THE PUNISHMENT OF WOMEN…DEATH BY FIRE
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.7600/pub_detail.asp
The Punishment of Women: Death by Fire
Nancy Kobrin, PhD, Joan Lachkar, PhD
There is an Arabic proverb – “Fire is more bearable than disgrace.”
In a shame-honor culture it is not difficult to understand why fire is more bearable than disgrace. Why do Muslim men need empowering? The answer to this old proverb is simple. In order to preserve their honor, they would rather destroy their objects, than be shamed by them. In addition, because the society in which they live such as Afghanistan does not allow them to express their healthy manhood and normal desires, they would rather resort to violence, bullying, torture and aggression.
A good example of this is clearly seen in Afghanistan where homosexuality is denied for there exists the phenomenon of the bachi bazi, a young dancing boy who acts as a sex toy to an older male. The novel and movie, The Kite Runner, provides us with further insight into the trauma of this perversity whereby the rape of a young boy is routine.
To keep their souls alive and from falling into the abyss, they burn the souls of others, most especially women. Women are the victimized part of themselves that keep them inflamed so they must torture and threaten to preserve their false sense of manhood. The Muslim male is not taught early on to look into his own soul. He lacks the ability of self-reflection so instead of introspection, he will act out his most heinous crimes. Not only does he feel the fire and the internal flames, he becomes it. “I am the fire!”
While our title draws upon an Arabic proverb, it also relates to Afghan culture because as Muslims, Arabic is the sacred language of the Quran and all things Arabic are to be venerated.
Even more startling is the recent report that 67 young women have immolated themselves out of desperation. (We would like to thank M. P. Stern for bringing this article to our attention.)
Most people are not aware how fire plays a very powerful role in all cultures. In Persian culture which Afghanistan is part of, the religion of Zoroastrianism worships fire. In India as well we had the custom of sati, wife burning on the funeral pyre with the dead husband. Immolation plays an extensive role in both suicide bombing as well as roadside bomb attacks. However, the ideologies of Islam fit hand and glove with the psychodynamics of rage, which exacerbates the problem of getting one’s needs met appropriately. Since this kind of hatred of the female signals paranoia, fire plays a purifying role, a way of purging the toxins from one self and projecting them violently on to another.
This is a great injustice to the lives of these young tortured women. Their desperation due to domestic violence is only half of the story.
Do most people realize the devastating effect it is to be the devalued little girl in a Muslim shame honor culture? Instead of rebelling she is coerced into internalizing male rage associated with the maternal dependency needs and forbidden sexuality, hence male weakness transformed as self-hatred. In the end they are all left with nothing but ashes.
Of course these 67 women are not to be blamed because they literally acted out in a concrete prescript way the male rage as fire by becoming fire itself. They become the torch of both the male desperation and their own desperation.
Even infidels are liable to be immolated. The tragedy of Paula Loyd, the Human Terrain social scientist in Afghanistan was set on fire by a rageful Afghan. Why? Because she was perceived as “tampering” with the group dynamics by assisting Afghan women who are under the thumb of a very strict Taliban Islam.
In a Memri Dispatch (Number 3268, October 3, 2010), The Egyptian Psychotherapist Dr. Radhwa Farghali was interviewed about women in Arab society and that they are treated as minors. So too in the case of Afghanistan. Dr. Radhwa Farghali states:
“In Arab society, women are treated as if they were minors or incompetent. The man has the right to beat his wife in order to discipline her. He has the right to kick her, to burn her, [our emphasis added] and sometimes even to kill her, or to debase her body, as a form of discipline. She is like a piece of furniture in the house…”
So we see that death by fire for the female is not limited to Afghanistan. One of the most moving memoirs, Burned Alive was written by a Palestinian woman named Souad whose brother-in-law set her on fire in an attempted honor killing. One of its subtitles is “A Victim of the Law of Men”. Perhaps as women are educated to come to understand that the problem is that of male rage, they might not take the bait cast by these desperate men. These women must be supported in strengthening their ability to fend off the desperation of the males. And this support must start very early in their lives.
The main point is how men psychologically project their impotent selves into women and then must destroy them as a primitive mental state. They become the male’s rage hence the fire. They show us through their actions what their internal world is like and how bleak it is.These women are not permitted to talk about their rage or the rage of the male’s which they internalize so fire symbolically represents the unspoken rage. Again this is another example of a brutal nonverbal communication — “Look at my actions to tell how I feel”.
Here, we have written about the Afghan practice of cutting off the nose of the wife for shaming the male.
To conclude, it is one thing to light the fire, it is another to become it. An impoverished mind can not distinguish the difference! Similarly, we must learn to be able to see the significance of such actions if we are going to be successful in understanding the nature of what we are up against in much of the Arab world as well as in Afghanistan
Dr. Nancy Kobrin, a psychoanalyst with a Ph.D. in romance and semitic languages, specializes in Aljamía and Old Spanish in Arabic script. She is an expert on the Minnesota Somali diaspora and a graduate of the Human Terrain System program at Leavenworth Kansas. Her new book is The Banality of Suicide Terrorism: The Naked Truth About the Psychology of Islamic Suicide Bombing.
Dr. Joanie Jutta Lachkar is a licensed Marriage and Family therapist in private practice in Brentwood and Tarzana, California, who teaches psychoanalysis and is the author of The Narcissistic/Borderline Couple: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Marital Treatment (1992, The Many Faces of Abuse: Treating the Emotional Abuse of High -Functioning Women (1998), The V-Spot, How to Talk to a Narcissist, How to Talk to a Borderline and a recent paper, “The Psychopathology of Terrorism” presented at the Rand Corporation and the International Psychohistorical Association. She is also an affiliate member for the New Center for Psychoanalysis.
Comments are closed.
