Bung Dana said :
>Silahkan para perempuan yg menjawab apakah ketentuan berjilbab itu
restraint atau oppression?
=Tergantung perempuannya, perempuan yang mana ?, kalau perempuan non Islam
sebaiknya tidak usah mengomentari sesuatu yang menjadi keyakinan umat yang lain
Salam
Dan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Bedanya apa antara restraint vs oppression?
Restraint itu sukarela berdasarkan keinginan sendiri, oppression itu
adalah kemauan orang lain tanpa basis hukum yg jelas.
Silahkan para perempuan yg menjawab apakah ketentuan berjilbab itu
restraint atau oppression?
--- In wanita-muslimah@yahoogroups.com, "Sunny" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> http://www.arabnews.com/?
page=7§ion=0&article=98991&d=27&m=7&y=2007&pix=opinion.jpg&catego
ry=Opinion
>
> Friday, 27, July, 2007 (12, Rajab, 1428)
>
>
> Muslim Women: Restraint? Sure; Oppression? Hardly
> Leila Aboulela, The Washington Post
>
>
> ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates - The West believes that
Islam oppresses women. But as a Muslim, descended from generations
of Muslims, I have a different story to tell. It starts like this:
You say, "The sea is salty." I say, "But it is blue and full of
fish." I am not objective about Islam, and although I am
considerably Westernized, I can never truly see it through Western
eyes. I am in this religion. It is in me. And articulating the
intimacy of faith and the experience of worship to a Western
audience is a challenge and a discovery.
>
> My mother instilled a spiritual awareness in me from an
early age. My grandmother told me stories from the Qur'an, and I
grew up listening to adults discussing Islamic law. I don't remember
when I learned about Allah just as I don't remember when I learned
my name.
>
> My earliest contact with the West came when I was 7 and my
parents enrolled my younger brother and me in the Khartoum American
School in Sudan. For the first time in my life I entered a library,
selected a book and took it home with me. It was the books I
discovered then that made me fall in love with reading: "Little
House on the Prairie," "A Wrinkle in Time," "Harriet the Spy"
and "Little Women."
>
> I read them again and again, and even though I knew that the
characters were not Muslim, I found Muslim values in those novels. I
found spiritual journeys, and familiar depictions of the rigor and
patience needed to discipline the ego. Yes, Islam restrains me, but
restraint is not oppression, and boundaries can be comforting and
nurturing. Freedom does not necessarily bring happiness, nor does an
abundance of choices automatically mean that we will make the right
one. I need guidance and wisdom; I need grace and forgiveness.
>
> I appreciate the West. I admire its work ethic and its
fairness. I need its technology and its medicine, and I want my
children to have a Western education. At the same time, I am
fulfilled in my religion. Nothing can compete with the elegance,
authority and details of the Qur'an.
>
> I am not oppressed simply because I have, thank God, been
spared the causes of oppression: Poverty, war, destitution, abuse,
illness and ignorance. I grew up in the Sudan of the 1970s, a time
before civil war and economic collapse. My mother was a university
professor, and my businessman father took us to Europe and spoke to
me about Shakespeare. These things make a difference. I think it is
deeply shameful that young girls are still circumcised in Sudan and
criminal that women in any part of the Muslim world can be denied
health care or education. Change and progress, though, are
happening, slowly but steadily, as Muslim societies acknowledge that
their unjust traditions are rooted in a culture that can evolve,
rather than in timeless religious values.
>
> Neither Muslims nor Muslim societies are static; they move
forward - but they have their own trajectory. They cannot be
replicas of the West. In 1985, when I graduated from the University
of Khartoum, I was the only female student in my statistics honors
class. When I visited the university a few months ago, the first
thing that caught my eye was the sheer number of young women on
campus - nearly 40 percent, compared with 20 percent in my day.
>
> In other areas, too, urban professional Muslim women are
advancing. The minister of economy and planning of the United Arab
Emirates is a woman. The Pakistani ambassador to the United Kingdom
is a woman. From 2001 to 2004, the president of Indonesia was a
woman. Muslim women have always had rights of property ownership,
but now they are active in business, the real estate industry and
the stock exchange.
>
> Things have been improving in our personal lives, too.
Polygamy is mostly out of fashion. Divorce, which has always been
allowed by the Shariah, has become easier and more socially
acceptable. It is still the norm for single women to live with their
families, but seeking work or education in another city is now a
legitimate reason for leaving home. In recent years, divorced and
widowed women have started to defy society by living alone. Although
patriarchal pressure on the young is still strong, women older than
50 have considerably more clout and leeway to live as they please.
>
> Islam restrains women, but it also restrains men. Both are
expected to accommodate their lives around the five daily prayers,
fasting during Ramadan, giving to charity and making the pilgrimage
to Makkah at least once in their lives. The 10 commandments that
Islam honors apply to both sexes.
>
> In the past, men could get away with flouting many
conventions simply because they were men. But one of the results of
greater education for Muslim women is that they now refuse to turn a
blind eye and instead insist that prohibitions that apply to them
must apply to their brothers and husbands as well. Among young
educated Muslims, it is now rare to find the kind of marriage
described by Naguib Mahfouz in the classic novel "Palace Walk," in
which the husband is a pleasure-seeking philanderer roaming through
Cairo's nightlife while his submissive wife is locked up at home.
>
> But despite all this, the West will still consider an
affluent, empowered, happy professional Muslim woman oppressed if
she dons a veil. The West's distaste for the hijab is no surprise;
Muslim liberals and progressives have also opposed the veil for
centuries. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey,
banned it. In 1923, Hoda Shaarawi, the mother of the Egyptian
feminist movement, removed her veil in Cairo's Central Station in a
defining moment in Muslim women's history.
>
> Yet over the years, Muslim women have gone back to wearing
the veil or have remained loyal to their national dress, which
usually includes some kind of head cover. Twenty years ago, when I
was recently married and a graduate student at the London School of
Economics, I, too, started to wear the hijab. I took this step with
no pressure from my parents or my husband. It came after years of
hesitation, years during which I held back out of fear that I would
look ugly in a head scarf and that my progressive friends would make
fun of me.
>
> But I had so often gazed with longing at the girls at
university who covered their hair, and I wanted to be like them. To
me they seemed romantic, feminine, wrapped in some kind of mystique.
I liked the look, but it was more than that. I was persuaded by the
religious argument for the veil, which stresses modesty. I wanted to
take a step in the right direction. Recently, Muslim progressives
have softened their stance against the veil. In some countries, the
hijab's widespread popularity has made it almost the norm, rather
than a gesture of defiance by a minority. Also, the veil has turned
out to be a red herring; it has not stalled Muslim women's
advancement, as was feared.
>
> I hope that in time the West will come to look at the veil
in a different light. It encourages me when a Western woman comments
on my head scarf. When one says "That is a lovely color" or asks "Is
that batik?" I feel that she has reached out to me. She has seen
that beyond the symbol is an item of clothing not unlike the veils
that Western women once wore to church, or the bonnets Laura sported
on the prairie. That mark of perceived female submissiveness is also
an accessory that can be purchased in any department store in the
West; it comes in gorgeous silks and beautiful hues.
>
> So I say, the sea is salty, but it is also blue and full of
fish.
>
> - Leila Aboulela is the author of two novels, "The
Translator" and "Minaret." E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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