Friday, December 4, 2009
“At the Muslim School she learned a little English, which is what young men want now.” Again, it seems like a woman can never be what she wants. Her entire life’s decisions seem to revolve around satisfying what men expect her to be. Women are being sent to school in order to learn how to be fancied by men, how horrible! I wonder if given a real opportunity, in a vacuum of sorts, where no social context imposes on her wishes and desires, what women want. What is it that to them they wish to become? What do Muslim women wish to learn for the sake of learning?
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Yeah I know what you mean. My final paper was on Umrao Jan Ada, so I spent quite a bit of time looking at how women were treated in Islam in the 18th and 19th centuries. It really annoyed me how women's lives are so centered around men. When I was reading all of Thanawi's expectations of women, I couldn't help but picture women in Islam as puppets where the men are controlling their every move. That's a very good question about what women in Islam would do if they were given complete freedom. It would be interesting to see if the culture changed any based on this, which it probably would.
ReplyDeleteI'm not trying to play devil's advocate here, but I think that having "what men want" is a sort of survival mechanism, considering that a woman's livelihood usually depended on a man in that time. I think having a lot of what men wanted was essential to snaring a secure position in society. Of course, it bothers me that women would have to do this, but I think self-preservation is the first step to self-liberation. They use men's wants as ways to get things they want themselves.
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