Importance of Woman (Article) - 4/22/2009 9:11:45 AM
You have given your best, Miss Shamin, and you're speaking out very passionately. The poem you quoted is excellent. Do you know who wrote it?
Now the custom of burying female infants alive is an ancient pre-Islamic custom that existed only in the old world. So it should read "Why were female infants buried alive in ancient times? etc." If you say: "why is a female infant being buried alive...", people will think this is happening today. The burning of widows after the death of their husbands in India, similarly, is not a present-day phenomenon. So perhaps some progress has been made? Today's issues are the dowry-related acid attacks in South East Asia and the escalating marital problems everywhere. It's also the strengthening of political tendencies that are causing women to lose some of the rights and privileges they have achieved one or two generations ago.
I'm 34 now. I can tell you that fifteen years ago, a woman has been safer and more respected than she is today. This is the problem. We're going backwards, Shamin. The world is returning into the dark ages.
Have you read Fatima Mernissi? One of her books is called "The forgotten Power. An analysis of [the role of] women in the history of Islam". You'll find many facts and informations in it that you will find useful when writing an essay like this. All her books are recommendable. She did a lot of research on these things and you will like what she says.
If I may add something more...the oppression of one gender by another is just the same as the oppression of one class by another. It has economic reasons and it is imposed by economic means. It is a struggle for power and a strategy to keep it. A society's ideology is always a superstructure covering its economic basis. It provides a (so-called) justification of the way the distribution of the available resources is organised, by whose labour they are produced and to whose benefit.
If a woman is too weak to resist the imposition of certain things upon her, is it she as a person who is too weak? Do you feel to weak to say "No" if someone wants to force you to accept something you don't like? Isn't that "weakness" the result of a position of extreme disadvantage created by society rather than a gender-specific characteristic? I believe that the differences between men and women lie only in the imagination. If the roles were reversed, men would behave the way women do now.
All in all, you've done very well with this article.
Salam,
Mahdi
As I gaze upon the world... (Poetry) - 5/14/2010 12:49:09 PM
Yes, that's true. A very touching poem. We weren't born in very lucky times.
As tears prick my eyes........ (Poetry) - 4/20/2009 10:17:51 AM
Never believe that love is just. Love destroys the very heart that sacrifices itself to it. And yet its pain cannot be regretted.
Your poem shows this very clearly and very intensely.
Deceived (Poetry) - 4/20/2009 10:07:27 AM
You're very good at sad poems.
There's a traditional style called falak. Your poem goes in this direction, especially with the exclamation "Oh God! Oh God" constituting the refrain. The emotionality of your language is very powerful.
The saddest poem ever (Poetry) - 4/20/2009 9:59:45 AM
This truly is the saddest poem ever. :(
What is importance though and what does it consist in? A person can live a life without meaning for a hundred years but in the hundred and first, that person shakes the very foundations of the universe. It just happens. Things are waiting inside our souls, and all our lives can be geared toward one particular moment in time. Only then, in the one moment that decides everything, do we know who we really are.
