Racism in the Muslim Community?

This made me very sad. I'm so disgusted by my own community at times. :( Alhamdulilah I love this sister though well done to her for speaking out.

Women Victimized by Yemeni ‘Exchange Marriages’

SANA'A -- Women living in areas of rural Yemen are increasingly losing their say regarding whom they marry as they become caught-up in the widespread phenomenon of ‘exchange marriages,’ in which money and family ties outweigh romance.

The expression rises from the phenomenon of spouses from two families being traded in what is essentially more of a business arrangement than a traditional marriage, Dr. Abdul-Baqi Shamsan, professor of sociology at Sana'a University, explained.

Shamsan told The Media Line that the main victim of this type of marriage is the woman. “In such exchange marriages, the women are dealt with as commodities by the family’s or group's elders, who strip them of their right to choose their life partners,” he said.

Poverty and tribal traditions push many people into marrying-off their children this way in order to avoid paying unaffordable high dowries or to strengthen ties between the families involved. But the prospect of these marriages ending in divorce is very high because usually if one couple breaks up, the other would most likely follow suit. Even if they don’t, the family-members from the second couple often intervene to end the second union as well.

So when Maha Saleh Al-Kawlani, 25, came home in tears and told her brother Mohammed that her husband Fuad had divorced and but kept their 18-month-old son with him, her family, which considered the divorce to be an act of ultimate disrespect to them, reacted with outrage.

Just a few days after his sister Maha’s divorce, Mohammed, seeking to get even with his brother-in-law for dishonoring his family, divorced his wife and Fuad's sister Jamila, keeping their two-year-old daughter with him. "From the time we got married, the family problems never stopped…Our marriages were dependent upon each other," Mohammed told The Media Line.

Their exchange marriage, which had been arranged by Mohammed's father Saleh Al-Kawlani and his father-in-law three years earlier, according to Shamsan never stood much of a chance because, he said, “exchange marriages are not based on acceptance, love and respect. Whenever one couple doesn't get along and breaks up, the other part of the business deal is that the other couple will likely break up as well.”

A similar story exposing the hazards of exchange marriages was told by translator Abdusalam Rajeh, 35, who married his cousin twelve years ago, and in turn, two of his cousins married two of his sisters. Rajeh said his father and uncle arranged their marriages, but nevertheless asked the would-be brides and grooms for their opinions.
“Unfortunately, most of the family problems that my wife and I experienced stemmed from external factors. For instance, if my sister and her husband quarreled, our marriage would be affected,” Rajeh recounted.

The father of six, Rajeh said his wife was taken forcibly from him by her father to her father's house more than once after Rajeh's sister went to Rajeh's family's home because of quarrels with her husband.

"Sometimes we had problems and the other couple was adversely affected," he said, adding, "Indeed, problems from the exchange marriage sent my marriage to the verge of collapse more than once.”

Things became so bad that he divorced his wife four years ago. "But my love for my kids and my wife; and my determination not to break up this family," led him to take her back, he explained to The Media Line.

According to Islamic law, a husband can be re-married to his ex-wife if he divorced her once or twice, but after the third divorce she must first be married to another man in order for her original husband to marry her again. This time, Rajeh said he took no chances, making an agreement with his uncle and brother-in-law that if one couple had problems, this must not have any effect at all on the other couple.

"However, I still feel that my marriage is not based on a firm foundation and is therefore prone to collapse at any time," Rajeh rued. “Though the interference of families in our marriages has significantly decreased since the agreement, it still sometimes comes into play."

Rajeh’s wife, 30-year old Shams Ahmed, told The Media Line that, "Exchange marriages simply mean unending problems [usually] resulting from other people's actions which we have nothing to do with.”

While there are no statistics on how many people are involved in exchange marriages, Abdulmalik Salah, a sociologist at the Yemen Center for Social Studies and Research Labor, told The Media Line that, "According to our knowledge of Yemeni society, we can say it's a widespread phenomenon in the rural areas, especially in poverty-stricken ones." Such areas constitute around 70 percent of the country.” According to Salah, some 60 per cent of couples marrying this way end up divorcing.

Salah said that the factors behind this widespread phenomenon include the harsh economic conditions, the high illiteracy rates among people in the rural areas, and their lack of religious understanding. Exchange marriage is actually prohibited in Islam, so Salah says that some people agree to pay low dowries to each other in order to get around this religious prohibition. For example, what might have been an expected dowry of $5,000 might instead end up no more than $100, according to Salah.

Shamsan agreed with Salah, adding that, "Some tribal people adopt this form of marriage in order to strengthen the bonds between their families; or uses it in an attempt to extend their influence." However, he said this often backfires as the relationship between the two groups or tribes involved in the exchange marriage turns sour when because of the divorce of one or both of the couples.

Indeed, Mohammed's father, Saleh Al-Kawlani, told The Media Line that, "The good relationship that I used to share with my cousin Ali turned into animosity after we married our children in an exchange marriage. Now, we don't even say ‘Hi’ when we cross the road.”

Mohammed himself hopes to put the whole experience behind him by marrying again, but stressed he would “never, ever marry or let any members of the family get married in an exchange marriage.”

His father agreed, saying, “I should never have arranged such marriages for my children. I had heard a lot about the ill-effects of exchange marriage, but I did not believe them before. I would never accept my children marrying in this way -- ever again.”

Source

The Cost of Being a “Real” Pashtun Woman

By writing on Pashtun women’s plight with the hands of social stigmas, I am not arguing thatnon-Pashtun women are free of such problems. Rather, writing on such issues means that we have to find the courage to face the reality and speak up about it; to come out of a denial mode. Unless we speak out against our problems, we will not be able to think critically and find solutions for them. This piece is also not aimed at generalizing about Pashtun women’s social situation, since there are exceptions in everything and everywhere.

In 1774, Breshna, a woman from the Nasar tribe who is today popularly known as Khadai, got married to someone from the Slaimankhail tribe. After her marriage, a man, from her tribe, named Beeda Bara Khan Nasar didn’t let her go back to her in-laws. This infuriated the Slaimankhail tribe and they gathered an army of four thousand people and fought with the Nasar tribe in Zhob in southeastern Afghanistan. The feud started on the second year of Timur Shah Durrani’s reign and lasted for almost two centuries (1774-1951). The feud that was started by men because of men, today after two centuries, is blamed at Khadai. Khadai is considered the source of bringing bad luck, adversity and shame to the families involved, and is identified as the cause of the feud. And that is why when the Pashtun mothers swear at young daughters for misbehavior, they often call them “Khadai”. Her story is an example of how Pashtun women have suffered from the social guilt of something called bringing shame to the family. Among Pashtuns, this phenomenon is called sharam.

Sharam is the English equivalent of shame or disgrace. This term has usually been used in cases where honor is involved in the Pashtun society. When the honor of a person, family or tribe is jeopardized due to any kind of conflict of interest between individuals, the person causing the disrespect might be declared an outcast. The family or the tribe might disown such a person or not treat him/her a part of the family. To avoid bringing sharam to their families, men are usually expected to not involve in crimes such as theft, fraud, murder, and other criminal or negative behavior. An example can be sexually harassing women, such as by staring at them or following them; this might result in complaints from the victim’s side, and the harasser could thus cause disgrace to his family. 

The culture of avoiding shameful acts has backfired in different matters on the very people who abide by it. A person’s fear of causing sharam for his/her own personality and his family or tribe has limited or almost blocked the ways for people to liberate themselves and express freely that they have suffered from injustice, in most cases, with the hands of their own relatives.

Often times, women are the primary targets of this culture of sharam, a culture comprised of two sides of the same coin. A woman who speaks up against the injustice she has to endure or may have experienced is looked down upon in the community for either complaining or for being too “liberal” or “shameless” (be sharam) by disclosing the realities that should have remained secret. These be sharam women include those who say “no” to a forced marriage or choose husbands for themselves, women who confront their husbands over infidelity or second marriages, widows choosing to remarry out of their deceased husbands’ families, women who ask for their part of the property shared with their male relatives, women who choose not to live with their in-laws while their husbands are away abroad to earn living for the whole family, and women who ask for divorce. Such women’s names, such as Khadai’s, who is considered to be the cause of a two-centuries-long feud, are used as negative metaphors or as examples for cautioning young girls. On the other hand, if a woman silently bears all the injustice, especially domestic violence, and ignores her basic rights, she is praised for being a woman of character, tolerance and source of pride for her male relatives. A Pashtun woman is called asli Pustana-real Pashtun woman when she goes through much in her life without complaining and opts for not changing her own situation when she has an opportunity to do so.

There have also been instances of the lives of women in my village where they have been praised for keeping calm and quiet when faced with injustice from their relatives. People praise and refer to them as asli Pashtanay i.e. real Pashtun women, when they not only quietly suffer in their lives but also show being content during their adversities. Wana (not her real name) died of a heart attack in 2003 when, after trying in vain to become pregnant for fourteen years, her husband decided to remarry. Even though she did not like the fact that she had to share her whole life and most importantly her husband with another woman, she was celebrated as a heroine throughout the village for going out to ask for the hand of her husband’s second wife. Wana was a victim of depression, anxiety and finally a heart attack that took her life, just so she could keep the honor of her family, the name of her father, and the respect of her husband and be called an asliPushtana.

A twenty-three year old man from Kabul in Afghanistan who lived and worked in another city said that he was angry at his father for his decision to bring a second wife home. When the man’s mother came to know that he was angry at his father for remarrying, she called him and asked him to not only call and talk with his father but also send him the required amount of money so he can hold his second marriage ceremony. The man says his mother argued that it was a hugesharam for her and the whole family to start a brawl within the family because of her husband’s second marriage. She had told her son that there were so many enemies of her husband and his family and people were jealous of his status and position in the society; in order to maintain that, she could endure the miseries and disloyalty of her husband-of-more-than-two-decades and not bring sharam upon the family that could cause their jealous enemies some satisfaction of witnessing distress and conflict among the members the envied family. She was ready to deny her own rights and let her husband exploit her stand regarding the people jealous of her and her husband’s life and position.

Apparent from the above examples, women are held responsible for anything that goes wrong within relations and families. They therefore are very cautious about their status and character in the household and in the tribe so as not to cause any harm to the name of their families by being the reason of sharam for them. This is the main reason of discrimination and acceptance of violence against women in the society, the reason for nurturing social stigmas and paving ways for incidents of violence, such as rape, that go unreported. Moreover, women have been denying and sacrificing their own basic human rights in order to save the honor of their families in the society. They have created an environment where quietly becoming a victim is deemed noble.  They are lured into believing that they are honorable and decent if they tolerate injustice, that they are responsible for the honor and good name of their families, that they are, in fact, the ones to be blamed when anything goes wrong in family matters.

 Source

No Sex Education Please, We're Muslim!

Recent investigations into the Rochdale child grooming case, in which all but one of the convicted men were found to be British Pakistanis, once again highlighted the need for Muslims to talk more openly about sex. But this is a subject which the community has always been notoriously guarded about.

The release of a book, Sex Education for Muslims by psychiatrist Dr Mobin Akhtar caused fury in Pakistanlast year, despite trying to educate people about sex in accordance with Islamic instruction. The author was even accused of encouraging pornography and few bookshops were even willing to stock it. Meanwhile, the title for the Urdu version had to be toned down to Special Problems for Young People.

As Dr Mobin Akhtar points out, sexual ignorance can lead to unnecessary psychological distress. My own sex and relationship education, in Bradford during the 1980s, was based on the principle that ignorance is better than empowerment; elders feared that any talk of sex might lead to sexual initiation. I still don't know the word for it in Urdu, my mother tongue. And if sex was promoted at all, then it was the type which took place strictly within marriage, and only between a man and a woman.

It's no wonder then that I grew up completely ignorant of my own biology as well as the personal and emotional implications of sex. Even basics like puberty and menstruation were never discussed. Instead, I was left to scrape together snippets from the school playground which usually led to more confusion.

To add insult to injury, I reached the throws of puberty ahead of everyone else. But mum was determined to preserve my sexual innocence for as long as possible, and therefore keen to shelter me from my own maturing form. So, after PE and swimming, while the other girls arrogantly flaunted their training bras in the changing room, I hoped my ill-equipped vest would go unnoticed. I learnt that my blossoming body was something to be hidden, more out of shame than modesty.

I also learnt that public displays of affection were wrong. After all, I'd never seen a Pakistani couple - married, of course - holding hands or even sitting snugly on the sofa. In fact, the first time I saw someone snogging properly was on British TV, and you can bet the characters weren't Pakistani.

Moreover, since my parents had separated while I was very young, and since the idea of taking other partners was incomprehensible to them, I didn't even know that married couples share a bed. Perhaps that's why, when I was introduced to the facts of life in a science lesson, I simply dismissed it as some repugnant English method of procreation which couldn't possibly apply to Pakistanis. I reasoned that Muslims didn't need these procedures because I'd heard babies were divinely ordained.

It was my teenage frustrations, and the lack of opportunity to compare notes with other women like me, which inspired my current research - intimate conversations with three generations of Muslim women, in and around Bradford, about their experiences of love and marriage. I was heartened to find that other forty-something women also had very similar experiences. Fozia for instance, just like me, credited Indian films for offering a semblance of emotional intelligence. She was heartened to see people that looked like her and spoke a language she understand actually falling in love on screen:

Marriage wasn't depicted in a functional way [on screen] because there was a lot of romantic love around. And Asian love was always represented as something that's really powerful and loyal and deep and all-consuming. There was that very traditional thing of loving one person for the rest of your life. I knew they were films but I did believe I might find a partner who I would then fall in love with and be together forever.

Kabhi Kabhie, Bollywood, Indian cinema, Bradford, nath utarna, sex education, Muslim women, love and marriage, Cartographies of Love, Rochdale child grooming case, Dr Mobin Akhtar, Sex Education for Muslims, Special Problems for Young People

As we daydreamed about falling in love, Bollywood style, the irony was that the classic films of the 1970s and 80s were actually colluding with our parents to preserve our innocence. No wonder they were so gamely endorsed. You see, overt sexual content was still unacceptable in Indian cinema during this era, so filmmakers tended to resort to a standard lexicon of images or sequences to symbolise displays of love, which in turn helped the films to maintain glamour as well as traditional values.

My research also suggested that I wasn't the only one to sit countless times through classics like Kabhi Kabhie (1976), oblivious to the symbolism in the film's iconic title song. It features a bride and groom on their matrimonial bed as she sings him a favourite love lyric, which brings back wistful memories. Little did I know then that the bride's unravelled, long, dark, silken tresses alluded to her state of undress. Her hair also cleverly obstructed my view, in line with the unspoken "no kissing" rule that existed in the classic Bollywood films of yesteryear.

What this immortal scene actually depicted was the couple's growing intimacy through the groom's removal of the bride's jewellery, one piece at a time. Little did I know that the groom's removal of his bride's nose ring was a crude reference to her loss of virginity. I know now that the term "nath utarna" (removal of the nose ring) traditionally signified a dancing girl's initiation into the sex trade, and is still sometimes used today.

Source

Habib Ali responds to the plea of a woman

 Very important video regarding treatment of women by Muslim men.

Nouman Ali Khan - Contradicting Community

Girls will be boys in Afghanistan

It may seem strange, if not downright unbelievable, that in a society obsessed with maintaining strict gender roles, one form of transvestism has become widespread and even acceptable. We are talking here about little girls sporting closely cropped hair, dressed in boys' clothing and carrying male names – the phenomenon known in Afghanistan as bacha posh ("dressed like a boy").

Discussing it with my Afghan friends, I discovered that many knew at least one bacha posh, if not several.

"Remember that famous theatre actress?" one friend recalled. "She lived on our street. During the Taliban rule, she dressed four of her daughters as boys."

"I knew a girl in Herat," another told me. "She used to do occasional labour work and sometimes beg on the streets."

There is also a celebrity bacha posh: Bibi Hakmina, a politician who was previously with the mujahideen. Proud of having spent all her life as a man, she never leaves home without a Kalashnikov. She never felt like a woman either, she told the BBC in a documentary film, explaining what it felt like to live one's life as a man in a society where gender roles are so strict, that being a man or a woman often feels like coming from different planets.

Bacha posh is one way of adapting to a rigid social environment where having a son is a must for any family desiring prestige and security. Families that can't produce a son sometimes resort to this deception, dressing up one of their girls as a boy and presenting her as a male offspring to society.

In this bizarre form of keeping up with the Joneses, everybody, from the bacha posh's extended family to her schoolmates and teachers, become part of the deception game. They all pretend that the girl is a boy, even after discovering the child's real gender.

The pretence stops at puberty, when the bacha posh is overnight forced to become a girl again. The world of boundless male freedoms is thus replaced with the invisible chains that mark an Afghan woman's life.

The hardest part of this sudden boy-to-girl transformation is the behavioural change it requires. Having learned to face the world with an Afghan boy's direct gaze, she is suddenly required to be coy, averting her eyes in a show of feminine modesty. On television, it's easy to spot a former bacha posh from her erect posture, her direct eye contact, and speaking up with the confidence of a man.

Women who were once bacha posh talk about the psychological impact of their imposed gender change with mixed feelings. They feel anger over lost freedoms, bitterness over never having had a carefree childhood but they also appreciate that they are possessors of a unique experience: they have seen the world through both male and female eyes.

To have known and lost freedom still remains a most bitter pill to swallow, but such is the uncompromising nature of Afghan society. There is little room for individual suffering because what matters is what people think of a family, and if a bacha posh can help her family gain respect by pretending to be a boy, then so be it.

A generous take on this would be to look at the bacha posh as gender bridge-builders with unique insight into the normally separate worlds of male and female. Some of them have gone on to shine in political careers where negotiation skills are crucial. The head of the Balkh Women's Affairs Department, Fariba Majid, the previously mentioned MP, Bibi Hakmina and Azita Rafat, one of the first female Afghan MPs, belong to this category.

But while Bibi Hakmina broke the rules by never becoming a woman again, Rafat not only returned to her original gender but also became a wife and mother to four girls. Living the life of an MP, she found herself subjected to malicious jibes for not having a son. In reaction, she then repeated her own life-story, turning one of her daughters into a bacha posh, complete with a boy's name, short hair, and looking like a perfect mini-man in a shirt and suit.

If prestige is one reason for this radical but common deception, poverty and safety also make families opt to join the bacha posh game. Many poor families without sons find themselves caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. On the one hand, allowing their girls to work as street vendors amounts to losing their moral integrity. On the other hand, the family needs money, having no choice but to let its daughters work. Unsurprisingly, the child street vendors one encounters in Afghan cities are often such girls pretending to be boys.

More recently, Afghan human and women rights groups have begun to criticise the bacha posh practice as not only a manifestation of misogyny but also a violation of the girls' rights to be themselves. But to deal with this problem is far from easy.

Like much else in Afghanistan, even though bacha posh exist in everyday reality, they do not exist officially. Ghost-like but real, the unfortunate fake boys are another symbol of a creative and resilient society that is often in denial of its own role in creating its own social ills.

source

'Honour' crimes against women in UK rising rapidly, figures show

Banaz Mahmod, an 'honour killing' victim strangled in 2006

The number of women and girls in the UK suffering violence and intimidation at the hands of their families or communities is increasing rapidly, according to figures revealing the nationwide scale of "honour" abuse for the first time.

Statistics obtained under the Freedom of Information Act about such violence – which can include threats, abduction, acid attacks, beatings, forced marriage, mutilation and murder – show that in the 12 police force areas for which comparable data was available, reports went up by 47% in just a year.

The figures, shared with the Guardian by the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation (Ikwro), also reveal that a small number of forces – including four in Scotland – are still not collecting data on how often such violence occurs.

The 39 police forces that gave Ikwro figures recorded 2,823 incidents in 2010. Ikwro estimates that another 500 crimes in which police were involved were committed in the 13 force areas that did not provide data.

But this is likely to be only the tip of the iceberg, campaigners say, as so many incidents go unreported because of victims' fears of recriminations.

Jasvinder Sanghera of victim support group Karma Nirvana said the real figure could be four times as high.

Among the 12 forces that gave figures for 2009 and 2010, the number of incidents rose from 938 to 1,381. In London, reported incidents rose from 235 to 495; in Greater Manchester, from 105 to 189.

Ikwro's campaigns officer, Fionnuala Ni Mhurchu, said the increase was probably due partly to better police awareness and to more victims coming forward after coverage of high-profile prosecutions, but that violence itself was also increasing as young people increasingly refused to bow to their families' demands.

"They're resisting abuses of their human rights such as forced marriage more and more," she said. "And as a result they're being subjected to this kind of violence. We hear from the community that this violence is on the increase.

"These figures are important because they demonstrate this is not a minor problem – it is a serious issue affecting thousands of people a year, many of whom will suffer high levels of abuse before they seek help. We want the government to develop a national strategy on honour-based violence that covers not just policing but also issues such as education and community cohesion."

This is the first time UK figures have been collated for so-called honour-based violence, defined as crimes planned and carried out by a family or community in order to defend their perceived "honour".

Previously a figure of 12 "honour killings" a year has been cited, although it is unclear where the number comes from.

In 2006 Banaz Mahmod, a 20-year-old Kurd, was strangled on the orders of her father and uncle because they disapproved of her boyfriend. She had repeatedly told police her family were trying to kill her. The case led the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) to publish a new strategy in 2008, which highlighted the need to gauge the scale of the problem to improve police work and recommended that all English and Welsh forces introduce a mechanism to record the number of reports. There is no national guidance in Scotland.

Ikwro said it was concerned that some forces were still not collecting the data in a consistent format, and called on Acpo and Acpo Scotland to help ensure this was done, and release statistics regularly.

Sanghera said complete data was crucial to prove the scale of the problem, adding that she feared momentum had been lost in recent years.

Commander Mak Chishty of Acpo insisted this was not the case, adding that the police national database, which is being phased in, would provide collated figures.

"We have reviewed every force with a questionnaire and the 2008 strategy has been completed," he said. "We're now in consultation on a new strategy. All frontline staff have received awareness training and every force has a champion on honour-based abuse. I'm confident that any victim who comes to us will receive the help they need."

Maya's story

When I was 16 my mum came into my room one day and said I had to get married to my cousin in Pakistan. I was horrified: I wanted to go to college and get a job, and I didn't even know him, how could I marry him? But when I said no, my mum slapped me across the face.

After that I wasn't allowed out. My family treated me with disgust, as if I had shamed them. My father, mother, even my young brother, beat me on a daily basis. My body was covered in bruises.

I wasn't given any food for days on end, and I tried to take an overdose on several occasions. I just used to sit on my bed from morning to night. Prison would have been a better place.

After around a month, they let me go out to the doctor. Terrified, I sat in the toilet and called a solicitors' firm. I've not seen my family since that day. A wonderful solicitor got me a place at a refuge and a forced marriage protection order.

But I'm still constantly paranoid: I'm always looking over my shoulder. I've lost everything. And I'm scared of what will happen if they find me.

Maya's name has been changed

source