Screaming Against the Wind
I asked a Christian colleague of mine who studies the Bible about the Prodigal Son parable. I have never fully understood it and when I told him that, he told me that it was my arrogance that kept me from understanding the story. He likened the story to arguing which ant is taller. The “good” son is one ant and the prodigal son is another ant. The ants are a metaphor for people, who are all sinners. The father of the two boys symbolizes God. According to the Bible, only God can forgive sins. The good son complains that he has always done the right thing whereas his wayward brother has not, and yet the father decides to forgive the wayward son and reward them both. In essence, the “good” brother is arguing which ant is taller because all humans are sinners and compared to God, we are all ants.
We are all flawed so who are we to judge another seems to be the takeaway lesson. And yet we do, from socio-political-economic engines that systematically marginalize the disenfranchised to the day to day harassment of someone who has been judged as “BAD”.
Unfortunately, the disenfranchised are more often than not female, undereducated, poor, and rural. In Nicholas d. Krstof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, the authors report how an intelligence officer at the Indian/Nepalese border laughed at the idea that watching out for trafficked girls at the border is as important as confiscating pirated goods. The officer’s logic was that prostitution is inevitable because what is a young man to do from the ages of 18 to 30 when he marries. (I won’t touch the subject of what a woman is supposed to do). The officer reasoned that kidnapped and enslaved Nepali girls, who were usually the nationality forced into sexual slavery in India, were an acceptable misfortune in order to keep “good girls” safe. When pointed out that the trafficked girls were “good girls” too, the officer replied that they were peasant girls from the countryside who could not read, and therefore were expendable to keep “good Indian middle-class girls safe.” Society looks the other way just as many antebellum Americans did because the victims look different from themselves (Half the Sky, pages 23-24). In reality, is any ant taller?
The World Economic forum rated 130 countries according to the status of women, and eight of the bottom ten were majority Muslim (Half the Sky, pg. 149). However, it is simplistic to blame a country’s religion when the oppression may be rooted in the culture even when oppressors cite religion as a justification for actions like honor killings. Historically, Islam is not misogynistic: when Muhammad introduced Islam in the seventh century, it was a step forward for women because it banned female infanticide and limited polygamy to four wives who were supposed to be treated equally. Muslim women owned property with their rights protected by law. At that time, women in Europe didn’t have equivalent property rights and the early Christian leader Tertullian called women “the gateway of the devil” (Half the Sky, pg 150-151). However, Christianity has progressed while conservative Islam remains largely the same. Although the Koran explicitly supports some gender discrimination in that a woman’s testimony counts for half a man’s testimony in a court of law and a daughter inherits half as much as a son, because it was originally progressive, it should not be allowed to become a defense for backwardness.
Nicolas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn offer Islam’s evolving view of slavery as support for oppression being rooted in culture and not religion. They cite that the Koran encourages the freeing of slaves as a noble act even though the prophet Muhammad had many slaves and Islamic law accepted slavery. Saudia Arabia abolished slavery in 1962 and Mauritania followed suit in 1981. Even though there was a strong cultural tie to slavery, the Islamic world renounced it. Mr. Kristoff and Ms. WuDunn question why Muslim countries don’t empower and enfranchise women since a precedent was set when the Koran was read differently with regard to slavery (Half the Sky, pg. 152). It seems that something other than religion decides which ant is taller. When is that something going to realize all ants are the same height?
