My wife and I watched a show last night with a story about forbidden love within Muslim families. I’ll post more thoughts soon, but something from the coverage came together with yesterday’s post about Dr. Wafa Sultan in a powerful way. Namely, the importance of women.
At one point in the show, the journalist interviewed the Muslim brother of a 16 year old girl who had been raped. His attitude about killing her with four bullets to the head was that she was no different than a broken dish – no longer useful.
I don’t understand that thinking. Especially when I consider that their holy text begins with essentially the same five books as the Jewish and Christian holy texts. Within those books is the story of the creation of woman as a “ezer ke-negdo” or, life-giver. You know the story – God didn’t think it was good for man to be alone, so He created woman.
How do you read a story like that and then consider women to be property like dogs and livestock? And what happens when you do?
Well, you lose the benefit of their help. Instead of relying on the counsel of a helper, you rely on your own thinking.
Men and women are different (which I’m thrilled about, btw). One
fundamental difference is how we process things in our brains. Men’s brains are simple and women’s
brains are extensively integrated. When women experience the
world, they store more information about the events than men do –
especially emotions.
Which brings me to this quote from the article on Dr. Sultan:
“her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at
the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical
Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the
government of President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.
“They
shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, ‘God is great!’ ” she
said. “At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to
question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it
has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for
another god.”
Without the counsel of women, these men – and millions more – have an unemotional, simplistic view of the world. They have cursed the very thing that was designed to help them.
With tragic repercussions for us all.
