Week 10

This weeks readings were “Feminism and Modernity in the Middle east” by Lila Abu- Lughod and “The Tradition Effect: Framing Honor Crimes in Turkey” by Dicle Kogacioglu. The first reading focused more on how women need an education if they want to manage their house. People believed that women didn’t need an education to manage their households because they thought that the only person that mattered in the house was the men. The men were the ones who were expected to have an education not women. This part of the reading showed how society gave this role to women, a role of inferiority. Whereas society gave men the role of authority over women, when in fact both should be equal. At the beginning of the article the author tells us how man were told that a good wife should be intelligent, piety, continence, modest, loving, able to control her tongue, be obedient to her husband and devoted to her own family. After reading this I think of how again women need to be submissive in order to be considered a good wife. Later on in the article, it explains how when women get education become more important and actually have a role in the house hold; not like before when their only job was to give birth to a child. This time they were able to give advice their husband, take care of their finances, and raise their children without the need of nanny raising their children. It was a huge step when women were able to obtain an education because it was merely an idea in the beginning, no one did anything about it. That was until Adalat published in a journal all the arguments in favor of women getting an education. One part of the article that I like was at the end when it says “Why do they not know yet that woman and man in this world are like the two wheels of a carriage: they must be equal, neither having privilege over the other. If one of the two wheels of a carriage is deficient, it will be impossible for it to move” that part was written by Shanax Azad . After reading this quote I started to think that everything does need to be balanced because when society won’t allow everyone to progress then we will be stuck in the same place. Now women are important and we need to open our eyes and see how important women are in society.

The second article was about the honor of crime and how women are killed by their own family members if they do not approve of their sexual behavior. After reading this article I began to relate it to the women genocide in Central America and how these types of crimes are dismissed. In the article it says that when a women in killed because of honor crime it is fine because that is their tradition. A tradition that you can not change. However when a man is affected by this tradition then the state institution will try anything to make sure it doesn’t happen to a man. Again I related this to the women genocide because in those countries when a women is killed no one would say or do anything because the judicial system would work in favor of the killers just like the judicial systems works in favor of the people that killed the women because of the honor crime. For example when I was reading a part in the article that stated that the judges would use articles of the criminal code to reduce the sentence of someone that was on trial because of an honor crime, which is completely ridiculous. It was interesting how when judges were asked about what their thoughts were in these types of crimes they were simply said that it was s unlucky and cruel turn of tradition. They have the power to do something about it but prefer to stay quiet. This article shows the cruel reality of how a man’s life is more valuable than a women’s life, which I think is this week’s reading connect  because both of the articles have a similar theme that is how women are not treated equally and how society does nothing to change this.