The place for a woman is either at home or in the grave
Pakistan. A 13-year-old girl.
My brother used to tell me that the place for a woman is either at home or in the grave. I was always restricted to home. He said: “If you leave the house I’ll cut off your head and put it on your chest.” My brother had been to the local school and beaten the girls and the teachers. He said anyone who wanted to study was a friend of America. I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted it so much that once I dreamt I was sitting in a hospital, working as a doctor. I wanted to help the poor, those who cannot afford medical fees.
Oh no – that’s not what her brother and her father had in mind for her, or for her younger sister, either.
My father and brother told me to carry out a suicide attack. They were pressuring me to do this. They told me: “If you do it you will go to paradise long before us.” I replied: “Why don’t you tell me I will go to hell long before you?”…They started beating me when I refused. They beat me non-stop. They made my life hell. I never had a single moment of happiness. They did everything other than kill me.
And as for that sister…
And still, people have the nerve to say it’s their culture, not religion, that is to blame.
I have one little nagging doubt about that argument. Religion is supposed to give people moral guidance. It is supposed to enable them to tell right from wrong. Why, then, aren’t muslim leaders in the region the most vocal opponents of these practices? Why don’t they spend every waking hour campaigning against it, issuing fatwas against it? And given that they aren’t (as far as I know), from where comes their moral authority?
Religion is supposed to give people moral guidance. It is supposed to enable them to tell right from wrong. Why, then, aren’t muslim leaders in the region the most vocal opponents of these practices?
Because what they are doing is considered right by their religious interpretation. Religion doesn’t “enable them to tell right from wrong”, it defines right and wrong for them. And it’s definition varies from teacher to teacher, and is most definitely different in many ways than your concept of right and wrong.
Eww, “it’s” when I meant “its”. I’m literally mortified.
That post was also slightly off on nuance. While religion does enable them to tell right from wrong, it only does so based on the definition that the religion puts forward.
Paul: I suspect you are right. (My questions were largely rhetorical.) But my genuine puzzlement is with the argument that claims culture is to blame and not religion. I think my point is this: That since religion claims to provide moral guidance, we should take that claim seriously, and in so doing, we need to hold religious leaders to a higher standard than the local football club. If the latter chooses not to engage itself on the right side of this fight, that’s understandable, but the religious leaders have no excuses for not speaking up, given their claims to moral insight.
I suspect you are right. (My questions were largely rhetorical.) But my genuine puzzlement is with the argument that claims culture is to blame and not religion.
There are cultural issues that are different, and contribute to this sort of environment. I don’t think that is really disputable. For instance, Muslims in the US do not regularly participate in honor killings (it happens, but it’s not particularly common — nowhere near as common as in some majority Muslim countries). The culture is strongly against blatant gender inequality and draconian enforcement, and the religion tends to bend itself around cultural norms.
As a case study, look at Christians. They have many teachings that are comparable to brutish Islamic ones. At various times in history these have been widely acted upon. The difference in our religious fundamentalists and theirs is ours have a culture that strongly disapproves of their more brutish beliefs, and as a result the religion suppresses them. It tends to police itself as a means of survival, because the culture discourages the more extreme practices.
Now, any argument that the culture is fully responsible and the religion bears no responsibility is of course wrong. But it’s no more wrong than placing all the responsibility for atrocities with the religion — and I say that as a person who fully supports the new atheists, and thinks the world would be much better off sans magical thinking and religion. Thinking that without violent religious teachings everyone would get along and treat each other well is magical thinking (I’m not accusing you of this).
That since religion claims to provide moral guidance, we should take that claim seriously, and in so doing, we need to hold religious leaders to a higher standard than the local football club. If the latter chooses not to engage itself on the right side of this fight, that’s understandable, but the religious leaders have no excuses for not speaking up, given their claims to moral insight.
I thought this was your point, which is why I answered the way I did. I might not have been clear enough. According to whose morals are you judging their actions? If these people acted according to the morals they got from their religious leaders, why would you expect the religious leaders to condemn them on a moral basis?
I can’t help but feel the word “moral” is too loaded for a conversation of this nature. Unfortunately, I don’t have a better term to suggest.
This is a terribly frightening story. Meena is such a brave girl to go public about the huge role her family played in atrocities perpetrated on innocent people by them and the rest of the roguish criminal Talebans. Gosh, I wonder will she be hunted down because of having talked to Orla Guerin, (Irish) BBC Pakistan correspondent. She is so young — but what brage courage on her part. With a brother and father like that to call family — who needs them indeed?
That’s a good way to put it, I suppose. But then, it seems a picture emerges of a religion that is fundamentally amoral? Neither a force for good nor for evil, it just is. But then it should also give up all pretense of being a source of moral guidance, I think.
According to whose morals are you judging their actions?
According to my own, which are the only ones I’ve got. But I believe and hope they are shared by a good many people.
If these people acted according to the morals they got from their religious leaders, why would you expect the religious leaders to condemn them on a moral basis?
“Expect” is such a slippery word. If taken to indicate what I think is likely to happen, no I don’t expect any such thing. But in the sense of what is necessary to earn my respect, I very much expect it. I hope that is clear enough.
I actually feel a bit guilty having this cool intellectual discussion in response to a situation which really calls for expressions of disgust and loathing. But I am not very good at expressing such emotions. Believe me, I have them even so.
Er, it seems I forgot to italicize the first paragraph, where I quoted you. It’s so annoying not to be able to preview comments.
Sorry, sorry, sorry! I didn’t design it and I have no tech skills.
Not to worry, Ophelia. The annoyance is really very minor, especially compared to the main item of the the day. How easy it is to forget that.
The thing is, it’s difficult to disentangle religion and culture. They don’t exist side-by-side, never touching, but rather co-evolve over time, deeply shaping each other. One result is that the culture can absorb horrible ideas from the religion, or from an interpretation of the religion – e.g. the idea that Jews are Christ-killers and therefore deserve persecution. Another is that horrible cultural practices can be preserved more effectively when given some sort of religious imprimatur or explanation. Religion tends to fossilise and reproduce barbaric moral beliefs and associated practices, even if they existed in the region concerned before the relevant religion did.
In this case, I’m not satisfied that Islam is off the hook. These concepts of honour may have existed in some of the regions concerned even before Islam, but Islam, with its emphasis on extreme female sexual modesty, and all the rest of its barbaric sexual morality, certainly tends to reinforce and preserve such concepts, whether or not it can’t be blamed for originating them.
What struck me was the way that one sentence in the article stuck out like a sore thumb. I wonder whether the BBC’s computers are programmed to shove that sentence in if you use a certain code? The big law firm where I worked had a lot of boilerplate sentences that you could insert quickly, so it’s not beyond possibility that the BBC could. Even if not, it certainly looks like a bit of organisational boilerplate stuck in just to avoid being “Islamophobic”.
Ugh, sorry, I just realised that I had a different article in mind when commenting on the jarring sentence about religion not being to blame. Sorry about that. But I’m sure you’ve all seen such sentences, and the rest of my comment applies to many of these horrendous news stories.
Yup, I bet I know the article you mean, it’s the one I linked in News about the girl buried alive in Turkey; I flagged up the boilerplate ‘it’s culture not religion’ sentence in the teaser, because it annoyed me so much.
It’s so depressing to think about what life must be like in places like NWFP if the level of hatred of women is as high as that…What it must be like to be a girl whose brother is always telling her she belongs either at home or dead, not to mention her brother and father relentlessly pushing her to blow herself up. The constant drip drip drip of loathing…how do they stand it…
Well said, Russell.
The only point I was trying to make in distinguishing culture and religion and avoiding placing all the blame on the religion is that even if all the Muslims converted to a new religion (or left religion completely), the battle would be nowhere near over in ending these atrocities. There is a reason that the Christians shaped their religion (mainly observations and practices) around what the Pagans were already used to. Cultures do not change practices wholesale simply based on current religious belief. For modern day examples, see Haitian Catholics practicing Vodou, or South American Catholics continuing to believe/worship other older god beliefs. While current religious beliefs shapes current practices and sentiments, it does not do so in a vacuum.
I feel that nuance is often lost when discussing religion and pointing out how it affects behavior negatively. Religion does of course have complicated causal relationships to detrimental aspects of culture, with the religion being used to reinforce or push atrocities further based on already existing cultural biases.
To be perfectly clear, I consider Islam a blight. And while I consider it a more pressing issue than Christianity, Christianity is no less of a blight simply because Western culture has defanged many aspects of it at the current time (and even then, not really, seeing as Western Christians are the ones behind the Uganda law).
Harald,
Our moral views are likely very close. I simply found it odd that you took the tack of claiming religion does not make a person more moral and the clerics should recognize this, when the example is of a person acting morally according to what some clerics teach (now, non-militant clerics should most definitely be condemning this family’s behavior if they do in fact want to make the “Religion of Peace” claim). I agree the actions are immoral, but I also recognize that the definition of moral I am using differs from theirs. In their view Islam does make a person more moral. They simply define the word differently.
“I feel that nuance is often lost when discussing religion and pointing out how it affects behavior negatively.”
When it comes to burying teenagers alive I think the word “nuance” should not come easily to mind.
I have a young moslem friend. She describes herself as “croyante mais pas practicante”, like countless people who hold allegiance to the various churches of the west.
For her suicide bombers go straight to hell, because they set out to kill innocents.
Gordon,
If you think I’m saying this isn’t abominable you’re simply not paying attention and quote mining my post. Please don’t bother replying if you’re not actually replying to me.
If the discussion here got derailed it is perhaps my fault for going off on a slight tangent. However, in my defense I will note that it is not terribly interesting to discuss whether burying teenagers alive is okay or not, for the very simple reason that most (all?) readers of this blog will agree that it is indeed abominable. So then the discussion naturally turns into one about what makes some people think that doing it is right and proper. I think Gordon was reading too hastily and not realizing what we were actually discussing.
Paul, I agree that Russell did put it well. I think you misunderstood my point slightly. Of course I recognize that some clerics’ views of what is moral is different from mine. My point is that because of the claim that religions (or religious clerics) provide moral guidance we should judge them more harshly for either failing to do so or for providing immoral guidance instead. If my tack in stating the point is odd, well, I am not finished thinking the whole thing through. I am thinking aloud, as it were. Thank you for providing feedback.
On a similar gruesome note @ B&W News.
“Medine’s father is reported as saying at the time: “She has male friends. We are uneasy about that.”
So there was a Council meeting.
Afterwards teenager was buried alive, just right beside her house. There is no fear of family feeling uneasy about that at all. Better to be buried alive outside your home — than having to live with thoughts of daughter/siblings having male friends.
I was glad to read that the nation of Turkey was appalled by this gruesome murder.
The perpetrators of this crime and that of brave Meena’s sister should get life imprisonment, The murderous brutal acts by these inhume human beings were fully contemplated — which makes them even more despicable.
“The perpetrators of this crime and that of brave Meena’s sister should get life imprisonment,”
Yeah, I tend to agree. In fact, these are the sorts of cases that seriously shake my normal opposition to capital punishment. I oppose capital punishment because I can’t imagine a just system that incorporates it, but here is a case where the crime is horrifically cruel and there is no room whatsoever for doubt about who did it …
No, I’d better not go there. Just lock them up and throw away the key.
I too, quite emphatically, oppose capital punishment. I would never condone an ‘eye for an eye’ under any circumstances whatsoever. I believe no human being in authority on this planet has the god-given right to take the life of another human being, without their consent, irrespective of their crimes. The mere thought of states like Texas in America — which deals in capital punishment, is enough to send shivers down the spine.