Mohamed Ismail - Unpeople

Mohamed Ismail is a medical doctor, writer, and activist who is interested in issues of human rights, freedoms, minorities and violence against women.

Mohamed is a member of several international organizations that effectively contribute to promoting the value of humanity. He has also participated in several international campaigns defending peace and freedoms all over the world.

Through his writings, he strives to shed some light on misconceptions and beliefs that antagonize human rights, hoping for a change to a better life.

For every victimized woman who voicelessly suffers

You are not alone; speak your pain out loud, for the whole world to hear you.

Unpeople

Combating Female Oppression

Copyright Mohamed Ismail (2019)

The right of Mohamed Ismail to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781788785433 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528912952 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781788785440 (Kindle)

ISBN 9781528955669 (ePub)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2019)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5LQ

I dedicate this book to my beloved one who never left my heart for a single day.

Ever since prehistoric times, women have endured much suffering. In fact, they have been victimized by each civilization in turn. In the time of the Greeks, they used to be traded like any commodity; a woman was even marked as a poisoned tree and an abomination of Satan... In Roman culture, women are regarded as soulless, and when they misbehave they are punished by being thrown in boiling oil or tied and dragged by horses till death... In the ancient Chinese traditions, a woman is the water of pain that washes happiness away; a Chinese man has the right to bury his wife alive, and when he dies, his woman belongs to his family as a part of his legacy... The Indians, too, perceived that neither death, hell, poison, snakes, or even fire is worse than a woman; she is even denied to live after her husbands death and must be burned with him.

Honestly speaking, when I first considered writing about violence against women an overwhelmingly studied topic since the 1940s I was inspired by a form of Middle Eastern culture in which a strongly patriarchal social hierarchy, combined with misinterpretation of religion, has led violence against women to become woven into the very fabric of social structures, and thereby to appear thoroughly familiar and manifested as a fact of daily life. In those parts of the Middle East where this culture predominates, female discrimination has a wide spectrum of aspects. At their simplest these can be purely verbal, like the stereotype-laden language of popular proverbs like Break your daughter a rib, shall come her twenty-four, or disrespecting someone by calling him by his mothers name. Often, however, this discrimination appears as more restrictive traditions like being disallowed to drive her own car in some locales, typically disinherited in others, denied her right of good education or to choose her husband, forcefully veiled, sexually curtailed through circumcision or even killed in the name of honor. In sum, women in these parts of the Middle East symbolize pure and explicit subjugation: regardless of financial, social or educational status, she is merely... a woman.

Then again, and despite the fact that most accounts of women in the developed world seem to highlight their advanced status, I have found that violence is far from being confined to particular settings or cultures. Thousands of brutal acts of violence and neglect specifically targeting females can still be observed around the world on a daily basis. Female victimization begins more or less upon conception; millions of girls have been victimized even before birth, as technology and greater access to medicine have given rise to prenatal sex selection and sex- selective abortions. In their childhood, females have suffered circumcision rituals or even sexual abuse by their family members, living with a scar ever after. Even more, violence against girl children has become a powerful and all-too-common tactic in times of war and during humanitarian disasters. Girls who have barely attained adolescence have been forced into marriage, often to men many years older, regardless of being unable to legally give their consent to engage into such partnership. Women are traded, bought and sold across national borders as commodities to be used as prostitutes or slaves, or even to be sold again with a profit. Their lives may be simply taken in the name of family honor for speaking to strangers or committing other minor transgressions. Even the lucky ones, who have evaded all those dangers, continue to encounter the threat of sexual harassment and abuse in schools and workplaces, not to mention in their own homes by an abusive spouse. In short, violence became a global phenomenon in such a way that it seems to be a newly acquired human instinct with women being merely a safe target.

Aiming to explore the hidden rationale behind all this brutality, and by tracking the evolution of womens status in different societies throughout history until the present time, I came to the conclusion that the one and only reason for such oppression is gender ideology. Who does what? Who is culturally permitted to do this or that? It is obvious that men and women perform different tasks that are culturally determined and readily apparent. Given that traditional perspectives of femininity and masculinity characterize females and males as innately different entities, men and women are typically socialized differently in most human societies from early infancy. Males are brought up and taught to be strong, competitive, autonomous and necessarily aggressive, while females should be gentle, warm, adaptive, and innately passive. No wonder, then, that such biased socializing process would generate a heterogenic gender that subjugates the inherently perceived weaker one, with all the more social ratification. Cultures may differ in the context and intensity of differentiation between sex, gender, gender roles, gender-role ideologies and gender stereotypes; however, whatever the extent to which culture will foster, encourage, or maintain differences between males and females, the subordination of women will be perpetuated.

Notwithstanding the worldwide rhetoric of female liberation and empowerment, the aim of this book is to shine a revealing light on the dark side of contemporary womens lives and highlight the striking fact that the status of women has never really improved by modernization and technological advancements; rather, new patterns of violations have emerged and extended across the entire globe. This book is full of interesting findings and hypotheses about how and why violence varies across different societies. Only by looking at other cultures can we determine what is universal and what is variable and why, where violence or anything else are concerned. Investigation of particular cultures may reveal the causes of variation, but we still have to find ways to test the generalizability of the suggested explanations. This is because the particular cases studied here may not be representative of the whole world after all, therefore our understandings might be biased in ways that may be difficult to uncover.