As a child, Shylan Kamal liked to knead bread because she felt her muscles working. Having become one of the few women in Iraq to practice bodybuilding, this Kurdish forty-something believes that her passion also allows her to fight for gender equality.
“Having muscles is good for women. We want our beauty to be expressed through our bodybuilding,” says the 46-year-old coach, in an ultra-modern gym in Erbil (north), where she trains four hours a day in bodybuilding.
Three years ago, this trained nutritionist and former photographer left Germany, where she lived, to settle in the capital of autonomous Kurdistan, in northern Iraq. She found there a conservative and patriarchal society, where her passion for female bodybuilding provoked many eyebrows.
“I don’t care what people say, because I have my convictions”, assumes the sportswoman, rejecting the traditional canons of beauty imposed on women.
“I hate that people consider the woman as an inferior being, a sexual symbol, that she has to take care of her children and make herself beautiful for her husband”, she continues. “Why couldn’t women combine beauty and strength?”
After warming up on the elliptical trainer, her hair cascading over her powerful shoulders, the bodybuilder alternates between weight machines, dumbbell lifts and floor push-ups.
Shylan has been training since she was 22. On her Instagram account, she poses in a bikini to show off her muscles and sometimes waves the flag of autonomous Kurdistan during bodybuilding competitions in Europe.
In recent months, at three events in Great Britain and Germany, she has won third place each time. Like in Cologne, in western Germany, in mid-April.
In Iraq, “unfortunately, people are not used to seeing women in bathing suits showing off their muscles”, she acknowledges, also saddened by the prejudices and the surprise with which she is greeted when, during competitions abroad, we discover that she comes from Iraq.
Originally from Souleimaniyah (north-east), the second city of Kurdistan, Shylan was 14 when she emigrated with her uncle to Germany, where she studied and then became a photographer in a photo studio in Düsseldorf, in the west of the country.
At 16, she married a compatriot with whom she had three children, now in their twenties.
“As a child, I moved a lot, I was full of energy and I wanted to release this energy”, she recalls. “When I helped my mother knead the bread dough, I felt my muscles grow and it made me happy.”
In still conservative Iraq, women’s sport is developing slowly. Many women’s teams have emerged in recent years, whether for football, boxing, weightlifting or kickboxing.
Relatively spared by the conflicts that ravaged Iraq, Kurdistan took a step ahead in the field of sports, the autonomous region betting very early on these disciplines via the development of infrastructures and subsidies.
Ranjbar Ali, 45, trains at the same place as Shylan. He says he is “happy” to see more women going to gyms and so much the better if some “like Shylan break down barriers and preconceived ideas”.
He too advocates for gender equality. “If people think it’s shameful for women to show off their bodies and their muscles, then it should be shameful for men too,” he said, his black sports tank top revealing his bulging biceps.
Shylan’s advice “to women of the world and, in particular, Kurds?” Practice.
“It’s a physically demanding discipline, which requires concentration, a healthy diet,” she says. But thanks to it, women “will be in better health, psychologically too.”
“I’m sure going to gyms is more beneficial than going to beauty salons.”
08/05/2023 07:20:48 – Erbil (Iraq) (AFP) © 2023 AFP
