Essays on Muslim Women

Introduction

Arabs, particularly from Middle East and North Africa have unique psychological challenges that are associated with the back rash that has been brought about by terrorism. In addition to the increased misconception of their religion being associated with the vice, they also face cultural challenges that dictate how they are supposed to live. There are numerous studies that have been carried out among the Arab women on the subject of their mental health. This paper will address the epidemiology of their condition, focusing on the special group on the immigrants, while comparing them with their counterparts at home and ...

Religion and sports have a long history that has lasted through millenniums. Sometimes the two old acquaintances have worked together, and sometimes they have been in conflict, but they have retained some form of connection. Wherever one of the two exists, there are at least small vestiges of the other. Even in the highest forms and levels of sports there lurks religion, just as the competition of sorts always appears even in the highest levels of the church. Given the long history that the two have shared, it is only natural to conclude that religion continues to shape the ...

The covering of head is typical for all three main religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In the course of the centuries, many things have been changed though the tradition of covering a woman’s head not only in a sacred place but in everyday life too is still alive and carries out in Muslim lifestyle. Why is it so strong? Is it more than just clothes?

Qur’an explains the dress code for the believers and established several rules about clothes for both men and women.

The first rule says that clothes must be nice and luxurious but the best garment for a faithful person is righteousness. “O Children of Adam! We have bestowed raiment upon you to cover ...

Affiliated Institution

Introduction In order to understand the cultural practices of other people and our own without being affected by ethnocentrism, we can use the guideline of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is about understanding the cultural practices of other cultures by examining them from the contexts of those who practice them. Similarly, we can understand our cultural practices better by examining them from the context of others or outsiders. Ethnocentrism pushes a person to perceive his/her culture as superior to others, making it difficult to understand other cultures. This also makes it difficult to understand another culture from an emic perspective ...

Abercrombie and Fitch Case Analysis

Abercrombie & Filch is a fashion company that has been dogged by numerous lawsuits and cases regarding employee discrimination. The company has been accused of discriminating employees based on race and appearance. Since the turn of the 21st century, Abercrombie has been slapped with numerous lawsuits concerning employee discrimination on various grounds. This paper will conduct an in-depth analysis of these cases and provide relevant responses.

Appearance

Regarding appearance, Abercrombie’s CEO, Mike Jeffries, has been accused of favoring “thin, tall, and white models” over the “not so good-looking” staff. Moreover, Abercrombie reportedly does not allow staff to put on scarves ...

The feminist movement has been a vibrant one for the past couple of decades, not only in the United States but all across the world. There have been politically powerful and culturally influential campaigns and movements regarding women’s liberation and consciousness. The feminist movement involved several projects in the government bureaucracies, different institutions, and professions. These movements have brought about major changes in the lives of many women and their professions. Despite the acceptance of women’s equality and prominent accomplishments, the feminist movement has yet to achieve its absolute goals of gender equality (Epstein 2001). The focus ...

Legal and Social Response to Forced Marriage

Critical Review Introduction Adhering to one's cultural beliefs is important although some cultural activities are controversial and destructive in the face of the modern civilization. However, paying attention to the complexities of the social constructs and the cultural makeup of a community is essential before placing any critic on the cultural behavior of such a community. Additionally, governments and other organizations should have positive motives when they intervene in communities they deem to have unacceptable cultural behavior. Sometimes, western societies view their ways of life as superior to those of the Third World countries. Some cultural activities such as ...

Children of Dust

Children of Dust is a book about the evolution of the author from Abir, Amir, in reformist blogger Ali Eteraz. In his book, he tells his story since childhood from a village in Pakistan and ending his life in the United States and his attitude to Islam. The story of Eteraz’s life makes it possible to consider in detail the complexity of the lives of many Muslim children and the process of their search for themselves and relation to their faith. Most of his childhood Abir and his family were very poor and lived in squalid conditions in ...

Introduction

Canada is known internationally as a peacekeeping nation that does not take part in larger imperialist agendas and is a haven for refugees and immigrants. This has caused the country to adopt multicultural state policies meant to provide a safe and progressive environment for its diverse society. However, the country has a history of indigenous colonization, slavery, white settlement policies, and racialized immigration policies meant to settle people of color. Despite the multicultural policies being in place, Canada’s history has influenced racism in the nation with the Canadian minorities being marginalized socially, politically, culturally and economically. This essay ...

The Middle East has long been known for its willingness and active practice of imprisoning citizens for politically based reasons. For example, anyone who stood against the authoritarian powers in those nations have often been taken as political prisoners, in the regime’s continued attempts to maintain absolute control. However, as nations in the region experience political reform, prisoners are being released and those nations are seeking ways to come to terms with, and move beyond their history of political oppression (Amnesty International 1). It is my opinion that countries in the Middle East should release current political prisoners ...

2016

Sydney, New South Wales This report was completed as an assessment in the

Introduction

Immigrants develop a sense of place in their new country and eventually are able to call it home. They normally integrate into the community into which they have arrived and start to develop a meaningful sense of belonging – being part of the Australian way of life and being able to participate in activities and values which are important to them. However, many Muslim women are not allowed to happily adjust to their new surroundings nor are they able to maintain their cultural norms and spiritual beliefs ...

I find the Rachel R. Chapman ethnography intriguing because it gives very interesting insights in a global health initiative on maternal health care and how maternal mortality rates in Southern Africa, particularly in Central Mozambique, can be improved. Reading on, I find some of the things addressed in the book weird and absurd; it doesn’t make sense to me that pregnancies are actually, for the longest time possible, hidden from others, or how they expose someone to social threats, envy and ill will. I think pregnancy is supposed bring joy to the pregnant woman and the community at ...

April 8,2016

Irshad Manji: The Trouble with Islam; A Muslim’s Call for Reform Irshad Manji wrote her book The Trouble with Islam in 2003 - 2004 as an open letter. The author expressed her doubts and questions to the Muslim and non - Muslim people regarding the rigidity of Islam religion, seeking true answers. Muslim-born author Menji outlined major challenges for modern Muslims in order to get better and get rid of outdated traditions. According to Manji, Muslims keep practicing outdated traditions that make many Muslim countries stay backward. In 1972, as a four year old girl, she arrived to ...

Muslim women in the U.S

The American society is an amalgamation of hundreds of nationalities living together and thriving in a world equally. America is known all around the globe as a symbol of freedom and independence. It is a country where people can be what they want to be without the fear of being judged or condemned. This thought gives the presumption that people of all faiths, ethnicities and creeds can coexist peacefully without having to face criticism and hatred. However, this is different in the case where one group and religious minority in the country targeted and ostracized for their views. The ...

I have been studying in the United States since 2009 and have observed that Muslim women who wear the hijab in US society are taken as the chief representatives of Islam, far more than Muslim men or those Muslim women who dress without it. In fact, research has shown that women who wear the hijab are often viewed as fervent Muslims and even Islamic ‘fanatics’ as they are easily differentiated from non-Muslims in the society (Ebaugh, 2005). In effect, those who do not choose to cover themselves or their heads will never be judged on their appearance, occupation, faith ...

The western intervention into the Middle East is one that has been seen to cause an unending debate of whether the move is of great help to the region or a source of problems. Many will agree with the statement that western intervention, or westernization for that manner, though showing countless evidences of force and spite, has in its process brought many positive changes and been hugely beneficial in a manner that without it, the Middle East would never have been where it is today. However, there are many who still have the belief that the countries would have ...

The term representation is used to refer to the construction of meaning through various symbols and images (Sisler, 2008). Cultures, races, and religions are represented in different forms of media around the world, but in most scenarios these representations are filled with stereotypes making western cultural ideologies and beliefs as better or ideal compared to other forms of cultural ideologies. The portrayal of Arab- Muslim Americans or Muslims in general, within the media of the United States focuses on the idea of agenda setting and the dominant ideology which frames the perceptions of mainstream America (Gerhauser, 2014). The United ...

Mernissi, a Muslim woman who grew up in the Middle East in a traditional Muslim harem, with women and other children, compares the “Western harem” to be much worse than the restrictions of the Eastern harem. What she calls the Western harem, is the standard of beauty in the West that is so restrictive to women’s sense of self. The author compares the Western standard of beauty as a very oppressive problem for women, much more damaging than anything she has experienced in her native country. The argument from her perspective is that the Western version of men ...

The media exists as a particularly invasive as well as informative source of stereotyping that in an attempt to remain objective allows the subjectivity of others to give way to over-generalized beliefs of other cultures. While many feel it necessary to blame the various media sources that feed the fires of stereotyping the media is meant only as the vessel and nothing else. This belief however has been altered throughout the years as the beliefs and practices of several cultures have been categorized and rudely stuffed into the stereotypes that society has forced upon them. A perfect example of ...

In this paper, we would like to dwell on some issues concerning knowledge, religion, and women rights. Things that would appear impossible to link are actually strongly connected. As an object for our discussion, we took a book ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ written by Khaled Hosseini. One of the main topics of the book is an unfair and abusing treatment of Muslim women and their luck of knowledge to deal with it. What is knowledge itself? Due to the Oxford dictionary, it is a fact, information, or skill that a person receives through experience. This definition could be used ...

According to Byng (2008) the use of power and the policies introduced by the United States government, in combination with the backlash of the September 11th attacks, and other extremist terrorist activities, have together created a high level of misunderstanding and of resentment against people of the Muslim faith in the United States. As a result, they suffer from a high level of discrimination, and resulting social inequality. One of the areas in which this is most visible is their access to, and treatment during, medical care. According to Stubbs (2003), following September 11th the Muslim population became the ...

Gender inequality is a predicament of all women, especially the Muslim women, but musawah, an Islamic movement, is on the right path of rescuing Muslim women from this bondage via encouraging them to make their own interpretation of the Quran- will the movement succeed in bringing gender equality? The musawah movement was coined with the intention of enlightening Muslim women in order to achieve gender equality. The movement has adopted several, relevant, mechanisms that will aid in the achievement of its goal; for example, providing education programs that are intended to enlighten the Muslim women as well as encouraging ...

On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda, an extremist Islamist organization, committed the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S history. No one in the world will ever forget that dark moment when two passenger planes, cutting through the blue sky, crashed into the iconic twin towers of the World Trade Center, leading them to collapse to the ground. In the aftermath of this tragedy, anti-Muslim sentiments and fear have grown significantly within the United States. In fact, while innocent Muslim-Americans are being subjected to discrimination at the hands of a section of American society, the notorious terrorists who actually committed the ...

How does intersectionality theory help understand “veiling” in ways outside the “dominant” western view of veiling as a form of subjugation? How do women in Mirza’s study navigate agency and resistance in relation to their transnational identity in UK? It has been observed and argued over the years that the transnational Muslim women who come to Britain from postcolonial societies, nations, and cultures from prehistoric era find a difficult position in the intersecting and dominant faces of race, gender, and class. Therefore, in order to fully and aptly analyze and understand the impact of these dynamics of race, ...

Introduction

Australia is one of the many countries in which moral panics have resulted to elevated racism. The concerns about crime and the fear of crime in many Australian cities including Sydney have greatly shaped lifestyles and have influenced the qualities of life. It is evidently that crime in many Australian cities is continually being linked to immigrants and other ethnic minorities. In Australia, in the recent years, the issue of crime committed by ethnic minorities and immigrants has been the subject of many media headlines and has greatly shaped policies, both domestic and international. The 9/11 attacks in the ...

Dress is regarded as marker of identity. Dress in which veil is given importance is common is Middle Eastern clothing style. However, majority of women when talk about dress, they consider fashion, modesty, and convenience with reference to their religion and values as their reasons and logic for veiling. But, it is also a fact that every style related to clothing has its own aesthetic, and is an indication of control, social discipline, and pleasure (Ingham & Lindisfarne-Tapper, 2014). Dress is used for creation and confirmation or contesting collective and personal identities. This is because of the fact that every ...

Gender inequality has become a major issue in the society today with countries, governments, organizations, and gender activists, both men and women, joining the fight against gender inequality. Gendering starts early in childhood and is embedded in our institutions and family set ups. Role models in the society treat boys and girls differently from infancy and this becomes the onset of gender inequality which then proceeds on to maturity. Gender inequality is more prevalent in some societies than it is in others. The Muslim community has been on the frontline of gender inequality with most women being subjected to ...

Why do Muslim women cover their hair?

It is the commonly approved norm among the followers of Islam that a Muslim woman needs to cover-up her head and most part of her hair exposing just her face. This general norm is part of the general, accepted dress code and social practice norms which Islam preaches. This dress code suggestion is hence an integral fraction of the existing standard social system of Islam, and the materialization of significant common principles of Islam, that are applicable to all believers of Islam. Precisely, a modern, well-educated Muslim woman follows the norm about covering her hair because she prefers to ...

The roles of women in Iraq and America compared to men are due to customs and traditions rather than religion. The rights of women in Iraq have improved through the years, their views and perception may still be old fashioned. And it is the main difference on Iraqi and American culture. Just like any other Asian countries, Iraq has very strong family ties. And the women are viewed as devoted and hard-working wives. Compared in America, women there take pride in being independent, expressing their own views and proving to that they can be capable of being more than ...

Islamic Dress Code

The roots of the Islamic veil can be traced to 13th Century B.C. in Mesopotamia which was by then symbol of social class to the natives and not religion (Sultan-ul-Qalam, 2006). The veil was a distinctive feature between the women in the royal harem and their ordinary counterparts. It was mandatory that all the Women in Assyria, Mesopotamia, put on the veil to cover their heads with the exemption of the prostitutes. For Assyrian schoolgirls, it was an obligation that they put on the veil at all times in the conformation of the Muslim Sharia Law. This was at a time ...