RUTHFULLY YOURS

I am currently reading Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World by Katherine Zoepf. One chapter discusses the use of the veil or the hijab and it is a most telling revelation about the astonishing differences of thinking in the traditional Islamic society as contrasted with Western thought. Zoepf recounts this encounter with a Muslim woman who proudly explains why she wears the hijab.

What if a man sees you girls walking in the street with your hair uncovered and becomes so aroused that he goes and abuses a child?

Wouldn’t you feel that it was your fault that this child was raped? I know that I could never live with myself if something like that happened. That is why I wear the hijab.

Although only two or three years younger than Zoepf, this Muslim woman named Asma is light years removed from the idea that “blaming an unveiled woman for the actions of a child molester [is] outrageous [and] to argue otherwise [is] to suggest that men [aren’t] responsible for themselves.”

Zoepf quotes Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist who has explained that the traditional Islamic society “hardly acknowledge[s] the individual, whom it abhor[s] as a disturber of the collective harmony.” Consequently, traditional society “produce[s] Muslims who [are] literally ‘submissive’ to the will of the group.”

If seen in a positive light, this group cohesion creates a strong community bond where all Muslims are guardians of the others in the group. Thus, “if someone slipped, then the guilt would be shared.” Consequently, less important are the rights of the individual compared with the “rights of the community.” This sense of group identity is certainly a common thread among tightly knit communities of many different religious organizations.

On the other hand, this misogyny “disproportionately” burdens female members. Thus, females who grow up under this constant scrutiny “face a particularly difficult path, since the mere fact of their being in the public eye is often enough to raise suspicions about their modesty.”

Herein lies a fundamental and clear-cut difference between a society based on individual responsibility for one’s actions and one based on group conformity wrapped around a guilt-induced rationale. At no time does a man’s accountability for assault enter this mindset. According to this point of view, the woman deliberately put herself in a position to be victimized and the community did nothing to stop the woman’s actions. This, is why Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, Australia’s most senior Muslim cleric can assert, without irony, that an unveiled woman is asking to be raped since she is “like uncovered meat who attract sexual predators.” Moreover, al Hilali “suggested that a group of Muslim men recently jailed for many years for gang rapes were not entirely to blame” since there were women who “sway suggestively” and “wore make-up and immodest dress.” He went on to say that if the woman “was in her room, in her home, in her hijab (veil), no problem would have occurred.” Thus, the problem of rape lies entirely with the women victims.

Our first President was actually born on February 22, 1732 but he is celebrated today along with tributes to our great Presidents- Jefferson and Lincoln.

Read Ron Chernow’s outstanding biography….
Product DetailsWashington: A Life
This is his letter of August 21, 1790 to The Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island:

Gentlemen:

While I received with much satisfaction your address replete with expressions of esteem, I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you that I shall always retain grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced on my visit to Newport from all classes of citizens.

The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security.

If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good government, to become a great and happy people.

The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my administration and fervent wishes for my felicity.

May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.

May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy.

G. Washington

What can a Victorian-era novel depicting provincial English society teach us about modern politics? For starters, the more politics change, the more they stay the same.
George Eliot’s opus “Middlemarch” (1872), set in a small English town in the early 1830s, isn’t on most high school or college core reading lists. It should be. The novel’s vexing political questions foreshadow the debates taking place today.

“Middlemarch” unfolds against the backdrop of rapid industrialization and a rising middle class. At the time, only the landed aristocracy could vote. Due to urban migration—there was no redistricting to account for population shifts—cities were underrepresented. Meanwhile, the gentry controlled sparsely populated “rotten” boroughs whose voters were under their thumb.

In the novel, political agitators recruit the wealthy landlord Arthur Brooke to run for Parliament on a program of democratic reform. Eliot portrays Mr. Brooke as a frontman for the populist movement and observes that “the very men who profess to be for him would bring another member out of the bag at the right moment.”

Democratic activists choose him because he’s an empty vessel: “Mr. Brooke’s mind, if it had the burthen of remembering any train of thought, would let it drop, run away in search of it, and not easily come back again.” He’s flawed in other ways: Mr. Brooke’s opponents disparage him as “a damned bad landlord” who is “currying favor with a low set.” They make hay out of his poor treatment of tenants.

Mr. Brooke buys a newspaper, the Pioneer, and installs Will Ladislaw, a political activist, as editor to promote his campaign. Eliot describes the Pioneer as a “valuable property which did not pay.” Newspaper readership in those days was also segregated politically: “It’s no use your puffing Brooke as a reforming landlord, Ladislaw: they only pick the more holes in his coat in the [competing rag] ‘Trumpet,’ ” Tertius Lydgate tells his friend. Mr. Ladislaw retorts: “No matter; those who read the ‘Pioneer’ don’t read the ‘Trumpet’ . . . Do you suppose the public reads with a view to its own conversion?”

Dr. Lydgate is a young physician who aims to revolutionize the practice of medicine, which “chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs.” Doctors made their money by writing prescriptions, especially for opiates. Dr. Lydgate favors a holistic treatment-and-payment model over physicians “making out long bills for draughts, boluses, and mixtures.”

However, the doctor doubts whether laws promulgated by self-interested politicians will accomplish anything in the way of reform. “That is the way with you political writers,” Dr. Lydgate tells his friend, “crying up a measure as if it were a universal cure, and crying up men who are a part of the very disease that wants curing. . . . You go against rottenness, and there is nothing more thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured by a political hocus-pocus.”