Posted on 04/26/2012 10:03:47 AM PDT by bayouranger
In "Distant View of a Minaret," the late and much-neglected Egyptian writer Alifa Rifaat begins her short story with a woman so unmoved by sex with her husband that as he focuses solely on his pleasure, she notices a spider web she must sweep off the ceiling and has time to ruminate on her husband's repeated refusal to prolong intercourse until she too climaxes, "as though purposely to deprive her." Just as her husband denies her an orgasm, the call to prayer interrupts his, and the man leaves. After washing up, she loses herself in prayer -- so much more satisfying that she can't wait until the next prayer -- and looks out onto the street from her balcony. She interrupts her reverie to make coffee dutifully for her husband to drink after his nap. Taking it to their bedroom to pour it in front of him as he prefers, she notices he is dead. She instructs their son to go and get a doctor. "She returned to the living room and poured out the coffee for herself. She was surprised at how calm she was," Rifaat writes.
In a crisp three-and-a-half pages, Rifaat lays out a trifecta of sex, death, and religion, a bulldozer that crushes denial and defensiveness to get at the pulsating heart of misogyny in the Middle East. There is no sugarcoating it. They don't hate us because of our freedoms, as the tired, post-9/11 American cliché had it. We have no freedoms because they hate us, as this Arab woman so powerfully says.
Yes: They hate us. It must be said.
(Excerpt) Read more at foreignpolicy.com ...
Sex crimes against women in the US military have been covered up and allowed to continue for decades...
Wife beating is excused in many states as “she deserved it”
We need to clean up our own act before we worry about other countries...
sympathize with the women yes
but how can we point fingers when the men in our own country are no better...
While the Middle East call crimes against woman “religious freedoms”
the West call it “the fault of the women's movement”
and blame the reporting of abuse on PC and equal rights...
How many times in these threads have we read that the women tell lies about the “immocent” men ???
Not only in America are there sex crimes and other abuses against women that are not stopped..
While roving gangs think nothing of “wilding” women in parks in New York during the day (Groping and sexually molesting )
in New Zealand during tournament weekends gang rape is a popular way to celebrate a win...
Every year incidents of rape especially gang rape is greatly increased for that one week...
With a sick criminal mentality against women by males born and bred in Western Civilization
is it any wonder that in Britian and Australia and Scandinavia most rape is now comitted by Islamic males
based on their own cultures and acerbated by the indifference of the West
How the Islamics must laugh at us...
The divided culture of the West play right into the hands of the abusers of women in the East..
Yes, we are better...until something like this is considered in Congress...
Outrage as Egypt plans ‘farewell intercourse law’ so husbands can have sex with DEAD wives up to six hours after their death
By Lee Moran
PUBLISHED: 04:28 EST, 26 April 2012 | UPDATED: 05:55 EST, 26 April 2012
Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives - for up to six hours after their death.
The controversial new law is part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament.
It will also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 and the ridding of women’s rights of getting education and employment.
Controversial: The ‘farewell intercourse’ law is part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament
Egypt’s National Council for Women is campaigning against the changes, saying that ‘marginalising and undermining the status of women would negatively affect the country’s human development’.
Dr Mervat al-Talawi, head of the NCW, wrote to the Egyptian People’s Assembly Speaker Dr Saad al-Katatni addressing her concerns.
Egyptian journalist Amro Abdul Samea reported in the al-Ahram newspaper that Talawi complained about the legislations which are being introduced under ‘alleged religious interpretations’.
More...100,000 women undergo brutal genital mutilation illegally in Britain (and some of the victims are as young as TEN)
‘Down with military rule’: Tens of thousands pack Tahrir Square to protest against army generals and pro-Mubarak election candidates
The subject of a husband having sex with his dead wife arose in May 2011 when Moroccan cleric Zamzami Abdul Bari said marriage remains valid even after death.
He also said that women have the right to have sex with her dead husband, alarabiya.net reported.
It seems the topic, which has sparked outrage, has now been picked up on by Egypt’s politicians.
When I started reading this story I did not have an inkling of what was in it.
I was thinking of America’s women and the feminist movement and why they hate men.
As I read the story and found that it was about abuses of Islamic women I began to wonder how these feminists in America could ignore the horrors that women of the Middle east face.
Even our own American women serving in our military were ordered to wear scarves, and any woman visiting must cover up.Even Pelosi and Hillary Clinton are have been pictured in that country wearing scarves.
Atrocities, beatings, having their clitoris removed, killed in honor killings, married off at 9 years old, none of these things seem to bother our feminists or our California female Senators and Congresswomen.
All they seem to care about is aborting their children,Making the same salaries as men, and same sex marriage.
Women are hard to understand, even though these things are going on in the Middle east there are many Islamic women who seem to want to be mutilated, want to commit suicide in bombings and want to raise their children to be terrorist martyrs.I suppose they are much like the women in this country who keep returning to husbands who abuse them.
Women, can’t live with them can’t live without them, but it would seem that the women in this country would stop once in a while and think about their abused sisters in the Middle east.
Meanwhile we keep talking about civil rights and human abuses and keep sending more foreign aid.
Middle Eastern women could end the abuses of islam if they worked together. They could probably end islam as well.
With the internet, social networking, they could do it. Why don’t they?
Because they’re muslims.
Do you have any credible backup for these allegations? We need proof that America is ‘no better’.
If not you’ll just look like a liar and a fool. And ignorant.
Why don’t Muslim women get together to stop the abuses they endure? Maybe its the hostage syndrome, centuries of religious indoctrination and arrests or stoning of the few who try to effect change or act different. It’s not easy to put aside the veil, go about with out a male relative minder or try to drive a car yourself, let alone try to have an abusive husband or father charged at law.
Wife beating is excused in many states as “she deserved it”
Please reference the states that make up "many," and document your assertion with references to relevant legal codes.
How many times in these threads have we read that the women tell lies about the “immocent” men ???
Do you contend that no woman has ever lied about such things? That every single accused man is guilty as charged? That some women lie, just like some men lie? It is just as wrong to say women always tell the truth as to say they always lie. A reasonable person tries to determine which stories are true and which false.
Not only in America are there sex crimes and other abuses against women that are not stopped..
Such are illegal and take place in the same way that all other crimes also take place despite being illegal.
While roving gangs think nothing of “wilding” women in parks in New York during the day (Groping and sexually molesting)
When this came out a few years ago during a PR festival, I had fun imagining what would have happened 100 years ago had they tried it. There would have been a riot, with 1000 men fighting each other to get close enough to kill the perps.
in New Zealand during tournament weekends gang rape is a popular way to celebrate a win...
Reference please.
Every year incidents of rape especially gang rape is greatly increased for that one week...
Reference please. Sounds a lot like the (proven false) epidemic of wife-beating on Super Bowl Sunday.
With a sick criminal mentality against women by males born and bred in Western Civilization is it any wonder that in Britian and Australia and Scandinavia most rape is now comitted by Islamic males based on their own cultures and acerbated by the indifference of the West
No, it's not a bit surprising. But don't blame it on Western Civ. Blame it one the decline of Western Civ.
How the Islamics must laugh at us...
No doubt.
The divided culture of the West play right into the hands of the abusers of women in the East..
True.
Hot Flash: Modern "domestic violence" accusations REQUIRE that the man be jailed, based only on her statement to an officer, (With no penalty for perjury.) When he goes in front of a judge, he is found guilty of a felony by virtue of his Y chromosome. 10 men, A WEEK are imprisoned in one state, for verbal assault, (Now a felony, thanks to lobbying by the YWCA...).
I suggest you stop using 30 year old propaganda.
You are absolutely nuts if you think any of this even comes close to what is done in the middle east.I’m not familiar with any families here who have their daughters sexual organs cut off in the name of purity.
Tennessee Nana - your post is a near classic example of the fallacy of moral equivalence. What many of us in the West, including yourself apparently, consider to be abusive of women, is not only acceptable, but codified in Islamic societies under Sharia law. Forced clitorectomy, child marriage, corporal punishment of rape VICTIMS, limiting civil rights based on sex etc etc etc are all against the law in the US. Contrary to your argument that we are “no better”, treatment of women under Islam and in the West is simply not equivalent.
You cite, correctly, a history of the US military’s “covering up” sexual crimes against women. But your own description of that as a cover up demonstrates that it is morally unacceptable in our culture to treat women in that manner - why else would the military try to conceal their own wrong behavior?
Failure to call out what is wrong in the Middle East will not lead to cleaning up our own house! Quite the opposite - it sends the message that even worse acts than our own are permissible. The acceptability of the ‘virtual’ subjugation of women in gangsta culture and pornography desensitizes us to that type of degrading in real life. Similarly when you, by wallowing in the obscuring mud of false moral equivalency, refuse to condemn hatred of women as expressed in honor kiillings etc abroad, you can expect to see that hatred increasingly expressed here.
And please do not bring up the canard of cultural insensitivity. A favorite quote of mine is by a Gen Napier when the British banned the practice of suttee (wife burning) in colonial India:
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom; when men burn women alive we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”
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