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Islam and women
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While cherished, life is a struggle for most people in the world.
Injustice and tragedy surround us everywhere all the time. But I can
not imagine anything more tragic than to be a woman in an Islamic
country.
In Islamic countries, women are not valued for their beauty or
motherhood, not to mention their faculties or personality. Rather, a
woman in Islamic country is the guaranteed right of pious Muslim men.
She is a commodity used for pleasure and procreation. Yes, the chador
could be woman's personal choice, and wealth may soften woman's plight
in an Islamic country. But for most women in Islamic countries, life is
utterly unjust.
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In Islamic countries, women need written permission from
male relative, or chaperon, to go out of the house. What if the child
needed urgent medical attention? In Islamic culture, a woman is
stoned because she smiled at someone, her
nose cut because she
fled her abusive husband, and
honor killing crowns
her rape. Women are prevented from going to school, but are allowed or
required to marry when they are only 9 years old
children. The word of
two women equals that of one man before a judge... No law of heritance--an
argument that Muslims never fail to bring up to demonstrate women
status--can make any of these just. Is the guarantee of heritance worth it
if
woman's life is not guaranteed and could be lost at man's whim?
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"Many women
who do not
dress
modestly ...
lead young
men astray,
corrupt
their
chastity and
spread
adultery in
society,
which
increases
earthquakes." |
HOJATOLESLAM
KAZEM SEDIGHI,
an Iranian Muslim cleric,
blaming women for a spate
of recent temblors around
the globe |
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 In
her
books, Fatima Mernissi (pictured) captures
all the problems of women of Islamic world.
Reading Lolita in
Tehran gives an account of how much the Islamic society loses by
trampling women's dreams, creativity, and ambitions.
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".....The hijab is manna from heaven
for politicians facing crises. It is not just a scrap of
cloth; it is a division of labor. It sends women back to
the kitchen. Any Muslim state can reduce its level of
unemployment by half just by appealing to the shari‘a, in
its meaning as despotic caliphal tradition. This is why it
is important to avoid reducing fundamentalism to a handful
of agitators who stage demonstrations in the streets. It
must be situated within its regional and world economic
context by linking it to the question of oil wealth and the
New World Order that the Westerners propose to us."
(p. 165)
Islam and democracy: Fear of the modern world,
Fatima Mernissi
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 I
read about the
stoning of Soraya M.
(pictured when she was 9 years old) in late 80s in Bulgaria. A paper in the leading
literary magazine LIK told her
story and introduced the
expatriate
Iranian journalist
Freidoune Sahebjam who
was the
first to publish it.
After reading it, I cried for this woman for days. The comparison of my
life to hers was dreadful. When I was 16 years old, I played
soccer with the boys in the
neighborhood,
danced along
ABBA's songs, and worried that I could not watch some movies because of
age restriction. Soraya was married at 13 and by the time she was 26 she
had 9 children, two
stillborn. Only to see, in time,
her oldest boy throwing a stone at her, with pride... The elders of the
village gathered together and decided her fate in 1 hour; she was never
allowed to say a word in her defense.
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Every
aspect of the punishment by lapidation (stoning) is not
just wrong, but sickeningly
wrong:
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