First, Honor Thyself

Sorry for not interacting earlier, everyone. I`ve been dealing with a computer with a fried hard drive (extra crispy...mmm). Anyway, thanks for reading and commenting.

Delhiwala, I didn`t intend the article to attack men. What it does rail against is traditional, patriarchial systems, which, in some ways are also harmful for most men, at the cost of just a few powerful ones. And yes, some women are equally culpable in the victimization of women. This is not a men vs. women issue for me. It`s an issue for anyone with a conscience and for those who value individual freedom and don`t think a woman`s (or anyone`s for that matter) body is someone else`s property.

Saminasha #28, this discussion (ownership of women`s bodies, virginity, women as chattel, etc.) is nothing new. It`s nothing I`ve invented though I`ve written about it even when I was in grad school and in other smaller articles earlier, in different ways. There are reams of material on it. This article was just my perspective on it as I am sure your interact responses were yours.

Re: # 29

unclear on the meaning of ``kavya``

#28 so are you saying there is there is some kavya in the author?

Hey Jawahara,

How different is this piece from what I`ve written to you on a previous FGM board?


http://www.chowk.com/show_user_replies.cgi?membername=Saminasha&start=40&end=49&page=5&chapter=1

Another interesting perspective -

GLOBAL VIEW

The Foreign Brides
By BRET STEPHENS
May 2, 2006; Page A17

They are called Die Fremden Bräute -- the foreign brides. This year, thousands of teenage girls, very few past the age of consent, will arrive in Germany from Turkey for arranged marriages and lives of domestic servitude enforced by tradition, isolation and fear. It`s a thriving one-way trade that has been going on for more than three decades, and it sits at the core of Europe`s greatest predicament today: the widening gulf between an increasingly postmodern society and its often premodern immigrants.

The subject of foreign brides broke wide in the German media last year, when a 28-year-old Turkish man took his 11-year-old wife to a registry office in Düsseldorf to get her an ID card. On that occasion, the girl was detained by the authorities and deported to Turkey. But according to the Turkish-born German sociologist Necla Kelek, that is more often the exception than the rule. Ms. Kelek, 48, is one to know: In two bestselling books, ``The Foreign Bride`` and ``The Lost Sons,`` she has exposed Germans to the lives of their 2.6 million-strong Turkish community in a way few of her German-born peers would have dared.

Next week, the German parliament is set to debate legislation, conceived by Ms. Kelek and supported by Chancellor Angela Merkel, that would require foreign brides (from outside the European Union) to learn German before their arrival and bar entry to those under 21. ``The goal,`` says Ms. Kelek, ``is to ensure that those who come are willing to integrate.``
[Necla Kelek]

This isn`t just an academic or political issue for Ms. Kelek. It`s a telling fact that the most prominent Muslim critics of contemporary Muslim societies -- Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Holland, Irshad Manji in Canada, Seyran Ates and Serap Cileli in Germany -- are women. ``It`s the women who have felt the relapse into Sharia the most,`` explains Ms. Kelek. ``The boys might be slaves to their families, but on the streets they are free, and besides they can always look forward to a wife they can suppress. It`s the women who explode.``

Ms. Kelek herself came to Germany as a child in the late 1960s, along with a family that, initially at least, sought to integrate into German society. She learned German, made German friends, respected what later would be called, controversially, the German Leitkultur, the ``lead culture.``

But things changed in the 1970s. Previous Turkish immigrants had generally come from cities and were relatively secular, but later arrivals were overwhelmingly from the countryside and traditional in their outlook. The rise of fundamentalist Islam also had an effect. Religion became the primary marker of individual identity. Codes of family honor and standards of female purity, to which Ms. Kelek`s family had once been relatively indifferent, became important.

When Ms. Kelek was 17, she locked herself in her room in a fit of adolescent rebellion. Her father knocked the door down with an ax. Instead of beating or killing her, he abandoned the family for good. It was, she says, one of the happiest days of her life: ``We turned on all the lights and played music. We were free.``

A similar scenario between a rebellious daughter and her Turkish father might work out differently these days. There have been 55 honor killings in Germany in the past six years. Most of the victims were ``fallen`` girls who had broken from their families and were living ``like a German.`` Usually the perpetrator is a brother, acting at his father`s behest. The Turkish community tends to treat these young killers as heroes.

Such violence is integral to what Ms. Kelek calls the Turkish community`s ``organized self-marginalization.`` The tender age of the foreign brides, for instance: That isn`t just a matter of depraved sexual tastes. ``They want a girl with `closed eyes,``` Ms. Kelek explains. The younger the bride, the more likely she is to be submissive to her husband, dependent on his family, ignorant and terrified of the world outside.

Today, every second Turkish woman who has a child in a German school is herself a foreign bride. Two-thirds of these children arrive in school not speaking a word of German. The German educational system bends over backward for them, providing religious instruction in Turkish or Arabic and excluding girls from physical education, sex ed and other subjects where Islamic mores might be offended. The results have been dismal: 60% of Turkish children leave school without any kind of certificate. ``The distance between Turkish youngsters and German ones increases every year,`` Ms. Kelek says.

The Turkish community is not the only party at fault, however. Until last year, few Turks, including those whose families had lived in Germany for generations, could obtain German citizenship. Successive German governments compensated for their refusal to facilitate citizenship procedures by allowing the Turkish community to do more or less as it pleased. Thus the 11-year-old bride: With a parent`s consent, Turkish law will allow even a nine-year-old girl to marry. Had German law applied, the age threshold would have been 16.

There`s a deeper problem here, though, which goes to the heart of modern Germany`s problematic notion of goodness. Germans, Ms. Kelek says, ``want to do everything right that they previously did wrong. This is especially the case with the Muslim community because it`s such a different culture, such a different religion. Germans are trying to prove to themselves just how tolerant they are.``

No surprise, then, that Ms. Kelek`s legislation is being hotly opposed by the Social Democrats and the Green Party. For too many self-described progressives, limitless tolerance of ``the other`` has replaced the defense of individual liberty as proof of virtue.

Ms. Kelek sees it differently. Europe, she says, ``has to fight for its values,`` not least by putting some hard questions to its increasingly alien and belligerent Muslim communities: ```Why aren`t your women free? Why aren`t your children free?` If we don`t ask those questions, this will only continue.``

Mr. Stephens, a member of the Journal`s editorial board, replaces George Melloan as our regular Global View columnist. Write to him at bstephens@wsj.com

my GKB payee dilli, and zeemax,

while you two raise great points, but i think at this point we as humans are supposed to have evolved beyond discovery channel, sperms, eggs etc..what with all these great religions and all. so while we are still learning a lot to learn from chimps and dogs, roumor is females now seem to have developed some brains and a mind of their own as well.

Re: # 20
Zeemax if you are talking about the hymen then nobody has come out with a really good reason why it is there in a few primates. In most other mammals it disappears fairly quickly some even in the embryonic stage. In any case it is no indicator of virginity is it? Strenuous physical activity can tear it and research has established that intercourse need not tear it.

The only argument which appears plausible seems to be that it was there to provide an additional vaginal protection from external sources of infection and natural selection allowed it to remain welll beyond adolescence.

Re: # 21
I am still waiting for a response to my sincere question and no woman has come forward.

Very Sad!!

Re: # 4
how do you know that? are you a dyke?

Re: # 20
woman only has one Egg and men have millions of sperms.

Ratio of 1:Million tells us something here....

Jawahara Jee,
This is by far and large a very good article that you have ever written. That is why it got published on FP.

My biggest complain with people who hold the views like you expressed in this letter about woman liberty and other such topics is that you fail to take into account any scientific approach and outrightly dismiss it as Man-Issue or Men`s conspiracy to keep woman down-under.

Can anyone explain to me my basic query?

1) Why does older woman after menapuse become more patriarch like or to-be-afraid of in DESI-Land?
2) Why does females in Western society after their proms tend to become more feminine at the cost of equality of genders?

To me, it cleary states what is scientifically so obvious, there are innate biological differences between Genders and so long society is still not developed woman would be treated unfairly by men. And woman would like to hide behind men and hope for the best treatment that may or not be delivered by men.

It is sad but truth..

Abstinence till marriage, both for men and women, does have its virtue towards a durable family system. That women have an irreplaceable verifying feature which has no other utility, maybe some evolutionist can tell us where it came from and why it`s still there.

Jawahara Jee,
This is by far and large a very good article that you have ever written. That is why it got published on FP.

My biggest complain with people who hold the views like you expressed in this letter about woman liberty and other such topics is that you fail to take into account any scientific approach and outrightly dismiss it as Man-Issue or Men`s conspiracy to keep woman down-under.

Can anyone explain to me my basic query?

1) Why does older woman after menapuse become more patriarch like or to-be-afraid of in DESI-Land?
2) Why does females in Western society after their proms tend to become more feminine at the cost of equality of genders?

To me, it cleary states what is scientifically so obvious, there are innate biological differences between Genders and so long society is still not developed woman would be treated unfairly by men. And woman would like to hide behind men and hope for the best treatment that may or not be delivered by men.

It is sad but truth..

#17, Chowk Staff, I did not post #17. Here is my post.

Jawahara {``Women’s bodies in most cultures have never been truly their own. Apart from a lucky few, women’s bodies were used to solve tribal differences, to assuage angry gods; were chattel to be traded by one man to another.``}

Jawahara,
Very succinctly and articulately presented. You are so right about this unbelievable stranglehold that many societies allow men to have over women and their bodies. I think that the more we leave behind our pastoral and tribal traditions, the more freedom women will obtain for themselves and their bodies. When wealth and status was counted in sheep, goats, cattle, chickens, camels, and other livestock under a man`s control, he started including human females in the same category. With more urbanization, liberalization, removal of sexual taboos, and acceptance of universal individual rights, a change for the better is inevitable. Good job.

Thank god/FSM for Jinnah..IF it weren`t for him, this would read Indian terrorist caught with grid map..

Terror suspect `bought electricity grid map`

TERROR suspect Faheem Khalid Lodhi allegedly bought two maps of the national electricity grid using a false name and business name.
Rose Bakla, who worked at the Electricity Supply Association of Australia in 2003, told the NSW Supreme Court yesterday she remembered the man who paid $170 cash for two diagrammatic maps of the national supply grid.

``The gentleman said that he was starting up a business and he wanted to display these in his office,`` she told the NSW Supreme Court. She described him as in his ``mid-30s, early 40s`` with a medium build, dark features and dark hair.

The jury heard he filled out the sales form as M.Rasul, a partner in Rasul Electrical.

Prosecutors allege the man was Faheem Khalid Lodhi, 36, a Pakistani-born architect who is on trial on four terror-related charges.

It is true that women and more importantly (and sadly), their bodies and virginity is being used by men. These men use the excuses of honor and religion to justify their acts. Religion, I believe, has nothing to do with it because men belonging to any faith be they be in any part of the world indulge in this shameful act. Again, education helps but one is surprised to see how sometimes educated men in our society behave towards women.

The solution to this problem is in the hands women only. And Mukhataran Main has proved that.