Happy Holidays

I hope you all have happy holidays
I wish you a relaxing 7aj holiday, with lots of eadiyas and family reunions, without much slaughtering of sheep. And making sure that the poor beasts are not gone to waste, but food for the needy.

I wish you a merry Christmas with decorations that enlighten your lives and doesn’t exhaust your pockets, nor add to more energy waste. And I hope you’ll leave those turkeys alone.

I wish you a happy Hanukkah without wasting so much energy on candles and adding insult to injury in global warming.

And since this time is the season for holidays for all the three monolithic religions, isn’t time that they start having one holiday since they all basically come from the same original source?

My holiday this year is different though; I will be leaving to Kentucky soon for my daughter’s wedding, only the paperwork formalities will be done for now. Next summer will be the wedding party. So wish her luck, she’s the first to leave her parent’s home from my children and I’m so excited to see her start her own life, and also worried a bit.
Mothers do worry, you know!

Until I see you again, have a blast

Halleluiah, Now Moslem Women Can Break a Leg! (2)

For quite some time Ream felt the euphoric satisfaction of a newly discovered internal power. The feeling was so liberating. For years she dreaded getting into an argument with Ali. Ali never respected her as an equal when taking important family decisions, to him there was only one captain to the ship, he ordered and the rest obeyed without discussion or objection, or that’s what he sought. When things went against his wish, most of the time as a result of some decision that Ream had to make because he was not there in the first place to order the “right” action, he’d growl with a deafening roar, alarming the household by breaking everything at his sight. With time Ream developed a phobia from raised voices, she just wanted peace at any price, and regardless of her apparent strong façade, just a slight rise in Ali’s tone hyperventilated her. But the years of workout in the gym has finally paid off, at last she was free from fear, but not from guilt. Long after her grandmother’s death, Ream still could see her wagging a finger at her, warning of disobedience to her husband; a good Muslim wife does not have the right to disobey her husband, angles curse her and forever she is doomed, in this life and hereafter. Guilt brought sadness and remorse, she prayed to God for forgiveness, and for some understanding of the actions that she lost control over. A more reason for her to feel helpless as a continuous source of sin.
This story was brought to mind when I read Silhouette’s post of Islam’s honor of women by legalizing women beating. I have written in the past about that, and drawn attention that such acts are inherent in the Islamic preaching that was decreed straightforward from the Quran. And also showed that no matter what, Moslems might differ over many things, women’s welfare remain the same for all sects. The verse ” As to those women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill conduct, admonish them, refuse to share their beds, and beat them” (4:34) apparently is causing problems for Moslems to adjust to the modern civil laws that protect women against violence. Therefore many Islamic clerics have beaten around the bush to justify violence against women since they cannot revoke the verse nor deny it. Sheikh Yourself Qaradhawi the Qatari mufti gave his fatwa that, “It is Permissible for the husband to beat the wife, only Lightly” basing his fatwa (legal decree) on a tradition of Mohammad which equates the beating to the tapping of miswak (a small stick used to clean the residues between teeth). I.e., it’s not the beating act that should be debated with Moslem believers, but it’s severity. Obviously not bearing in mind the brutality and dehumanization of the act itself. Here is more of the same. Another cleric,Sheikh Abdulmihsin Alebikan, legal consultant in the Saudi Justice department gave a fatwa lately to authorize violence against men, only in self-defense (this is not a joke) and that was after an incident when a man killed his wife after a bout of beating, and was sentenced to death. In other words; solving a “wrong” with another “wrong” action, when they have to provide more excuses to give to the benevolent, just God who discriminates against genders that he supposedly created for reasons that only He is aware of!

Now after this latest fatwa I guess Ream can rest asure that she was not sinning when she broke her husband’s leg since she considered that as self-defense, or was it!