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Head lines Women's Rights In Bangladesh - The Need For A Paradigm Shift The Bangladesh Observer Mrs. Jahanara
Imam A woman's right is violated the moment she is born. 'Why is it a girl? Why couldn't you produce a boy'? Some husbands would ask their wives as if the wives are to blame for the birth of baby girls. Many people fail to realise that the chromosomes that decide the gender of the child comes from the father, not the mother. What is more sinister is the case of a doctor who threatened to divorce his wife because she could not produce a baby boy. He knew how chromosomes worked, yet he saw fit to overlook this by blaming his wife. If we have educated people like these who behave like this then who needs enemies? The allergy to baby girls has become so endemic in our culture that it violates the very basic human rights that Islam had granted to women 1500 years ago. In pre-Islamic Arabia (Jahiliya), many baby girls were buried alive because Arabian society considered them to be burden on families. Muhammad (SWS) put an end to this evil practice and said in a hadith that if a man brings up a girl and a boy equally, then he will enter paradise. Based on this criteria, how many men in Bangladesh today will enter Paradise? But the problem doesn't end there. Due to peer pressure many women themselves have a strong aversion to baby girls even through they are of the same gender! We need to ask ourselves how this 'Jahili' mentality came about and how we can get rid of it. The answer is simple. Muslims in Bangladesh need to practice their religion properly so that girls can secure their rights, which have been granted by the Creator Himself. Education Once female rights have been violated after birth, the next level of violation takes place in education. Many women are forced to give up education because of the mistaken view that education has no value for a housewife. Education is the most valuable asset that any human being can have and everyone, whether male or female has a right to be educated. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, 'educate one man, you educate one person, but educate a woman and you educate a whole civilization'. Children suffer if mothers are not educated. There needs to be a paradigm shift in our education system where young children currently rely on private tutors to help them with homework and examp preparation. As education starts from the home, then it is imperative that mothers are educated to a level where they can be directly involved in their children's education without the need for private tutors at an early age. Fail to educate a woman, and you fail to educate an entire nation, and the nation suffers. Forced marriages
Even if there is consent from the woman about her
marriage partner, the problems don't end there. Many women who move into
their husbands' family face problems in adjusting to the new lifestyles.
This itself is not an issue, but the real problems lie in the
relationships between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. In an
ideal home, there should be no problems between the two individuals.
Unfortunately, the reality is different. Many families, whether in
Bangladesh, Pakistan or India have problems that are caused by
misunderstandings between mother-in-laws and daughter-in-laws. Why should
there be problems between them? One theory suggests that the mother's role
of caring for the family has been undermined by the new wife which her son
has brought into the family, and would see her as competition.
Furthermore, there may be a fear by the mother, who for so many years
received the attention of her son(s), but then finds his attention being
diverted to his new wife which would cause jealousy. Despite the fact that
Muslims are commanded to treat all family members well and to avoid
jealousies (one of the worst sins any Muslim could commit), it is a sad
reflection on our society that such noble principles are not generally
adhered to.
The need for a paradigm shift The Government has a major responsibility to help society make this fundamental shift. If women are the committed helpers of their men folk and make up half of the society, then how can society progress if their rights have been violated from the moment they are born? Dialogue Or Clash Of Civilisations?Dr S M Rahman, The Bangladesh ObserverUNTINGTON has propounded not only a vicious clash of civilizations idea but acted as a proselytizer of hate and ensured that Islam remains at logger head with Christianity and Judaism. His obsession is so overwhelming that he deemed it expedient to travel all the way to India to address the hard core Hindutva and tell the members to reinforce their commitment to Hindu fundamentalism, which in a way meant renunciation of Secularism as a political creed. His basic contention was that Islam could be effectively countered and harmed if Hinduism joined hands with Christianity and Judaism .A systematic propaganda for image tarnishing of Islam, is what Huntington so assiduously carries out, ironically as a great exponent of political science as a scientific discipline. If prejudice masquerades as science, Huntington has done enormous damage to his own intellectual image than to Islam whose followers constitute one-fifth of humanity, and its resurgence is no figment of imagination, but a reality that world has to live with. One would be right in saying that the Muslim World suffers from enormous contradictions and a wide gap between what is professed and practiced. It is also true that they lack participatory political culture, without which Islamic polity is a misnomer. Not only do they lack unity among themselves but are out of step with the imperatives of knowledge of science, technology and informatics. But these are failings and follies of the adherents of Islam, which make them so vulnerable, weak and impoverished. Islam must not be maligned for the misdeeds of its so-called followers just as Christianity, and for that matter any religion cannot be judged on the aberrant behaviour, which very often the believers of a faith tend to manifest. Whether it is Oklahoma tragedy or nine-eleven act of terrorism, these are crimes against humanity, irrespective of who commits them - Christian or a Muslim. Such atrocities must be unequivocally condemned and a collective global response modality must be determined to arrest and eradicate the menace. Launching "War against terror" unilaterally or through a contrived coalition is self-defeating as the very notion of war evokes counter-aggression, and the vicious game multiplies human sufferings. To attribute terror to Islam, when its very nomenclature implies peace is a colossal distortion of reality, and reflection of a bigoted mind. It could also be deliberate strategy of propaganda to justify military action to render a Muslim country weak and vulnerable so that its potential to become a formidable power is nipped in the bud. Moreover, when the country in question happens to be oil-rich, "war on terror" becomes a cover for greed and rapacity, making mockery of the moral overtones. What impels me to write this piece is to convey that often "intellectuals" in creating constructs and paradigms are guided more by utilitarian motives than the imperatives of scientific objectivity. Clash of civilizations idea propounded by Huntington is to serve the interest of the powerful lobby of the arms producers, whose massive business can only thrive when conflicts and clashes promote sale of weapons and equipment - a tragic irony which President Eisenhower, very much regretted, when he was making a retirement speech. He specifically implied that global peace was hostage to the military-industrial complex. No serving US President could ever pick up courage to frame a policy-global or otherwise - which could go against this mafia, except at the peril of his own ouster from power. Huntington's tirade against Islam is also to help US President retain unipolarity, and destabilise the Muslim countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Iran so that their reconstruction and democratisation would require US military presence for a long time to ensure the transition. Huntington has highlighted the complexity by concocting a bizarre thesis in his controversial book - The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. He makes a case that only Western countries are compatible with democracy. The separation of church and the state, is the key factor in western democracy. "In Islam", he says; "God is Caesar", in [Confucianism], Caesar is God; in Orthodoxy, "God is Caesar's junior partner". According to him, the "kin cultures" (western countries) would be supporting each other in the civilisational fault-line conflicts in developing a scenario of a religiously driven World War III. Confucianism, implying China would collaborate with Islam as it also is primarily anti-democratic and authoritarian in nature. The post-communist Europe, is now the line separating the people of western Christianity on the one hand from Muslim and Orthodox peoples on the other. He answers his own question, "Where does Europe end?" by saying: "Where western Christianity ends and Islam and Orthodoxy begin". The most pernicious idea, he propounds is that the challenge for the west is not Islamic fundamentalism. "It is Islam". Strangely, when the West was obsessed by the threat of
Communism, Islam was no enemy. The most gifted historian of the modern
times, Toynbee said: "In a world in which distance has been annihilated by
the progress of western technology, or in which the western way of life is
having to compete with the Russian way of life for the allegiance of all
mankind, the Islamic tradition of the brotherhood of man would seem to be
a better ideal for meeting the social needs of the times." Toynbee is not
the only one, who has emphasised the liberal and democratic values of
Islam. R.B. Smith in his book "Mohammadanism in Africa" admits that Islam
has given to its Negro converts a status, dignity and self-reliance which
are all too rarely found in their pagan and Christen fellow countrymen.
R.C. Reddy also endorses it: "The age long problem of racial equality has
not been solved by any system of religion or ethics except Mohammadanism.
In every other polity or religion, reason, ethics and spiritual ideas have
been broken on the rock of race and colour." "In Europe Christianity was understood to be a purely monastic order which gradually developed in to a vast church organisation. The protest of Luther was directed against this church organisation. If you bring with the conception of religion as complete other-worldliness, then what has happened to Christianity in Europe in perfectly natural. Islam does not bifurcate the unity of men into the irreconcilable duality of spirit and matter. In Islam God and the universe spirit and matter, church and state are organic to each other." The great proponents of secularism Locke, Rousseau and Joseph Mazzini were not against religion. In fact Rousseau, the great apostle of democracy asserted: "No state has ever been founded without a religious basis." Similarly Mazzini like Rousseau, Voltaire was no doubt anti-clerical but regarded God as the law giver of humanity. He says: "God is the only law-giver to the human race...Human laws are only valid and good in so far as they conform to His Law, explaining and applying it... All sovereignty is in God, in the moral law, in providential design which governs the world..." The underlying idea is that the moral law cannot be denied nor change by the majority vote. Secularism without respect of God's laws regresses into anarchy. This is what is happening in the world today. If Caesar transgresses morality and ethics, he behaves like a typical Bush and acts on the doctrine of pre-emption. This is the curse of modern secularism. Erich Kahler in his profound book "The Tower and the
Abyss" rightly says: "When the individual is supposed to submit
unconditionally to the will of the secular powers as instruments or
substitutes of the supreme power, then the will of God is stripped of its
actual influence on earth." Islam expects Caesar to behave in a manner
that God's laws are not violated. |
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