Some time ago I was reading a few articles in the online version of a national Indian newspaper. They were related to the religion of Islam and the role of women in many countries where Islam is the primary and sometimes only religion. What I read made me wonder again how any religion can make such difference of genders, in between man and woman.
I don’t want to go in detail with what I read but would like to write down a few examples mentioned in those articles. The authors wrote what the religious law of Islam allows women to do and, more importantly, what it doesn’t allow them to do:
Muslim women are not allowed to work out side of their home.
It is not permitted for a Muslim woman to marry a man of another religion.
Muslim women are only allowed to travel long journeys in male company. And this company has to be a male relative with whom they cannot have sex, such as their father or brother.
A Muslim woman or girl is not allowed to talk on phone with her fiancé.
There were two further laws that were not directly related with women but which also made me wonder about this religion:
Chatting on the internet is against the law of Islam.
Islam does not allow its believers to donate blood. This can only be accepted if it is done in order to save the life of a near and dear one.
Once in Iran, a popular religious leader gave a statement: by wearing clothes that encourage others to look at them, women mislead young men and in this way encourage extra-marital sex. Due to this misbehavior, our country has suffered from a lot of earthquakes.
It seems extra-marital sex is so powerful that it makes the whole earth shake! Everybody knows the Iran is an earthquake-affected area. Maybe in Japan that was also the case and there were too many woman wearing revealing clothes whereas people in Germany don’t seem to have a lot of extra-marital sex, if you follow his reasoning.
Seriously, I don’t understand such laws and I don’t understand how they can believe in such inequality! If a man is allowed to have four wives, why can a woman not have several husbands or at least talk on phone with the one that she is going to marry? What is the reason behind all this? I have written before about such inequality and suppression, too, and mentioned that women are in no way second-grade people. They are equally important in life as men and they are the ones in which life grows and who give birth. We all have a mother, how can we believe it is good to suppress women when our mothers are also women?
I also don’t know how women can live in such conditions of suppression. But there are many countries in which it is normal that women live in full suppression and somehow a lot of them are able to accept their fate as it is. I have a lot of respect for every woman in those countries who fights, stands up for her real rights as an equal being and helps other women to find their strength. There are female doctors, journalists, human right activists and also bloggers who write about the situation in their countries. Many of them daily risk their lives but their aim is to show the world what is going on. It has to change and it will.
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It is very strange and for me, having grown up in Christian culture, very difficult to understand that people really and from their heart believe in this. It seems nearly ridiculous but then it is unfortunately very true and harsh reality which one can see by the stories of women getting stoned when they are accused of adultery – even if nobody is there to prove this.