The Muslim Woman

In Islam, there is no such concept of free will, especially with respect to women folk. They are treated as mere commodities in the hands of men. They are battered, molested, killed when they ask for freedom. To make the situation worse, women have given no say in their own marriage. Girls less than ten years are given away to men over fifty years!

Do you expect women in Islamic countries to breathe?

There are no such laws in Saudi Arabia that define the minimum age for marriage. Although a woman’s permission is legally required, but that’s a different story that some marriage officials do not think it’s necessary to ask them.

Morsal Obeidi was just 16, she wanted to live like the other girls in Germany. Free to make choices. But she paid dearly for aspiring to be free, her brother stabbed her 20 times. This honour killing right in the heart of Germany has sparked huge debate about muslim women, the choices they have and they don’t have. And whether at all they can opt to walk away from the family bindings.

It must be really difficult to live closed life in a free world. The children of religious minority groups can never really get integrated into western society. Their homes and their religious bindings often place them in a dilemma of choices. They rarely think of escaping from home and bindings. Their upbringing teaches them not to abandon family and family values at any cost. The family name, family honour, their own religion and society are of supreme importance. Defying parents and religious law is never tolerated. If some of them do dare, they end up getting punished.

Iraq has been in the news ever since 2001. With the country being in the state of a perpetual war, women and children suffer the most, both, in social and economic aspects. Amidst such a climate, the atmosphere in Iraq is not very friendly, especially for women, who face threats not only from the militants and frenetic gangs who go looting Iraq, but also from their own family. The recent news of a murder of nineteen year old girl by her in-laws, just because she had an unknown number in her mobile phone, for the sake of honor, shows how blatant their idea about religion is. All the more, since Sharia law is incorporated in the constitution, the government is only able to sit and watch such crimes. This is true not only of Iraq, but many other middle-east countries.

Post Saddam Hussain’s hanging, things haven’t changed much and a new phenomenon is grappling Iraq, with a new trend emerging with the rise in the number of widows. One such widow is Suad Rzuki Aboud who lost her husband, three sons and a son-in-law when their family bakery was blown off by the Sunni militia. She says:

I was pleading for anyone to help. No one came.

Despite of a large number of women rights movement across the globe it seems that the larger portion of the fruits of women rights have gone to the woman of the western world while their sisters, especially in the Islamic world still remain deprived behind the veil of anonymity. For a society that treats its women as wealth to be possessed and kept fettered inside the secure environs of home, Nadia Abu Amar, an Israeli Arab’s desire for freedom cannot be tolerated. So even by escaping from her home in Ramle to a women’s shelter in Jerusalem she could not save herself from being killed by the male relatives of her family in the name of salvaging the family honour.

What would a woman get if she dares to hold a professional job? Abduction, rape and murder, yes this is what she would receive at least in Iraq!

Religious extremists in the southern Iraqi city of Basra are busy slaughtering the women folk who are going against their religious doctrines by stepping out of the four walls of their house just to earn their livelihood. In some parts of Baghdad, women were being prevented to go to the markets alone. Parents are frightened to send their daughters to school and university.

They are constantly being subjected to threats, intimidation and even murder. Perpetrators tend to justify their inhuman deeds of killing a woman by leaving a piece of paper on her or dress her in indecent clothes. Atmosphere is saturated with threat till an extent that the women folk dare not move out in the streets without proper dress code.

Grim figures suggest slaughtering of 42 women between July and September alone in the region this year. Abusers have created a kind of propaganda by painting graffiti on walls all across the streets.

The strict Islamic laws restricting movement of women, takes preposterous dimension in Saudi Arabia where men and women are treated in a manner as if they are two different species. Shrouded in dark colored abayas or traditional Saudi attires for women covering the head and extending to the tow, Saudi women move about the street like living ghosts. Forbidden to move outside their girls’ only circle, interacting with a non-relative male is blasphemous in Saudi Arabia.

She is living under police security not because there is threat of criminals or terrorists, but because her own parents are out to rake her! In other words, her parents are her worst foes at this moment because what she did, hardly any girl of her community dares to. This is the story of ill-fated Khaleda Begum, 25, whose fancy for marriage turned into a nightmare when she was forced to marry her own cousin, who was 20 years older to her. Khaleda is not the only victim of such brutal and savage custom, but many like her are forced to keep up the same brutal tradition. However, most of the girls surrender to such rituals or practices. This somewhere shows how the brutal practice like a tumor is stilling swelling up, if not openly, secretly at least.

What can be called a travesty of judiciary, the Saudi Arabia’s Higher Judicial Council has actually sentenced a rape victim to receive 200 lashes and prison while the perpetrators of humanity’s most heinous crime were allowed to walk free.

The 19-year-old Shiite woman who was raped by six armed men was originally sentenced to receive 90 lashes for traveling in the car of an ‘unrelated male’ at the time of the rape. However after the woman had the temerity of not unquestioningly submitting herself to be tortured as punishment of being raped, the judges on Saudi Arabia’s Higher Judicial Council more than doubled her punishment for attempting to influence the judiciary through the media.

Bangladesh is terribly in hot water as the protest for gender equality is underway. Hundreds are currently experiencing the lashes of the patriarchal system of male dominance over women.

What the country is undergoing is a long-battle with a noble goal that if ever it will be pushed to the limits, it will eventually result to women empowerment. Dhaka may seemingly be bloody as riots begin to curtail any movement to give women equal rights as men, but the members of the radical Islamic Constitution Movement should not be violent about their actions to temper down the situation.