Two years ago, a 10 year-old Yemeni schoolgirl named Nujood was married off to a delivery man in his 30s. The girl's father made the husband promise to wait until puberty to consummate the marriage, but the man did it on their wedding night anyway.

Everyday, Nujood feared the coming night when she would be beaten and forced to have sex. So, she did the highly improbable in a country that offers little protection for women's rights: she found bus money and went to the courthouse to ask for a divorce.

A sympathetic lawyer named Shada Nasser found her and fought her case pro-bono, while media outlets turned the story into a national sensation. Since a husband has nearly limitless rights in Yemen, Nujood had to pay her husband a $250 penalty for divorce-- four months' salary for the average Yemeni. Money was donated to Nujood to pay the penalty.

A large part of the problem is a lack of family planning and education. Nujood's father, Ali, is unemployed, has two wives, and 16 children. He is unable to provide for his family, so instead he has been selling off his daughters for dowries to feed the other children. Ali normally would have been furious that Nujood shamed his family be divorcing her husband. Instead, as Western media and donors have flooded Nujood with awards and money for education, Nujood has become the breadwinner for the entire house.

This month, Nujood published an autobiography, written with Delphine Minoui. Predictably, her dream is to become a women's rights lawyer just like Shada. Read more at the LA Times, Time Magazine, NYTimes, and yes, at Glamour Magazine (it's actually good article, I promise!!). 

David Foster Wallace, via Andrew Sullivan: 

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. 

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. 

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it.

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

For more thought-provoking quotes, check out the Politics by Other Means quotes section here.

There is a new party in Kurdish politics and it's likely that it will have a significant effect on the ongoing Iraqi election. The Goran or "change" party was founded by Nawshirwan Mustafa specifically to challenge the two party PUK, KDP coalition that has dominated politics in the region since it became semi-autonomous after the first Gulf War.

Al Jazeera correspondent Zeina Khodr has an excellent profile on the newcomers here.

Money quote:

For the first time since 2003, Kurdish politicians will lack unity. But that doesn't seem to bother Goran's supporters. I went to one of their rallies and most of them will tell you that they welcome new parties because it brings about a real democracy.

But the question is how will this new reality affect the Kurds' political influence in Baghdad? After all, Sunday's national elections is not just about rival Kurdish parties vying for parliamentary seats, it is about Kurds wanting to expand their influence in Baghdad.

That's influence they need if they want to resolve pending Arab-Kurdish issues, like the fate of Kirkuk and other disputed territories, the oil law and the status of federalism.

It is still not clear if Nawshirwan Mustafa, the head of the Goran movement, will co-operate with his Kurdish rivals in the next Iraqi parliament. "I hope we do," is what he told me an hour before he addressed a crowd of his supporters.

For more background check out this article Jon wrote way back in July 2009.

In the aftermath AKP's consolidation of power, the big question is what next? The Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) have long been an important if not the most important voice in Turkish foreign policy. With the military firmly under the control of the civilian government how will Turkish foreign policy change? Will Turkey pursue closer relations with Iran and Syria? What about Israel?

One interesting way to start this discussion is to look at the views and opinions of the Turkish population. While of course Erdogan and Co. call the shots at the end of the day, AKP's recent victory puts the party in a peculiar position. AKP needs to maintain its popular mandate in order to insure economic stability, maintain international legitimacy and manage its delicate relationship with the courts--the other pillar of the old secular regime.  This makes popular opinion, especially on sensitive issues like Turkey's relationship with Iran, more important.

According to a recent Pew report Turks have particularly low regard for Middle Eastern leaders:

Same for Hezbollah, Hamas, and Osama bin Laden:

While its unlikely that the Turkish public will dictate foreign policy, its views do establish the parameters for what AKP can and can't do. If these data are an accurate representation of the Turkish psyche, I wouldn't expect a big shift in Turkish foreign policy in the Middle East anytime soon.

"Any Muslim in any part of the world who works with Switzerland is an apostate, is against (the Prophet) Mohammad, and God and the Koran," he [Gaddafi] told a meeting [sic] in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.

Haley Sweetland Edwards has an excellent article on Ali Abdullah Saleh, America’s latest erstwhile ally in the fight against al-Qaeda. Money quote:

The best reason Saleh has not to push hard against al Qaeda may be a paradoxical one: if he were to eliminate America’s enemies in Yemen, he wouldn’t be able to fight them anymore. If the group remains a threat, Saleh’s cash-strapped government receives huge sums of money and pledges of political support from the international community, so why would Saleh slaughter his cash cow? "So long as there is al Qaeda, no one will let him fail. It’s simple," said Naif al-Gunas, the speaker of the opposition coalition, the Joint Meetings Party. A war against a dissolute enemy like al Qaeda also allows Saleh to use counterterrorism funds and military resources to battle his internal enemies—the Shiite rebel group in the north, and the separatists in the south—simply by accusing them both of being allied with al Qaeda, which he has done repeatedly. (The alliances are mostly unproven, but, as one parliament member put it, "Shared enemies make unlikely bedfellows.")

At the end of the day, Saleh’s ability to sell his own temporary allegiance to the highest bidder is his main political asset, and for the time being the U.S. seems to have secured the dubious prize.

Read the whole article here. One of the nice things about the rise in interest in Yemen is that its given a voice to lots of great young journalists and academics. Waq-al-Waq is unfortunately over, but half of that team (Brian O’Neill) still blogs at Always Judged Guilty.