Price Of Honour Essay Research Paper The

Price Of Honour Essay, Research Paper

The scholarly journal being critiqued is “Price of Honour: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World” by Jan Goodwin. As an award winning journalist, women’s’ rights activist and prizewinning foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Jan Goodwin spent four years covering the Middle east through wars, insurrections, and the volcanic upheaval of resurgent fundamentalism. “Price of Honour: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World” is the story of Goodwins’ intrepid journey toward an understanding of the women behind the veils, and of the often contradictory political, religious, and cultural forces that shape their lives. Defying stereotypes about the Muslim world, Goodwins’ acute analysis of the world’s fastest growing religion deftly illustrates how Islam’s holiest texts have been misused to justify honour killings, and how male pride and power have warped the original message of a once liberating faith.

Attiya Dawood is one of the many women writers who have emerged as powerful and unfaltering voices for women living in the underdeveloped world, a world joined not only by the thread of Islam but also in its unequivocal denial and suppression of basic human rights to its female population. Women’s voices in that part of the world are no more faltering, fearing, or whispering anymore. They are fighting not only against illiteracy, culture, tradition but also against that omnipotent concept of honour killings which is constantly invoked to legitimize various restrictions and abuses.

Poems by Attiya Dawood serve as an appropriate prologue for a book which deals with the situation of Muslim women in the underdeveloped world. Jan Goodwin travelled through the Islamic heartland to 10 countries : Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, UAE, Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, West Bank and Gaza, and Egypt. She interviewed hundreds of women, from peasants to city elite, from ordinary housewives to vanguards of women’s rights in those countries. She also spoke to countless men who found segregation between men and women only natural and justified in Islam, and also to their religious leaders who were more than obliging to provide theological basis for these practices from Quran and Islamic history. Goodwin especially concentrates on honour killings, a cruel and unjustifiable practice which is becoming increasingly common in Muslim societies.

Goodwin’s journey starts in Pakistan where she lived for two years in the late eighties. There, she kind of adopted an Afghan girl as her daughter. Later on, this Afghan girl was physically abused by her own father and was forced to marry a man older than her father. As she witnessed this trauma, Goodwin wanted to understand what it was like to grow up as a Muslim female in the underdeveloped world. She wondered whether what happened to this Afghan girl was a general phenomenon in the underdeveloped countries or was this experience intrinsic to a culture, specially one espoused in the Islamic countries. By the time she finished her exploration she was convinced that the plight of women in these countries was largely the result of ‘Islamic values’ and of what she calls ‘leitmotiv’ of growing fundamentalism in these countries.

The book can be loosely divided into three parts: her interviews with the women and detailed case histories of those victims of abuse and exploitation; her efforts to find theological and theoretical underpinnings of the situation; and her effort to determine the political dimensions of Islamic world and its influence it has on the West.

The part detailing women’s situation in the countries Goodwin visited, serves as a journalistic catalogue of case studies, and is perhaps the best part the book. Goodwin’s journalistic skill to keenly observe the impact of dress codes and locating symbolically important cases of women’s abuse help the reader to grasp the gravity of the situation. According to the author, the coerced use of ‘Hijab’ or veil in these countries is the most visible symbol of fundamentalists’ attempt to deprive their female population of their basic human rights. Such demands on dress code in the name of modesty are usually followed by other efforts to legitimize and institutionalize inequality for women. Legal issues such a polygamy, child custody in case of divorce, or for that matter, the very right to divorce, rights of property, legal barriers a woman faces in cases of rape, all accumulate to relegate women as second class citizens in these societies.

In 1985, the president of Pakistan established a commission to investigate the status of women. The report concluded “The average woman is born into slavery, leads a life of drudgery, and dies invariably in oblivion. The grim condition is a stark reality of life for half of our population simply because they happened to be female”. Not surprisingly, according to the author, the government suppressed the findings. In Afghanistan “fatwas”(religious orders) are issued to ban or limit education of women, and the first Islamic government installed after the fall of communists in 1992 immediately declared that only men could participate in future elections. In Iran ‘Pasdaran’ make sure that women are properly dressed and the clergy emphasizes the role of women limited to household and raising children. In Kuwait women demonstrate for suffrage. In Jord