Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic A view of Muslim marriages

Have you heard, as I have, that the situation is very bad for women in Muslim countries? Have you heard the same things about the treatment of women and girls in Muslim countries as I have? I have heard that girls are forced to marry men they don't know, that they are treated like property and constantly kept under "supervision" and "restraint", that they are sometimes married off when they are just children, that they are forced to accept being relegated to "second-class status" as their husband takes another wife, that they can be horribly punished or even killed if they break their family's "honor code", that they can be executed if they are raped, and so on.

But what does their situation look like to Muslim women themselves? Just the other day I saw an Egyptian movie called, I think, Scheherazade, tell me a story. (You wouldn't believe the language confusion: the movie was in Arabic, the subtitles were in English, but the title of the movie was in Swedish. Wow.)

Anyway, the original Scheherazade is the storyteller in the classic Arabic collection of fairy tales, Arabian Nights. She is the one who tells the stories about Aladdin, Ali Baba and others, but she has her own story to tell as well. And her story is a most horrible story about marriage. She is married to a king who loved his first wife, but after the first wife was unfaithful to him the king became the most horrible misogynist you can imagine. He had his wife executed, of course, but that wasn't all, not by half. No, he had to have a new wife, of course. But he wasn't going to give this wife the chance to cheat on him, so he had her executed after their wedding night. On the same day that he executed his second wife he married a third woman, and the next morning he had her killed. And so on. The king kept marrying and killing a woman a day, and in the end Scheherazade offered to marry the king to stop his relentless femicide. She accomplished this feat by telling stories to the king every night, and he could never have her executed, because when the morning came she was always in the middle of a story. The stories she told are the stories of Arabian Nights, and her own story is the story of a woman who has done nothing wrong but who must trick her husband into not executing her.



Scheherazade telling stories to her husband so that he won't kill her.

So the movie I saw was called Scheherazade, tell me a story. The Scheherazade of the movie was a woman slightly like Oprah Winfrey, but younger, slimmer and more elegant. She looked a little bit like Teri Hatcher's Lois Lane, come to think of it.



I found a picture! The woman is the actress who played the Egyptian TV hostess. The man is the actor who played her husband.

This woman, whose name I have forgotten, was the hostess of her own TV show as I said, and we saw her interview other women who told her about their lives. And wow, the stories they told her were so weird. They were stories about oppression, but not stories about enforced marriages or enforced polygamy or genital mutilation or any of that old stuff. But all the stories were about marriage, one way or another.

The first woman was such an outcast in her society that she had to live in an "asylum". (That's what the English subtitles called it, but I couldn't figure out exactly what it was. The place was a bit like a mental hospital.) The reason why this woman had to live in the asylum was that she was unmarried. And not only was she unmarried, but she was unmarried by choice, since she had turned down a suitor. Well, wow, you know. No wonder she had to be in a mental hospital. :rolleyes: How could she have made such a crazy choice? How could she have sent a suitor packing?

Well, the man who wanted to marry her had told her his conditions for making her his wife.
a) When they were married she would have to wear a veil.
b) She would have to keep working, but he would take control of her salary.
c) She would have to manage the household, but she could not make a single decision about anything without asking his permission first.
d) She would have to pay for all the furniture for their apartment and for all the costs of managing their household.
e) He would sell her car and take the money... okay, you get the picture.

The woman listened politely to all his demands, and when he was done she asked him this:

"So that's what I will do for you if we are married. But what will you do for me?"

"I will be your husband," he replied.

"What does that mean?" she asked. "What exactly will you do for me? How will you be my husband?"

"I will be your husband!" he roared. "Husband is husband!"

The woman was not satisfied with this answer, so she declared that she wouldn't marry the man. After that, she was considered so weird and impossible that no one wanted anything to do with her, and she had to live in the asylum.

The next woman who was interviewed was a poor woman wearing a veil. Everything about her suggested that she was a good woman with good, old-fashioned morals. But you wouldn't believe her story.

This woman and her two younger sisters were alone in the world after their father died. He had turned down all the suitors who had expressed an interest in his daughters, and when he died the girls had nothing but each other and the hardware shop that their father had owned. The shop was run by their father's apprentice, a young man named Said.

As the years went by the young women became ever more desperate. As unmarried women they were at the bottom of their society, with no status and no prospects whatsoever. Eventually the sisters decided that one of them should marry Said. He himself would get to choose which of them he wanted.

Said was at the bottom of society too, and like the sisters he had no prospects and no future. Like the sisters he was "unmarriagable", and like the sisters he was a virgin. Now, however, all three sisters expressed an interest in marrying him. Not only that, but the three sisters all hinted to him that they might be willing to sleep with him before marriage if only he would pick them as his future wife. It's not very surprising that Said started sleeping with all three sisters, is it?



Said about to have sex with one of the younger sisters after he has promised to marry her.

Each of the sisters thought that she was Said's chosen one, but eventually they found out that he had cheated on all three of them. The sisters were so horrified at this unbelievable betrayal that they became each other's enemies for life, and the eldest sister sent her younger sisters packing, even though they had no relatives in the world who might provide for them and nowhere to go. Then the eldest sister went to the hardware shop where Said worked and hinted that she wanted to sleep with him. She slipped behind a corner so that he couldn't see her. When he approached her, she hit him full force with a big heavy metal tool, and as he lay bleeding on the floor with a cracked skull she doused him with something flammable and set him on fire. And, you know, clearly the movie wanted us to sympathize with this woman. If any woman had the right to kill a man it was this woman, because the man she killed had made a mockery of marriage at her and her sisters' expense.

Wow.



The veiled blue-looking woman is the woman who killed a man and set him on fire.

The third episode was about a young woman dentist who was approached by a handsome and urbane middle-aged man. He courted her, and she quickly agreed to marry him. His and her families gathered with a lawyer and signed a marriage contract. Now the man and the woman were married, but the woman didn't want to sleep with her husband until they had undergone the equivalent of a "church wedding", particularly since her own family demanded that she guarded her virginity until the final marriage ceremony had taken place. However, the man wore down the woman's resistance and persuaded her to make love to him even though they hadn't had their "church wedding" yet. The reason why they hadn't had their wedding was because the villa they were going to live in hadn't been fully renovated yet.



The man persuading his wife to have sex with him, even though they have not undergone their final marriage ceremony yet.

The man and the woman kept sleeping with each other, and after a while the woman told the man that they had better have their wedding soon, because she was pregnant. Now the man dropped his bombshell. He accused the woman of having been unfaithful to him, because he was sterile. This wasn't something he had ever mentioned before. But because he claimed to be sterile she had to have been with another man if she was pregnant. It was a blatant lie, of course, and the woman asked the man to have a blood test so that they could prove that it was his child. But the man refused and reminded her that in a case like this a man was above suspicion, so he would automatically be believed by society while she as a woman would be regarded a liar. And because society would believe him and condemn her, he demanded that she pay him three million dollars, or else he would scandalize her and her family.

Wow.

These were the three episodes that women in Egypt told their "Scheherazade" in the movie. But "Scheherazade" had her own story to tell, just like her fairy tale namesake. She was married to a handsome and ambitious reporter who wanted to be Editor in Chief of the newspaper he worked for. But the members of the board were unhappy with his wife's TV show. They told the man that his wife had to stop telling such controversial stories on TV, or else someone else would be the editor. The wife wouldn't stop, however, and when her husband didn't get the job, he blamed his wife and beat her up really bad. The last story she told in her show was her own, the story of a beaten and battered wife.

Well, very interesting. The story of the battered wife is a painfully familiar one, but the other stories seemed utterly weird to me. They were all about the utter necessity of marriage, particularly for women, and about the oppressive impossibility of marriage for women at the same time.

Interestingly, however, marriage has been almost as necessary for women here in the west in the past as it was seen to be for women in Egypt in that movie. Think of Jane Austen's books. Her heroines seem to have to find a man to marry unless they are to die of boredom, poverty and passitivity. Because if women like her didn't marry, there was basically nothing else for them to do.



If young women like these ones couldn't get themselves a husband their lives would come to nothing, and soon they wouldn't even be invited to the balls.

Oh, but they could write books and become famous, couldn't they? Well, even that option was an iffy one. Remember that the Brontë sisters used male pseudonyms in order to get their books published in the first place. In Sweden in the late 1800s we had a female writer who was an internationally famous writer of bestsellers, and she became rich thanks to her books. She soon became the richest person by far of her own community. She could buy back the manor that her father had lost because of his gambling, and she made it the grandest house within miles and miles. But did that give her much of a status in her own community? No, because she was unmarried. When the people had their big community celebrations and parties, the rich and famous writer had to sit at a "humble table" with other people who had not done so well in life, while the respectable married women shared the "table of honor".



Selma Lagerlöf, the rich and famous 19th century writer who was not as good as the farmers' wives of her community because she was not married.

And a woman's reputation was totally dependent on her ability to stay in her husband's good graces, whether or not he himself was a good husband to her. I have read about a woman who was married to a merchant in a Swedish town in the 1800s. The man and a woman had a maid, and the man quickly started sleeping with the maid. The wife put up with the situation. But after a few years the man wanted them to get another maid, not because he wanted to get rid of the first one, but because he thought they needed two. No sooner had they hired the second maid than the man started sleeping with her, too, and now the wife had had enough. She went to court and asked for a divorce on the grounds of infidelity. The man actually admitted sleeping with his two maids, and the woman was eventually granted her divorce. Afterwards she had to live in a tiny room in an attic with her daughter, because she had basically no money after her divorce. The man kept living with his two maids in his grand house, and he may or may not have married one of them. The local priest, who was in charge of the church registers, wrote in those official registers that the woman in the attic was "divorced". The man who lived in the grand house with the two maids was "a man of honor".

This situation is so totally different from what we have today in the west, when a marriage is basically a "love contract" between two equal parties. But seeing that Egyptian movie, which was partly set in a glitteringly modern world, was like seeing the oppressive mores of the past transplanted into a world of modernity.

Ann

Let me state at the outset of my comment, Ann, that I agree with you that women should not be treated in the manner which the movie you reviewed describes. Not ever. Women are far too valuable to society in general and as human beings to be marginalized and treated as being less important than men simply because they're women, irrespective of their geographic location.

But I'm not sure that the Muslim religion should the sole target of your just ire. Remember that the societies in which the Muslim faith is predominant have long histories which reach back before the advent of the prophet, and many of the situations you describe in your introduction were (and still are) cultural in nature, not religious.

While I am not Muslim, nor do I subscribe to its tenets, I have done some casual study of its origins. One of the things Muhammad battled against was the open immorality practiced by the tribal chieftains in his society. Believe it or not, the prevailing condition for women in society under Muhammad's direct teaching was better than it had been before.

There is a tendency among some to link social behaviors to the prevailing religion of that society. For example, the Rabbinical debates on the justification for divorce which are recorded in the Torah (dating from the time of Jesus) range from limiting the grounds for divorce to infidelity (which is what the Old Testament records) to justifying divorce if the wife burns the husband's breakfast a certain number of times. Is it fair, then, to condemn Judaism for allowing divorce over a trivial matter? No. It is fair to condemn the attitudes and actions of some who claimed to be faithful Jews, but it isn't fair to clobber all Jews for the actions and attitudes of a minority.

You might respond that the minority of Muslims do not share the views you've described, but that the vast majority of Muslims do. You'd have a valid point. My only concern is that we be careful in throwing undeserved mud on people because of their religion. Remember, we have to look at the history and culture of a people, too. The majority of Muslims in the United States, for example, do not practice honor killing, forced marriage, multiple marriage, or any of the other things which horrify you so (and which also deeply disturb me).

And just because we all live in the year 2010, it doesn't mean that we're at the pinnacle of human development. That same sentiment has been put forth innumerable times in many ages, and it was no more justified then than it is now. People aren't perfect just because we've survived for a certain number of years, and societies (whether Western, Eastern, Southern, or whatever) always have more room for growth and maturity.

Ann,

If you are interested in reading how women are treated in other cultures, you might find Princess (ISBN #0967673747) interesting. Reading it certainly made me grateful that I live where I do.

Joy,
Lynn

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:

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

Lynn, thank you for your reading suggestion!

Ann

You know, with the three sisters story, it sounds like there was plenty of bad judgment to go around. The women shouldn't have done what they did, the man shouldn't have done what he did and the eldest sister should definitely have done what she did. None of the four sound blameless to me.

Anyway, I checked around and the only place I can find this movie available here will be through netflix, and they don't even have it yet.

Tara

Well, if you say so...

Kidding aside, I think all four of them did something they shouldn't have, but consider the consequences of the young man's actions. Even if he had married one sister, the other two would have been 'dishonored' for the rest of their lives, living as outcasts in a society with too strict rules regarding premarital sex. (I'm not advocating free love or anything like that, mind you.)

Also, I think it's a bad idea to say the whole mysogynist problem is a purely muslimic one. Sure, there are a lot of women suffering in muslimic countries, but then, there is an increasing number of young Muslimas who are self-assured, who wear their veil (or whatever) with pride and who actually attend college. I've also had the pleasure of getting to know a fellow student who was just like that, and I was pretty amazed to realize that her ideas of an ideal relationship were much more modern than my own. (Yeah, I'm a little old-fashioned when it comes to relationships.)

Mellie, when you put it like this, it struck me that maybe the woman's murder of the man was in fact an honor killing. The three sisters had hoped to use the young man to elevate their position in society a little bit, by getting one of them married, but instead the man ruined the sisters' last bit of social capital, their honor. Not that the sisters didn't contribute to it themselves, as I said.

But maybe the murder of the man was indeed an honor killing. Maybe the woman did it to show her society that she would resort to this last desperate measure to salvage even a little bit of her and her sisters' ruined reputation.

Finally, if you plan to see the movie, I'd like to give you a word of warning. The woman who was accused of infidelity by her husband and who had her baby repudiated by him had an abortion in the movie. We were shown the abortion, too. It was no fun.

Ann

I don't think this murder was an honor killing. As far as I know, honor killings are performed to "restore" someones "honor", usually a man's. But, since all three sisters lost their virginity, there was nothing to restore (apart from with surgery), so killing the man did not do them any good. All three sisters would have fared better (socially) if all of them had married him instead. At least they would not have lost their "honor" in the eyes of the people around them.

Certainly it was not a traditional honor killing. I was thinking, however, that it might be a woman's version of an honor killing, if that makes any sense at all. I don't really think that Egyptian women who see the movie would describe the woman's murder of a man as an honor killing, but subconsciously, a female Egyptian audience may sense a degree of similarity to a "real" honor killing, whose purpose is to restore a degree of honor to a man who has been dishonored by a woman. Or maybe Egyptian women wouldn't see any such similarity at all! Frankly, Mellie, I'm just trying to make sense of that episode in the movie, since it was so baffling to me.

I think I learnt one thing from the movie, however. It is probably not uncommon at least in Egypt for couples to promise each other marriage and then start sleeping with each other, even though the formal wedding has not taken place. Clearly women would be very vulnerable in such a system, since their society condemns them so mercilessly if they lose their virginity or, God forbid, become pregnant and then find themselves abandoned by the man who promised to marry them.

Finally, as for what you said about the possibility for unmarried women to choose polygamy as a way to achieve a higher status in the Egyptian society. I don't think that Said, a very poor person, would be taken at all seriously as a man with many wives. I think people would laugh at the sisters for sharing such an unimpressive husband. Besides, I'm not sure that the Egyptian society would allow sisters to marry the same man. In any case, the movie did not discuss the possibility of polygamy at all.

I may of course be completely wrong about the reasons why polygamy was never mentioned as a possibility by the movie.

Ann

Oops, little typo, there. We just finished moving and I have a cold so I'm a little tired. That was meant to read "definitely shouldn't".

In this case, imo, the women showed bad judgment first, as there couldn't have been any way they could be sure he'd follow through on his end of the deal and they knew how their society would regard them if he didn't. He should have had better self control, too. OTOH, I also can't support murder in a situation like that. Self defense is one thing, this was something completely different.

Of course, I also don't think very highly of any society that represses women or where you have to be married to have any kind of standing.

Tara

Yeah, I figured it was a typo, yet it was a cute typo.

And I have to agree with you on all points. As to the motive, looks like plain old jealousy to me.

But why did the movie portray the female murderer as so righteous? Guess where she was living after serving her prison sentence of fifteen years? She was living with her own prison guard, a kind-hearted old woman who had opened her home for this particular prisoner who had nowhere to go after she had served her sentence. It wasn't as if the prison guard was running some sort of hotel business for former prisoners who had nowhere to go after they had been released from prison, but she felt so sorry for this particular murderer. Why would you feel so sorry for a murderer who has killed another person out of plain old jealousy and spite?

But in the Arabic world, honor killings are regarded as a "better" kind of killings, since they are carried out to restore the honor of entire "families of men" who have been dishonored by the actions of one particular woman. Here we had a "family of women" who had been dishonored by the actions of one particular man. If I am right that it is a common enough practice in Egypt to start sleeping with another person after the two of them have promised to marry each other, then it can be regarded as particularly dishonorable to give such a promise to three persons, if you only intend to marry one of them.

Well, if the murder that the woman carried out was an honor killing, or even if it was "patterned after an honor killing", it clearly didn't work if it was intended to restore the honor of the three sisters. But maybe the movie was telling us that women have the same right as men to kill to restore their honor.

Well, hmmmm. I'm not asking for that kind of women's lib myself.

I'll stop going on about this now. I was just so utterly mystified that the movie was treating a murderer with such respect, but to me the "honor killing motive" offers an explanation for that.

Ann

I've not been following this one too closely and I certainly wouldn't count myself as being in any way knowledgeable about the subject, but this caught my eye and I'm curious, Ann, about that phrase in quotes - families of men - and wondering where it comes fun.

Only because, sadly, it is often the entire family that feels honour must be restored by killing - often mothers are as much participants in that as their husbands. I read of one case, where a young woman here in the UK was lured to her parents home and it was her mother who pushed her to the ground and then sat on her chest, holding her down so that the father could kill her.

So it's not just the men in a family, it seems.

LabRat

LabRat, you are right. In societies where honor killings are in any way a part of the existing traditions, so that these killings are more "acceptable" than other killings, I completely agree with you that the women often sympathize with the system so that they, too, feel dishonored if a girl who belongs to their family behaves in such a way that she is seen as a disgrace to her family. In other words, when a girl is killed for dishonoring her family, the female members of her family usually support the killing of her.

But there are a few factors that make honor killings a crime which is generally committed by men against women. It is usually the behaviour of a girl that makes the family feel dishonored. As far as I know, the only reason for a family to feel sufficiently dishonored by a son that they need to have him killed to restore the family honor is if the son takes part in homosexual activities. Since that is probably a lot more uncommon than girls having forbidden heterosexual sex (or are accused of having that kind of sex, or have been raped, etcetera) many more girls than boys will be killed to restore their family's honor. Also, the actual killing of the errant family member is almost always carried out by men.

My point is that we might see a gender reversal and a possible female version of the traditional honor killing in this movie.

Ann

P.S. I should perhaps add that my expression "families of men" came from two Swedish sources, one from the sister of young woman who was killed while she was visiting relatives in Pakistan. The sister described how several male relatives pounded on the victim and killed her. The other source is a book in Swedish where two male reporters, one ethnic Swede and one, I think, of Turkish descent, have interviewed men who have actually "honor-killed" a daughter or another female relative. These men described their own acute sense of shame at the errant girl's behaviour, but they also said that they had been under pressure from male relatives to kill the girl, since these male relatives also felt disgraced by the girl.

To top it off, there is another trend, at least in the honor killings occurring in Germany. (And, yes, there are a number of cases.) Quite often, a young male who is less than 21 years old (and thus, *might* still be given a lighter sentence like a youngster) or even a young man of less than 18 years will be persuaded to do the deed so nobody will have to spend a life sentence in prison. (For people up to 18 years, the highest sentence for murder is 10 years, and that will almost always be reduced by 3 or 4 years for good behavior. For people of 18 to 21 years, they can be considered adult or juvenile by the law, often resulting in a lesser sentence.) Personally, I find that highly disturbing.

To expand on what Terry said, I agree that it is more about culture than about religion. Remember that until very recently in our history, women were considered beneath men in both America and Europe, where the prevailing religion is Christianity.

Women have gradually gained independence, rights and respect in Western countries. The respect and independence have been slow in coming and happened more on an individual basis over the last few hundred years. It was a huge jump forward when legal rights were guaranteed when women were given the vote (1920) as well as the equal rights movement of the 1960's.

In the 1800's and in some places up until the 1960's in case of divorce, the children automatically were granted to the father. Until the 60's in many places a woman could not have a bank account or a piece of property unless it had a male name on it along with hers.

Also, the attitude towards "spinsterhood" and <GASP!> divorce were just scandals.

While I agree the way women are treated in Middle Eastern countries is appalling, I would definitely blame it more on culture than on religion.

First let me iterate that not all Muslims condone 'Honour Killings' while sadly yes it does occur and there have been many high profile cases and wide spread debate about this act it does not mean that all Muslims follow this.

I remember a Reglious Ethics class I did in school comparing Christianity to Islam on the subject of marriage and divorce and found it interesting that all my preconceived notions about Islam and the role of women were entirely wrong. From what I can remember of it the arrangement is a little bit like a contract and women do get a say when it was being drawn up. My teacher had used an example of a women she met who was well educated who when she got married stipulated that she wasn't required to wear the hijab during her daily routine. I also have met many Muslim women who do not wear it.

Keeping in mind that the media love to play up story divorce while not ideal is actually allowed without the notion of women ending up being killed in the name of family honour.

I agree with the statement made by others that culture plays a major part in the way people view others. Also I've brought this up before that everyone interprets the religious texts differently and there is always going to be someone who takes things too far. From what I know of Islam none of the publicised incidences of extreme behaviour doesn't in anyway represent Islam in any way.