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effects of gender stereotypes in the society
Women's role in Islamic society essay
effects of gender stereotypes in the society
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“So Long a Letter” is a continuous account of a Senegalese woman, Ramatoulaye, about her life being a wife through the nature of Islam. Ramatoulaye was not a traditional woman as in she had obtain an education. An education set her apart from society; however, she was still subject to other obstacles that other Muslim women faced. One part of Muslim culture that affected her greatly was polygamy. Polygamy is the act of being married to more than one person. When Ramatoulaye experienced polygamy personally, it became the turning point in her life. Her experience led her through serious of life obstacles that she was not capable of handling at that point in her life. The main point of “So Long a Letter” is to examine and show Ramatoulaye’s life as she transgresses through the life of being a wife, a mother, a victim of polygamy, a widow and finally a great example of how life challenges …show more content…
Ramatoulaye begins by writing her first letter to Aissatou about the distressing effect of her husband, Modou, death. It seems as if she is leading into a compelling story to a friend only by fate. Ramatoulaye says, “Your presence in my life is by no means fortuitous because their grandmothers exchanged messages through a fence in the compounds, their mothers argued over their uncles and they attended the same school” (Ba 1). Aissatou and Modou are two very different types of woman and that is exemplified by the statement “yesterday you were divorced. Today I am a widow” (Ba 1). At this point in the story, Ramatoulaye is going through the grievance process and funeral processions which is a fairly stressful and drawn out process. Although Ramatoulaye was in grievance, she was still thinking upon the fact that she is still in service
And readers are thus exposed to the exploitation and extortion that goes on in this cycle of sympathizers. While the gathering of the women is supposed to be a period of preparing the widows for their confinement, it turns to a period of financial exploitation of the widows. Ramatoulaye succinctly expresses her displeasure,
Fatima Mernissi is a superb writer who introduces the reader into a harem through the mind of a nine-year-old girl. In this autobiographical novel young Mernissi talks uncensored about the contradictions of life in a harem, surrounded by the extraordinary women in her family who are restrained from leaving the family courtyard. These women’s is a struggle of complete lack of freedom. They are not allowed to leave the courtyard except on very few occasions, and escorted by men (Mernissi 39). Their lack of mobility is also accentuated by lack of other freedoms such as education and financial freedom, although they have a voice in the decision making of the crucial changes in the harem life.
Moroccan traveler, Ibn Battuta, is well-known for being one of the greatest travelers of his time. Battuta’s descriptive account of his travels to East and West Africa in the fourteenth century provides important insight into African Islamic life at that point in time. Although Battuta and the peoples in black Africa shared the same religion, he comes to realize that sharing a religion is not enough to completely relate to a different group of people. The story of Ibn Battuta in Black Africa illustrates the difficulties he faced in relating to these peoples due to the non-traditional role of women, different religious customs, and frequent misinterpretation of situations.
Thesis: One of the most discussed subjects in modern society is the ideals of beauty. There are different ideas of beauty all over the world. For instance, in America more people finds girls who are skinnier to be more attractive but in Rebecca Popenoe’s Feeding Desire: Fatness, Beauty, And Sexuality among a Saharan People, she studies another culture ideas of beauty, and they are different from ours. We even see in the media what makes a woman beautiful and what doesn’t. However, while investigating this ethnography, I realized that the ideas of female’s beauty affect them in more ways than one and the gender roles in the community of Azawagh are very fundamental. Their religious ideal, their kinship, and their cultures play a huge role in throughout the entire ethnographic report. I will be exploring evidence from the book to show how these gender roles shape and construct the backbone of the Saharan people.
It revolves around the issues of gender oppression, sexual assault, and importance of social status. Alifa Rifaat manages to express her opinions towards these themes by writing about a typical Egyptian marriage. She puts in focus the strong influence that a patriarchal society has. She also manages to prove how important social status is in society. The uses of literally elements such as theme and irony help express this view. It shows that in a typical Egyptian society women are commonly oppressed by all males in society
It is important to note that Elizabeth Warnock Fernea herself is a brilliant writer, and her piece of Guests of the Sheik offers a very in debt analysis of an Iraqi village that would not be seen from most outsiders. How while Fernea concedes the fact that she is not an anthropologist she was married to one and the first two years of their marriage they lived in an Iraqi village called El Nahra. Since she lived in a village that has hardly any social contact between men and women, Fernea is able to give us a beautiful account of what the women’s life style, roles, and other aspects of a women’s life in an Iraqi village. While women are not treated incredibly badly there lifestyle was a lot different than the one an American woman would live. One of the primary directions of Fernea’s study are to show how the author could be credible in ultimately idealizing her culture and peoples in this ethnography. She uses her Self authority to convince the reader of that and her interactions with other women. The
The modern concept of marriage is different than what it was many years ago. The realities of love and marriage are constantly being challenged by highly educated and working women. Jhumpa Lahiri, through her novel The Namesake, narrates the story of the Gangulis: a Bengali family who immigrates to America. Ashima, the mother, gives birth to Gogol who represents the second generation of the immigrant family. The novel examines one outlook on modern marriage: using love to satisfy temporary needs rather than having a relationship dependent on actual feelings of trust and loyalty. Lahiri shows this outlook by providing a detailed view into Gogol’s series of unsuccessful romantic relationships,
Change is the law of life. A person goes through different stages of life, and at every stage there is transformation in the personality of the person. This new individual is entirely different from the previous one. For this change, different circumstances and events are responsible. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane are two texts of feminism in which we find the theme of evolution among the life of the characters like Celie and Nazneen who, happened to highlight the oppression of women in universal phenomenon irrespective of caste, creed, culture and nation. My paper is an attempt to study these two characters and see how their personality is evolved because of the different circumstances of life.
“The Harem Within” is a pioneering work that opens discussion of women’s rights in Islamic societies. With her humble life story Mernissi gives not only a voice to Moroccan women, but stands her advocacy for individual freedom and battle against the harem within. The narrative is a literature example that figures the women discrimination and appeal for
...the story he is inviting the reader to condemn the mistreatment of women and lack of freedom in the family particularly under the institution of marriage. The attitude of the author gives the story a condemning tone. The tone is appropriate for the theme which is a strained relations in the family and specifically in marriage relations.
The differences that the narrator observes are different from his life with his wife than from his life in Europe. Throughout his work in the Egyptian newspaper he was enjoying a good life with his family, receiving a fine salary while submitting regular articles to the Egyptian newspaper. His friend Ibrahim, with whom he had many strong conversations and arguments, is the one who visited him in Europe and with whom he spent a lot of time. Shadia, the most beautiful girl in the newspaper, was the one who got married to Ibrahim then divorced him years later. Shadia then carried on with her life, married the newspaper accountant and changed a lot when she became overweight and starting wearing clothes as fashionable as before.
“Polygyny is the marriage of one man to more than one woman at the same time” (Powell 167). This structure of marriage is prevalent among the families of Okonkwo’s village, and Okonkwo himself has three wives. A man with many wives was looked upon in a better light than a man with only one wife or no wife at all. In the novel, Okonkwo is said to have had a hard start as a young man because “he neither inherited a barn, nor a title, nor even a young wife” (Achebe 18). Men view wives as a means to gain titles and respect as well as extra labor power for thier combines. Women bring a number of benefits to a man: sexual services, reproductive power, labor, farms for women’s crops, in-laws with goods, land, and livestock. Men typically have only one wife if they lacked wealth (Amadiume 30-31). This is a feminist issue because the people of the village treat women as property that can be inherited. A feminist critic sees how polygyny devalues women and treats them the same as animals. According to Nigerian law, a woman is categorized “as an object who is not quite human” (Bazza 176). In Nigeria, if a woman is involved in polygyny and her husband divorces her for whatever reason, she cannot remarry and often turns to prostitution or extreme poverty for herself and her children (Kunhiyop 44). There is no good that comes from polygyny for
According to Muslim tradition, which was the dominant tradition in Senegal, when Ramatoulaye?s husband, Modou, passed away, she had to mourn over her loss for three months. During this time, friends and family members gathered in her house to accompany her. One of the traditions, which she wasn?t too fond of, was having to give up her possessions and belongings as gifts to her in-laws, as well as her deceased husband?s personal secrets. This whole process was a way of giving up herself as a person. ?Beyond her possessions she gives up her ...
Mariamma Ba’s So Long a Letter and the role women and impact of western culture on Islamic women in post-colonial Senegal: A critical analysis of Aissatou.