, as saying: "Could we ever touch your women? Of course not, the Koran forbids that."

"They lied many times," she added, without giving details.

Burnham was invited to testify under a mutual legal assistance treaty between Washington and Manila. The trial is part of the Philippines' quest to impose justice on suspected Muslim militants from the Abu Sayyaf group accused of mass kidnappings, deadly bombings and beheadings.

The hostage crisis prompted Washington to provide counterterrorism training for Philippine forces against the al-Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf.

Twenty Years Old in the Middle East

This documentary by Lebanese-borm filmmaker Amal Moghaizel is on TV right now. It interviews a number of young Arabs and Persians in their early 20s about what they want and expect out of life. They feel powerless although they go on with their lives as best they can.
They are so conflicted about America. They hate it and yet they love it. They love being Arabs and yet they wish they were anything but Arabs. They express disappointment in and distrust of America -- as their speech is peppered with American phrases such as "family and kids", "country of peace". One group of friends sat around a table with the Sudanese girl enumerating all the substitutes for American items she found. They break into laughter at how Zam-Zam Cola tastes like cough syrup and profess they don't miss Coke and got used to the Zam-Zam. The other girl's father works at Pepsi and she opines that they don't think of McDonalds and Pepsi as being American things anymore because they employ Arabs and provide benefits in their lives. A waiter brings burgers. The boy finally speaks up to say -- perhaps the burger buns made him think of it -- that they can't afford to boycott American wheat, but they do have a valuable commodity in oil at least.
Fascinating how American culture is so woven into the fabric of the lives of these Arab kids. The Syrian medical student insists that Americans are rich and ill-educated (not saying she's wrong) and that all the achievements of America can be attributed to immigrants (well yeah! we're all immigrants and it has enriched our nation in so may tangible and intangible ways. Maybe that's why we don't try too hard to keep people out. It has been a win-win situation for so long, we don't want that to end).
The Lebanese boy whose whole family speaks French at home goes to Sabra-Chatila to teach kids to draw. He says it's another window for the kids, a way to create opportunity. What a good young man, I think. I want to go help right now. I want to send a massive peace corps of helpful American twenty-somethings.
These are good kids in a difficult situation. They are not angels. They drink some of the kool-aid -- a few experiences and a few dark nights of the soul could send most of them down the path taken by Hamas and Hizbollah, but they are not nearly there yet. They want to be proud of who they are. They want better leadership. They do some of their own thinking. They are just people.

When 20 Years Old in the Middle East was over, I switched to CSPAN and caught Dr. Rice talking about the government's plan for outreach to the Muslim world to try to improve the economic situation, the situation of women, and so forth.
Rice said there is no greater outreach than to say that there is a future in freedom for Arabs built on democratic values and economic opportunity.
Governments have a way of accomplishing approximately a quarter of what they announce they are going to do, usually with ambiguous results. So this "outreach" isn't going to amount to much. The people, united, could do a whole lot more.
It saddens me that these fanatical jihadi freaks with their attacks and these corrupt Arab politicians with their tribal mentality create an atmosphere that is stifling ordinary Arabs. Arabs should be proud of their strength that they can survive all that.
It's too bad they don't see that their allegiances don't have to be along ethnic or religious lines, that America the country of immigrants is the model for helping them free themselves of that. Here, no one expects you to tolerate ill treatment or poor leadership from someone just because they share an ethnic identity with you. Here, American values of tolerance would actually allow more religious freedom for Muslims than the fundamentalists could ever bear. We would stand up for one's right to practice Islam however one sees fit, the fanatics exert pressure to make everyone's Islam the same extremist type.
Anyway. It was a decent film.