Hicham Maged's blog Acquiring knowledge lead to the acquisition of power

Laila in La-La Land

Today I am saying ‘bye-bye’ 2009; a year where good things and bad ones took place on various levels starting with the personal, passing by the national and ending with the global. Among the few good things is the “Kolena Laila” event that I told you about few weeks ago and this is my post at the end of the year and the end of the event too so whether you are a regular reader or a new one, welcome abroad to my blog!

Cherchez La Femme

I used to mention over here how I am not happy with the status of women in our area due to the image people have about women, so my simple question is what lead us to this situation? Let us scratch the surface to reach for answers, hopefully!

Although I do not like generalising, I believe there is an attitude of extreme highlighting on the ‘female part’ of woman in the minds of people.

This attitude is translated -either consciously or unconsciously- into a behaviour that focus on the ‘body-related’ topics and thus you find it controlling various discourses regardless the orientation (left/middle/right), and the final status is that women had been categorised according to this into two labels: either baby dolls or root of all evil for men.

The reflection of this categorisation could be noticed in the efforts that are being spent on quarrelling about things like:

• women should be killed for honour crimes;
• what women should/should not wear;
• young girls and the crime of of FGM;
• ... the list seems endless!

I cannot understand this in terms of any thing but having women as a property of men in their minds and hence their presence as human being was reduced just as a female where as their mind is ignored after such minimizing process by people regardless their orientation.

On the other hand, I do respect everybody's personal belief however in a country like Egypt where Islam is the religion of the majority, I am placing my critique about how sometimes -or many- people relate their actions to Islam and hence you find the anti/pro discussions regarding the status of women and this lead to another stereotyped image that existed due to their actions not what Islam call for. This point is clear for people who read well in Islam, not for those who believe in what others tell them regardless their orientation.

You know what? Allah (god) created us that we may know each other generally and in case of men and women specially. Consequently, I neither believe in generalising nor extremism to any side and this means -from my point of view- that the keystone to solve this problem is understanding our differences and deal with it in a better way than we currently witness since many decades!

In a nutshell, women are human beings not only females. If it seems hard for many people to understand this since many decades, what is harder -for me- that we are still discussing this in the 21^st century!

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