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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Jordan's men hand the gloves over to women |
| 2007-11-02 |
| Ayman Awat has turned up early at Jordan's national boxing arena and, as he puts his gloves on, the previous pair of trainees is still sparring in the ring. The two fighters are hopelessly mismatched in height and weight, and the little one has to fight a desperate rearguard action. "Easy, easy," the little one appeals, and the coach in the ring intervenes angrily. "What's all this 'easy?'," he demands. "You're supposed to be fighters!" Awat, who boxes at 69 kilograms for the Jordanian national team, frowns at the pair sparring. "I don't agree with this at all," he says darkly. "It's a physical thing. They shouldn't fight, they should stay at home. A woman should be a lady." Women's boxing is not a mainstream sport in the deeply conservative Middle East, yet it does exist in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. And Awat's branch of the sport can no longer get by without it: Olympic rule changes decree that if a country does not have a women's team then it cannot enter its male fighters in most major tournaments. "That's why we had the idea of women boxing," says Walid Jarrar, a committee member of the Jordanian Amateur Boxing Association. "I have no problem with it," he continues gallantly. "I'd let my own wife box. I'm already teaching her tennis and swimming." Right now, though, the association has all the women it wants — four of them. All were recruited onto the police force, then seconded to box full time. Or at least, to train full-time. Despite having sparred together for two years now, the four have yet to fight a competitive bout. That will change next month, at an Arab women's tournament in Tunisia. "Some of them started boxing five years before us and have had lots of fights so I'm a little bit worried about it," says Rudeinah Hejazeen, 24, the biggest of the four Jordanian women at 78 kilograms. "But I'll live. And because there aren't that many Arab women boxing at my weight I might even do well." It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Jordan's method of setting up its women's team owes more to its ambitions for its male boxers than to any desire to see local women in the ring. None of the four comes from Jordan's Muslim and Arab mainstream. The three Muslims on the team, who train in hijabs, are members of Jordan's small minority of African descent. The fourth, Rudeinah, is a Christian. Quite a bit more at link, and the photo is great. |
| Posted by:ryuge |