Independent Women

Caveat: I do not pretend to think that by writing about this I am some sort of expert or have considered the sociological influences of this matter from multiple angles. This is not meant to be eloquent but just a gut reaction.


BBC today featured today a story about an exclusively female hotel that has just opened in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This is a hotel run by women, for women with female IT personnel, housekeeping, front staff and bellhops.


Gut reaction: Great!
That's so great to provide women with a place where they can relax, not have to wear the full abaya, and feel safe from the perusal of men.


Following reaction: Feminist
Why should a woman have to feel threatened by the perusal of men because they're not completely covered head to toe in stifling black fabric?


Final reaction: Sadness
This is just not how Jesus intended it. My friend Jason spoke very thoughtfully last night to what changed after Creation that set man and God apart. Creation was very good when God was walking with man and woman in the cool of the garden. Man worked and tended to the garden and the woman helped the man. When we ate from the tree of good and evil, it wasn't that the fruit in itself contained the knowledge of good and evil and that is what separated us from God...


Woman and man ate the fruit in direct opposition to the will of God which had man's good in mind (Gen 2:17- in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die). When we went in the opposite direction of God's will, our eyes were open to a new measure of whether what Adam and Eve were doing was very good and in God's will or not. This new measure is the measure of good and evil. Where did they fall in the spectrum? Well Adam believed himself more good than Eve, and Eve saw herself more good than the serpent. From that point forward, we've been judging ourselves and the healthiness of our lives against the good-ness of others' lives.


This situation brings that contrast into a startling light. Extreme Islamic cultures continue to be the Adam, blaming the Eve for their failings. This sends women under covers, hiding in hotels where they can be safe, dangerously submitting to paths they've been ordered to follow. One of the Saudi IT specialists said, "It's not easy to work in a company, male and female together, so I feel really lucky." This is just not the natural order of things! God saw that it was not good for Adam to be alone and made Eve. Not good to be alone! We are meant to be complementary, men and women and to work together.

Jesus, reconcile our world to you, your will, and your order.

Atrocity

In that same vein (as the Bolivia-awareness blog), today I read yet another article about female suicide bombers in Iraq. This is my reaction:


floored
disgusted
discouraged
angry
sad, very very sad
mad
confused

No, I did not use a thesaurus. So you got my unfiltered, gut reactions. I began to think about a year ago that these women are forced into becoming suicide bombers, rather than choosing that path themselves. After all, there isn't even a fabled heaven of virgins awaiting a female martyr in Islam. After reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini I began to get a picture of the horrors of life as a female in a radical Islamist nation (Afghanistan in this book). An unethical, immoral, unfathomable responsibility is placed on the woman for the ludeness and violence of a man. Raped? Your fault! You allured the man and forced him to take you. Abused by your husband? Your fault! You're antagonistic and rebellious!


Now I would never consider myself a feminist, but I am absolutely appalled by the news confirming my most awful nightmares about the plight of the female. There is a woman (and thus I assume women) manipulating this sense of responsibility on the Muslim female. A woman! A mother of 6 is the one doing this! According to now 2 articles I have read (the first above), a woman has admitted to recruiting 80 female bombers, 23 who went through with committing suicide. She's not only preying on their helplessness by claiming to offer them liberation from their domestic lives, as I had suspected. Worse. She is actually orchestrating them being raped so that she can offer them restoration of their dignity by blowing themselves up. ........ !!!!!!!!


I usually try to keep it light here, but seriously. Please be aware. I have no idea how else to help the situation. If you are of the Muslim faith and are reading this, I don't know what to say. I suppose I would feel this way if I had read about the atrocities performed by soldiers in the Crusades. I like to think I would have stood up then. I can't believe this is all happening in the name of a faith and would especially upset if it were being done in the name of the faith I held. I'm rambling because I'm upset.


So the last thought I have is the words we were singing last night,


"God above all the world in motion. God above all my hopes and fears. I don't care what the world throws at me now. It's gonna be all right! Cause I know my God saves the day and I know his word never fails and I know my God made a way for me.


Salvation is here."