Blog 9; Female Weight Lifters Compete

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — In a private gym tucked away in the warren of villas in the ritzy Jumeirah district here, Amna Al Haddad, a 22-year-old, adjusted her head scarf, bent to a dumbbell rack and jerked 100 pounds, roughly her body weight, into the air. Al Haddad is one of 12 women who train as competitive weight lifters in the United Arab Emirates, combating the stigma of lifting as a “man’s sport” in the Arab country, whose local population — despite the presence of bikini-clad foreigners for decades — holds to its conservative Muslim tradition. Weight lifting is often confused with bodybuilding in the Emirates and women who take part are often seen as masculine, or lesbian, which is a crime in the U.A.E. Female lifters say they are told that the sport will make them unattractive to male suitors; marriage is still considered the most important event in a young Emirati woman’s life. “A lot of women say, ‘Wow, look at her body,’ ” Al Haddad said. “They ask me how to get lean, and when I say I weight lift, they get scared. But it’s the 21st century now. I don’t want to get married until I make the Olympics.” Weight lifting remains the only women’s national team of the six nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.“We tried to make a team with other countries like Kuwait and Bahrain, but they also faced that negativity,” al-Hammadi said.

The U.A.E. allowed women to weightlift starting in 2000. In 2008, it separated the bodybuilding and weight lifting federations, lessening the decidedly unfeminine imagery attached to lifting compared with that of bodybuilding’s hulking muscles and popping veins.


In the Middle East women do not have very many privileges solely because it is a patriarchal society. But here is a story of a woman who has decided to change that for herself. She has chosen a sport that not even in America is very popular for women, weight lifting. She still does obey the Religious views of wearing a head scarf and covering the majority of her body as respect for herself, but is able to modify her scarf to make it easier to lift weights. She is not ashamed of her own body image, Amna Al Haddad acts as if she is even proud of her figure stating that she is not ready for marriage, not until she makes it to the Olympics. Marriage is very sacred to the women of the U.A.E. and she is most definitely breaking a social norm by waiting to get married. In all I complement this young women for pursuing something that she loves knowing that she lives in a place that is socially against female weight lifters, recalling it a "man’s sport".

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/sports/amid-glares-female-muslim-weightlifters-compete.html