Buzz in Western media recently over the pictures of attractive young women at the forefront of opposition demonstrations - Gulf News: Opinion

Mohammad Al Khalil is a lecturer, Arabic Studies, Zayed University, Dubai. He writes in today's Gulf News,

There has been a buzz in Western media recently over the pictures of attractive young women at the forefront of opposition demonstrations in Lebanon.
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But how will the pronounced appearance of sexy and politically active Westernised young women be received in the wider context of the Arab world?
However pleasing such scenes might seem to observers in the West, who might interpret them as the signs of the "people power" of liberal and emancipated strata across the Arab world it is more probable that the new image being projected would play right into the hands of the opposing conservative loyalists.

The heavily-Westernised mix-gender scenes of activists out demonstrating, sometimes in very close quarters like the back of a pickup truck, may not sit well with Arab time-honoured tradition of the separation of the sexes.
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So it doesn't help the opposition camp, in the larger Lebanese and Arab context, that the majority of their slogans and signs are written in English, even though this is convenient for Western observers.

Just contrast this with the demonstrations called for by Hezbollah where the majority of signs were in Arabic and the women were separated from the men.

Granted, such practice is not "cool"! But Hezbollah is not only flexing its muscles for the benefit of foreign observers, it is also addressing itself to the larger Arab constituency who will not miss the meaning of signs like "This is Lebanon, not Ukraine" written in Arabic.

He writes of the "increasingly conservative Arab population." But is it increasingly conservative? Some parts of the population may be driven towards increasing conservatism in reaction to societal changes. What is true is that the pictures that are fascinating the West are (1) showing a slice of life in the Arab world that many in the West didn't know existed, but (2) that slice is no more representative of the large whole than are Arab stereotypes of the West based on slices of American life.

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