Touring Libyan Blogs : Chaperones Redux, Successful Women, Mother’s Day and More · Global Voices
Fozia Mohamed

Libyan blogs teemed with discussions during the last couple of weeks. We are glad to know that the Chaperone for Libyan women law  I mentioned two weeks ago has been scraped, possibly following voices of outrage from courageous women.
Here is an update from Highlander:
“Yes the General People's Committee issued an announcement for those who do not read Arabic, here below is the summary.” [more]
A collective sigh of relief at this happy conclusion!
AmericanLibyan has a powerful rant about how men ‘fear the successful woman’. This is unfortunately an aspect much witnessed in Libya, in terms of men preferring to marry women of lesser education or income. On the other hand, another trend is simultaneously in effect, where younger men marry women up to 10 years older than them as successful Libyan women can afford a house and bring in good money in addition to forfeiting their right to a big dowry in order to marry. Of course, I'm generalizing slightly here as there are people who do fall in love with each other regardless of money, education and age. To get back to the American Libyan's topic, do check her post and you won't be disappointed.
“I have always wondered why Arab men have to be such chauvinists when it comes to women, money and careers. For God sake men let it go and stop being such bigots. The reason we go out and have careers is because we WANT to not because we want to flaunt it in your face and start singing “na na nana na I make more money than yoooou and I’m just a giiiirl” and then stick out our tongues at you like some two year old, excluding me of course; I still do that all the time– it’s my guilty pleasure. Anyways I know men want to feel strong and manly and want to have power over women and want to feel that a woman needs them and yatta yatta yatta but uh habibi hate to bust your bubble but who said us successful ambitious women don’t want that? Trust me, we want a strong masculine man in our life and trust me he will have power over us if we love him, and I hate to say this but we need our men. We just don’t need you to run our lives with your cultural ways. So please enlighten me, exactly what are you chauvinists afraid of? ” [more]
On March 21, Libya and many countries in the Arab world celebrated Mother's Day. A mother in  our culture is put on a pedestal as she so rightly deserves.  Unique to Libya is the fact that Children's Day falls coincides on the same day and here Anglo Libyan reminds us of that.
“[..] my parents used to take me and my brothers on this day to watch the Fancy Dress Parade which used to go through the streets of central Tripoli, I used to like all those colourful costumes, is this still going? I wonder! anyway I would like to wish a Happy Child's Day to all of our kids too, May Allah bless all mothers, fathers & children.”
I wanted to tell Maysoon who commented on his post, and whom I'm sure would be very pleased to know that the parade Anglo Libyan is talking about, does still take place indeed. Children do dress in fancy clothes and go to their school and so they do parade on the street on the way to school and back with their finery. This has been captured beautifully by the lens of  blogger Hibo from Tripoli My Sou , and you can check her photos of the children on this site. Also blogger S. Hamid , has some cute photos of dressed up youngsters.
Rose Bud of Field of  Dreams  follows a scent which instantly reminds her of home.
“It reminded me of the countless weddings, engagements, sbouas, and funerals. The times when the family would gather around and have Shahi Ailla. The kanoon would always come out and the bahour would chase away the evil eye. It reminded me of my grand mother, she always smelled nice. I almost forgot that smell, and what a shame that would have been.” [more]
A.Adam of Flying Birds seems to be quitting blogging . “After three days from now this blog will celebrate the 3rd anniversary and it's gonna be the END…” , but the whole Libyan blogosphere is trying to persuade  him not to . We shall find out soon what happens. Besheshentra already figured out it may be his April fool's joke. We hope it is a joke A. Adam !
Rumours are a dime a dozen in Libya and when the popular Allibiya FM radio broadcasting channel was dropped last week,  Maysoon wrote about it in her post “Few things“.
“People what's wrong with Allibeyah FM??? it's been off for couple of days now!?”
This little note generated a lot of replies here , and even a full post by Anglo Libyan, which included a further expounding of ideas.
“Some big suits that lack a lot of education keep interfering with everything to the point of being completely ridiculous, I mean only in Libya they banned the words Television, Radio, Cinema and now FM, they used ridiculous alternatives such as جهاز الاذاعة المرئية (Visual Broadcasting Machine for TV), جهاز الاذاعة المسموعة (Audio Broadcasting Machine for Radio) and خيالة (meaning Cinema) and God knows what for FM!!, these were inventions that were invented by Europeans or western people, their names have become a Trade Mark and are used world wide, its in the same way that the English language uses many Arabic words for things that were invented by Arabs and rightly so” [more]
Our very own Danish Libyan blogger Safia has been the victim of death threats from islamophobes and others in Denmark apparently for her role in uncovering double standards operating in that European country against a Muslim trying to access the ladder of power. To follow the whole story you need to go here. Safia wows she will not be silenced !
Libyan Mental TV is a recent blog depicting Libyans in their natural habitat as witnessed by the authors of the blog. We are treated to ad-hoc  videos of activities that caught their eye in Libya. For the moment there is a young man talking to his girlfriend on the phone and a rock concert at University.
“Libyan Mental TV, is short for Libyan Mentality TV, if that was short at all, it focuses on the Libyan mentality and attitude towards things and it is exhibited in a humorous way, thus we chose to call it Libyan Mental-TV (LMTV)” .
Awesome!