Terry,
Thank you very much for your considerate reply. Your careful reasoning makes a lot of sense. You are only too right that it is so easy to criticize others, and that we ourselves are not at the pinnacle of human development. I want to clarify something in regard to a comment you made, however:
But I'm not sure that the Muslim religion should the sole target of your just ire.
It was not my intention either to criticize the Muslim religion, certainly not in this post, or to vent any sort of ire, whether righteous or not. If I were to try to define my response to the movie I saw I'd say that I was mystified, surprised, confounded and, to some extent, encouraged by what I saw.
I don't know about you, but I have come across vitriolic criticism against Muslim traditions many times, and many times I myself have wanted to chime in and express my own disgust at those traditions. But the people who have verbally assaulted Muslims societies and traditions have almost never been "ordinary Muslims" themselves. They have been people from the west or refugees who have fled from oppression in Muslim countries. This movie, however, is actually the first example I have ever come across of a movie that is critical of aspects of the Muslim society without launching an all-out attack on it. The people behind this movie are Muslims themselves, who probably expect to keep on living and working and producing movies in Egypt. They criticize their Muslim society from within, so to speak, and encouragingly, the Muslim society of Egypt allowed the filmmakers to voice this criticism against it. We are certainly talking about a measure of freedom of speech here.
I know that when I read "westernized" criticism against the Muslim society, it has often attacked such things as enforced marriages, child marriages, polygamy, genital mutilation, honor killings and so on. Well, this movie broached none of those subjects. My definite impression of the movie was that it spoke to people who either don't worry about these particular problems or else are tired of hearing about them.
What I found so mystifying and surprising was the problems that the movie did present to us. I thought that almost all of what was shown as bad about the Egyptian society had to do with the twin facts that in Egypt marriage is regarded as a necessity for survival almost on a par with food and water, so that there is virtually no place for the unmarried person at all, and that marriage in Egypt appears to be an institution which turns the husband into the master and the wife into the servant or the slave. Marriage also seems to be a means for men to extort money from women, because two of the three episodes actually dealt with that particular problem.
I thought it was so very fascinating to see Muslim people themselves describe the problems that their society creates specifically for women.
I said that I was confounded, too. I was certainly hugely surprised at some of the assumptions that these people seemed to make about reality. How could one of the women possibly think she had the right to brutally clobber the young man who had had sex with her and her sisters, and then set him on fire? I gasped when she did it, and I gasped at the fact that the movie seemed to ask me to sympathize with the woman. Couldn't she see that under the circumstances, she and her sisters had
really tempted the young man? Couldn't she see that she and her sisters had contributed to the young man's sexual misbehaviour? And how could the movie ask me to feel sympathy for a brutal murderer?
Similarly, I gasped when the middle-aged man of the third episode not only accused his wife of having been unfaithful to him, but also when he was so utterly confident that his society would accept all his accusations against his wife and dismiss all her protests, even though he was the liar and the swindler and she was the victim of his nefarious scheme.
All in all, Terry, I thought it was so incredibly interesting to see Muslim people themselves define what they thought were the problems of their society. And it was most interesting too that I was so surprised at the situations that the movie showed me. Clearly I hadn't understood what Muslim women themselves might regard as the worst problems with their society.
Finally, a few words about the portrait of Islam as a religion in the movie. I saw no signs that the main character herself, the "Scheherazade" of the movie, was religious. Neither was her husband. However, one of the husband's middle-class colleagues briefly mentioned something that had happened when he prayed. As for the other characters in the movie, clearly the veiled woman was religious. But we never saw her pray or going to the mosque or performing any religious acts or anything like that. The woman who was falsely accused of infidelity was religious, but in her case her religiousness was mostly expressed as a conservative attitude towards extramarital sex.
Let me put it like this: Islam was always there in the background in the movie, but it was never portrayed as an oppressive force in itself.
To me this movie was a window into a world as it is perceived by people who have been brought up to see reality in a very different light than myself. And what I saw made me feel wonder and consternation, but not ire.
Ann
