View Full Version : Just a cultural thing
Just a cultural thing.
Every culture is equal. We just need to understand.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6211260.ece
"She won considerable acclaim for her songs but had become a musician in the face of bitter opposition from her family, who believed it was sinful for a woman to perform on television.
Ashamed of her growing popularity her two brothers are reported to have entered her flat last week while her husband was out and fired three bullets into her chest. Neither has been caught.
The final song performed by Udas on screen seems to have portended her death. It was entitled, “I died but still live among the living, because I live on in the dreams of my lover.” Udas, a divorced mother of two, had remarried 10 days before she was murdered"
A question that has been bothering me is "Where are the feminists?":confused:
Some members of this disparate group will point out every alleged gendered injustice in the West but they're remarkably silent when it comes to the violence perpetuated on women in the Islamic world.:eek:
Oh, but that's different.:rolleyes:
(IMHO, many feminists undermined their cause in their defense of President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal. Had that happened in the office of a Fortune 500's CEO, they would have cried out for blood. They would have argued that in that configuration of power, Ms. Lewinsky could never consent.)
A question that has been bothering me is "Where are the feminists?"
Good question.
By the way, what odds would you give for this young lady living to a ripe old age?
From The Fayetteville Observer - "Young Afghan woman is caught between promises"
http://www.fayobserver.com/article?id=325274
"....Despite all her accomplishments, Muhibi’s future is uncertain. She wants to return to her country and fight for women’s rights after she earns a master’s degree in the U.S.
But the patriarchal system she wants to change back home is slowly closing in on her.
Muhibi’s father wants her to return immediately after graduation and marry her 25-year-old cousin.
“He is still waiting for me to marry him,” Muhibi said last week. “But my strategy is to finish my graduate school so that hopefully by then he gets tired of waiting and he marries somebody else.”
She left Afghanistan in 2003 with her father’s blessing and a scholarship to finish high school in Canada, she said. In her tribe, most young women marry in the ninth grade and start families, she said. "
By luck, I was at what many believe to be Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, Jr.'s last public speaking engagement.
(He tore the roof off. It was a tough and jaded crowd. The student body jumped up and showered him with thunderous applause.)
Not soon thereafter, he had his bitter homecoming. (The video is ghastly.)
I fear Ms. Muhibi's homecoming will be even more horrible.
redleg99
05-02-2009, 18:03
A question that has been bothering me is "Where are the feminists?"
They are out there, but as you can imagine, they prefer to blame the current problems of Middle Eastern women on the West. A good example of this is Valentine Moghadam’s Modernizing Women, which I recommend reading only if you need to raise your blood-pressure.
There are some home-grown feminists in the Middle East who are critical of their own societies, but they obviously have to be very careful. A good example of this is Qasim Amin’s The Liberation of Women and the New Woman which was actually written around 1900. The fact that this book is still in print, and that it seems to remain the best example of its type, might say something about feminism in the Middle East.
Source is here (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-forced-marriage2-2009jun02,0,5144153,full.story).
Photo of Ms. Muhibi is here (http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2009-06/47253979.jpg).
Rahila Muhibi, a native of Afghanistan and a recent college graduate in North Carolina, has no intentions of marrying her cousin, betrothed to her when she was 7. But to do so means defying her father
By David Zucchino
June 2, 2009
Reporting from Fayetteville, N.C. -- When she was 7 years old, Rahila Muhibi was engaged to her 8-year-old first cousin. The betrothal was arranged, in the Afghan custom, by her father.
When Muhibi was ready for high school, her father fended off relatives who demanded that the marriage take place. He thought she was too young, and instead helped her win a scholarship to attend school in Canada.
Last month, Muhibi, 24, graduated from tiny Methodist University here. Her father now says the time has come for Muhibi to return to Afghanistan and marry her cousin.
She has refused, setting up a test of wills with her father and a challenge to the societal customs that require women to be obedient daughters and wives.
Muhibi wants to go to graduate school in the West and continue running a small nonprofit literacy program she founded for Afghan women. But for the program to flourish -- and for Muhibi to reconnect with a family she misses terribly -- she must return home.
"It's hard for me to say no because my father has helped me so much," Muhibi said, speaking flawless English while chatting with fellow students on campus. "But I refuse to be submissive."
Muhibi said she didn't care for her cousin when they were children growing up together in a village in northeastern Afghanistan. She cares for him even less now, she said, calling him "my supposed fiance."
She has told him more than once that she has no intention of marrying him. When he telephoned her to congratulate her the day she graduated, she drove home the point.
"I told him to find someone else," she said. "I said I didn't want him blaming me for making him wait. He treated it like a joke. He said he didn't believe I would really say no because it would bring such dishonor."
Muhibi's father, Abdul Ghaffer, is 63 -- a tall, bony white-haired man. (Some Afghans choose surnames from other family members. Muhibi's father chose his grandfather's surname; she chose her grandfather's.)
A retired government clerk, he and his family rent a simple mud brick house on a rutted side street in Kabul, Afghanistan. He is proud of his daughter's educational accomplishments, he said, despite the criticism he has endured from friends and relatives over allowing her to attend school overseas. But now that Muhibi's education has been completed, he said, she must honor her obligations.
"If my daughter does not accept my idea, well, of course I will lose respect among my relatives," he said over black tea and chocolates in his tiny mehman khana, or reception room. "But I don't think my daughter would do anything against our culture."
Certain family obligations cannot be refused, he said. He pointed out that his son and a nephew are married to sisters of Muhibi's betrothed cousin.
"This is not just a problem for me if my daughter does not marry, but it would be a problem for the rest of the family too," Ghaffer said.
An Afghan woman who refuses an arranged marriage can bring dishonor to her family, and the act may result in banishment from the home. In some cases, reluctant brides have run away, been jailed or committed suicide.
Ghaffer said he considered the groom-to-be, the son of a herder, a fine catch. Now 25, he graduated from Kabul University last year and works for a cellphone company.
Ghaffer himself entered into an arranged marriage when his wife -- Muhibi's mother -- was 11. She too has urged Muhibi to submit to the marriage. "My mother told me: You should listen to your dad," Muhibi said.
With degrees in global studies and political science from Methodist University, she is almost certainly the best-educated woman in her Nikpai tribe. After so many years in the West, Muhibi cannot abide by the old, restrictive ways of her culture, she said.
Even when she lived in Afghanistan, she did not wear a burka as her mother and sisters do. When she was 12, she said, she broke a cultural taboo by sitting with Afghan men to talk politics, encouraged by her father.
Inside the student union building, Muhibi looked at home: Dressed in a white blouse and black slacks, she joked and giggled with several female friends and casually greeted the male students who stopped by to chat.
Muhibi said she received a full scholarship to Methodist after an official from the university visited her high school in British Columbia.
While in college, she obtained a $10,000 grant from the Davis Projects for Peace foundation to start a summer program that in 2007 brought students from Kabul to visit young people in the village where she grew up. They all attended classes under a tree because the village had no school.
She then raised $8,000 in a single night, selling home-cooked Afghan meals to American donors. She used the money to create the 100 Mothers Literacy Program to help educate women in her village.
At first, there was resistance in Afghanistan, she said -- from village elders and the women themselves. The women said they were too old to learn and preferred that the money be used to build toilets.
"I thought: How can you choose a bathroom over education?" Muhibi said. "If I had stayed in the village, I would have ended up just like them."
Muhibi raised more money, and, after the women and elders relented, she visited Afghanistan in December 2008, launching the program with 104 students. She hired as instructors male and female teens educated in the village's first schoolhouse, built in 2007. Each is paid $40 a month.
The program is run by Muhibi's oldest brother, 45, a teacher in the village. Her 22-year-old sister, who lives in Kabul, helps out.
Several hours by car from Kabul, the village is reachable only by dirt tracks. Muhibi asked that her siblings' names, and the name of her village, not be published. She said she feared Taliban insurgents or sympathizers would retaliate against them for teaching women -- considered apostasy by some Afghans.
Someone, she said, threatened recently to toss acid in her sister's eyes, a common Taliban punishment. Others have spread rumors that Muhibi is trying to convert villagers to Christianity, a rumor Ghaffer quashed by assuring elders that his daughter is a devout Muslim.
Despite her father's insistence on the arranged marriage, Muhibi said she considered him relatively moderate. When she visited in December, she said, he asked her to wear a burka. She refused, and he did not try to force her.
In fact, Ghaffer is the main reason for his daughter's remarkable journey.
The few Afghan women who do manage educations overseas tend to be from prominent, politically connected families. Muhibi grew up in a village in Baghlan province without indoor plumbing and electricity. Her mother is illiterate. Her father did not attend school but went to a mullah to learn to read and write.
Muhibi and her family are Hazara, a Shiite Muslim ethnic group that historically has suffered discrimination from Afghanistan's dominant Sunni Muslims. Some anthropologists think Hazaras migrated to present-day Afghanistan from Mongolia; many Hazaras claim to be descendants of Genghis Khan.
During the Taliban regime in the late 1990s, gunmen burned villages and killed Hazaras in Hazarajat, the ethnic homeland in northeast Afghanistan, which includes Muhibi's village. The legendary Buddha statues of Bamian, which had stood since the 6th century, were destroyed.
Muhibi said her family members were forced to flee in 1998, when she was 13, abandoning their home and possessions. They walked for three days to a neighboring village, passing burning villages and Hazara corpses.
Her father covered her eyes, she recalled, but she knew what had happened. "I knew what was there. I could smell the dead," she recalled. The family later walked seven days to Kabul, then fled to Pakistan. They returned to Kabul in 2002 after the U.S. invasion toppled the Taliban government.
Her father's strength has kept the family safe over the years, Muhibi said. He used his savings to provide an education for his four sons -- and his four daughters too. When Muhibi was 11, he rewarded her good grades by paying for private English lessons.
"My dad is one of the best dads ever," she said. "If he was a mean dad, it wouldn't be so hard to say no to him."
While pondering whether to return to Afghanistan to reject the arranged marriage in person one last time, Muhibi has been applying for graduate school and temporary jobs. Last month, she said, she was accepted for graduate study at a small Islamic university in London.
She said she would like to study international development and return to Afghanistan to direct projects. She may even marry, she said, if she meets the right man. But she will not marry her cousin.
"I'm waiting for him to find someone else," she said, relaxed and smiling among her friends in the student union.
Seven-thousand miles away, Ghaffer sipped hot tea as he squatted on pillows and a Persian rug spread across his floor. He was polite but firm.
"I thought about her future, and I sent her for education outside the country," he said. "So I hope she would also accept that we have promised to marry her with her cousin."
Muhibi might be in the United States for now, he said, but her home is Afghanistan. "And Afghan custom," her father said, "is different from any other custom."
Special correspondent M. Karim Faiez in Kabul contributed to this report.
A question that has been bothering me is "Where are the feminists?"
They're probably all in Dallas this weekend - we've got over 12k running in the Race for the Cure at EDS, a full stadium of them for the George Strait concert at the new Cowboys' stadium, and Cindy Sheehan picketing the bush's new home in Preston Hollow shouting about him being a war criminal or some such. Maybe we shoulda sent her to visit Buchenwald with Obee - and left her there. With all those feminist magnet activities going on around here, I don't think that would leave too many more out there to give anybody else a migraine. :rolleyes:
Richard's $.02 :munchin
"I thought about her future, and I sent her for education outside the country," he said. "So I hope she would also accept that we have promised to marry her with her cousin."
Muhibi might be in the United States for now, he said, but her home is Afghanistan. "And Afghan custom," her father said, "is different from any other custom."
That last sentence almost sounds like a warning.
Why the hell would her father spend all that money, send her overseas for education, and a taste of true freedom, only to expect her to come back to that godforsaken life of an Afghan woman? Burkhas, beatings and no rights as a female sounds like the norm.
Yeah, not so much.
Why the hell would her father spend all that money, send her overseas for education, and a taste of true freedom, only to expect her to come back to that godforsaken life of an Afghan woman
Thousands of years of tradition and a refusal to adapt.
And Social Darwinism continues to prove itself a valid theoretical concept among humans. ;)
Richard's $.02 :munchin
rubberneck
06-07-2009, 10:02
A question that has been bothering me is "Where are the feminists?":confused:
They are too busy screaming about the murder of one abortion doctor while demanding the right to terminate the lives of tens of thousands of unborn children every year. :rolleyes:
That last sentence almost sounds like a warning.
Why the hell would her father spend all that money, send her overseas for education, and a taste of true freedom, only to expect her to come back to that godforsaken life of an Afghan woman? Burkhas, beatings and no rights as a female sounds like the norm.
Yeah, not so much.
It seems like a terrible example of like father, like daughter. Both are assuming that events will unfold in a way to each's liking without contemplating the incompatibility of each other's expectations.
There's nothing new about a parent and child having such a collision or, for that matter, the dehumanizing objectification of women for the sake of patriarchy. Yet, it is still sad that this young woman seems headed towards disaster if she returns home and remains committed to living her own life in her own terms.
Explain this one. :rolleyes:
Richard's $.02 :munchin
Gaddafi Asks To Meet 700 Italian Women
Reuters, 5 Jun 2009
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has requested a meeting with 700 Italian women during his historic visit to Rome next week, when he will set up his tent in the grounds of a 17th century villa on a hill above the city.
Gaddafi, who has a women-only corps of bodyguards, held a similar meeting on a visit to Paris in 2007 with 1,000 selected women guests, who were told he wanted to "save European women."
He is making his first visit to Libya's former colonial ruler, Italy, since he took power in a coup in 1969.
Italy, at the forefront of the West's warming diplomatic and business ties with Tripoli since it gave up seeking weapons of mass destruction in 2003, made a formal apology last year and offered $5 billion (3.12 billion pounds) in compensation for the excesses committed during its colonial rule 1911 to 1943.
Among the requests for his visit -- pitching his tent is routine on foreign visits by the nomadic-born Libyan leader -- is a meeting with 700 women from Italian political, business and cultural life, to take place in a concert hall on June 12.
They will include Equal Opportunities Minister Mara Carfagna whose appointment last year raised eyebrows because, as a former model, she had been the subject of public flirting by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, angering his now estranged wife.
"Gaddafi has expressly asked to meet representatives of Italian women," said Carfagna, calling it an opportunity to help cooperation on the economy and illegal immigration, where Libya is helping Italy patrol the Mediterranean for boats of migrants.
Carfagna told Ansa news agency she would talk to the self-styled defender of Islam about the situation of women in Africa.
As well as meeting Berlusconi and other politicians, Gaddafi will see Italian students, face protests by rights groups about the plight of Libyan dissidents and may meet some of the Libyan Jewish community who fled in 1967 after anti-Israeli riots.
Gaddafi should be back again next month, as head of the African Union, at Italy's G8 summit which U.S. President Barack Obama will also attend.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090605/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_italy_gaddafi_women