Hicham Maged's blog Inquisitive curiosity paves knowledge path

Beauty and the Beast

How many times did you hear questions like these: are you beautiful, is she beautiful, is he handsome? Oh! Please do not count! These questions are very common in our daily life because beauty is one of the magical words in the human vocabularies regardless the language since humans tend to seek things that satisfies their senses with pleasure.

Beauty and the Beast

This perspective is typically formulated within what is called “outer beauty” which simply means the attributes of a human that are being perceived by others. Hereby “beauty idols” arouses in people perception where they not merely iconize them through out history but also are called to follow them as their roll models.

The Beast chases Beauty

This is why humans usually put weight on how someone looks and this can be clearly figured out in work environments while applying for jobs, especially while interviewing females not women in this case and you find administrations seek to employ “attractive looking people” which became a global trend regardless the society and culture where the beast is chasing beauty!

I however wonder: is this “outer beauty” considered as the only item that we should take into consideration while dealing with each others and forget about other items over the check-list? My answer is definitely No; Hence, I find the trend of preaching “beauty idols” is simply strange because it contradicts with the diversity of humans and uniqueness of every individual person living on this planet and hence; you cannot simply portray all humans into one category according to your specifications and who fails to meet the qualifications is out or in other words ugly either in race or color.

C’mon! This perspective discriminates the human nature generally and women nature especially because the diversity of human being is the key of interaction; that we may know each other plus understand each other not when the beast chase beauty according to this i.e. sexism.

Man-Woman vs. Male-Female Relationships

Consequently, in the case of women, they are humans who have the right to be respected which means rejecting this silly stereotyped baby-dolls image because there is a complete difference between attraction (plus seduction) from one side and real beauty from the other side. Moreover, the “Male – Woman” relationship is supposed to be upgraded from the “Male – Female” relationship as the later one is found commonly among all creatures except humans who are supposed to go for the former relationship within the marriage framework. Other than marriage, you shall find men and women working together as colleagues in whatever place but all should be established on the respect foundation.

This can be an executive summary for how Islam regards men and women in society but unfortunately you still find people who believe in stereotypes and see noting except the common misconceptions, and here I mean some Muslims and Non-Muslims as previously elaborated while discussing the FGM issue in Islam!

In other words, Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, so “real beauty” from my perspective has nothing to do at all with the external attributes; rather it deals with reaching the equilibrium state where balance and harmony occurs between sayings and doings of someone and this is how I consider someone beautiful or ugly away from people’s intentions as we cannot – and are not called to – seek after them.

In a nutshell, according there is another perspective that humans can look for the case of beauty and achieving it rather than the media-preached outer-beauty version which is nothing but sexism. Hence, while wondering about when people will grow up, I do not wonder that Islam calls for piety as the criteria for judging people from Almighty Allah (swt) – GOD – not from people!

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Tags: man/woman, sexism
Categories: Critiques
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