It was all taken away from me
Johann Hari talks to the stand-up comic Shazia Mirza.
Shazia used to be a teacher in Tower Hamlets, where I live, and she would see Muslim girls rebelling against the chafing medieval codes of their fathers every day…Come 3.30 they put the hijab back on and they’re carted off to the mosque to rote-learn the Koran for three hours. They would come in the next day exhausted, having not done their homework, and they would say, ‘My parents say the Koran comes before homework.’” Shazia understands this better than most: her parents are, she says, “fanatics.” She was forbidden to leave the house throughout her teenage years except to go to school. “I’m a woman, and I couldn’t stand the repression. I wanted to go swimming, do ballet, ride horses, tell jokes. I was allowed to do all those things until I went through puberty and then it was all taken away from me, and I couldn’t stand it. I looked at the beautiful, intelligent women like my mother and my aunties who were basically turned into prisoners in their own homes, and I thought – I can’t live that life.” Her mother had been a university lecturer until, at the age of 22, she was married off and turned into a housebound baby-machine.
No comment necessary.
they put the hijab back on and they’re carted off to the mosque to rote-learn the Koran for three hours.
“Desparetly Seeking Paradise” by Ziauddin Sardar is a must read that has a comic depiction of this drama. Highly recommended.
Hey, Tasneem, hi – I like your site.
(Here for anyone who missed it in the Context post.)
Thanks for the reference, I’ll look for it.
Ah, but this is their culture, so it is just as valid, and good, as ours, isn’t it?
Ahem.
Tingey:
I am a Muslim and this is NOT my culture. It’s sad when obscurantist idiots define our lifestyles and even more sad when people try to label that misnomer as “their culture”. Note, the Muslim person in question, Shazia Mirza herslef is not endorsing this. Can we say: “her culture”?
OB:
Thank you very much ;-)
‘It’s sad when obscurantist idiots define our lifestyles and even more sad when people try to label that misnomer as “their culture”.’
Isn’t it though. And sad that there are so many obscurantist idiots and friends of obscurantist idiots around, doing the “their culture” routine.
“And sad that there are so many obscurantist idiots and friends of obscurantist idiots around, doing the “their culture” routine.”
That’s where we need to decide whose “routine” is it. Me and my peers don endorse to that school, that does not make us lesser of Muslims.
Exactly.
Tasneem seems to have missed the < IRONY > in my post……
Pity.
Of course it is rubbish, and you mustn’t force people into submission (oops that means islam, doesn’t it?) erm.
I think you get the point(s)
Oh, and remember Tasneem, that religion (any and all religions) is just a collection of blackmailing threats to keep the population in line, and the priests in a living.
So let me see the teachings of Jesus Christ are a collection of blackmail threats?
How about when he said you have to follow “every jot and tittle” of the Old Testament?
So that makes all of his teachings invalid?
I would appreciate a little clarification here from Johann and Richard. Could you cite the passage in the New Testament about the “jot and tittle?”
Is it not the position of some churches that Jesus’ death on the cross liberated his followers from an obligation to follow Mosaic law?
I come from a long line of atheists and agnostics and the nuances of Christian theology escape me. (Why they dumped the dietary laws and kept the one on homosexuality could require another thread).
Lace
I cant heip you I am no theologian,I just foud the hostility toward christianity worth commenting on.