King Faisal I of Iraq to the British high commis­sioner, Iraq/Mesopotamia, August 17, 1921

I should define what I call prosperity. 
In some way, I do understand what you mean, but is such a So tatty (I would not honour any such place by calling it a Society!) worth living in – where a woman doesn’t have her place as a DEPUTY CREATOR and can feel her “worth” only when she becomes a work horse and pays her way through the Terms Of Enslavement, the mortgage.

 

Angela, I would have been the greatest admirer of this system just if I had not known it so well!

 

One can be rich without being wealthy. 
We are discussing just the economic aspects, continually. I understand that. In some parts of the world, a woman would wish to be really rich – with something that only her Creator can grant her and soonest – her grandchildren!

Prosperity is the farms producing enough food for the people in the area and the people in the area being able to afford (even through barter) to purchase that food.
You know I am farmer. My lands were producing good crops for hundreds of years. I took charge at a very st**id age. I was a freshly cut graduate! I knew everything about life that anyone needed to know. I put in “better” practices – my yields increased, I was producing over 32 to 40 tonnes of cane from an acre! Fan simply tastic!

In 30 years my lands have died. They are poisoned by what Exxon has been selling me. (And, please, don’t tell anyone, I had got my manager appointed as their Regional Agent)

After all this prosperity, we are producing nada sugar cane.

There is no natural model of continued growth.

Enrich - what I mean by enrich society is by innovation.  Muslim scholars brought us algebra, astronomy, poetry, innovations in cryptology and medicine.  These innovations came from men and women who lived in the security of a Tribal community with traditional values.
They had a whole millennium of a great time, the chap who started this string must be strung by a nylon wire for his lack of sense.

Men and women in Bahrain require help from their Sultan for welfare and that is the richest country in the world.  
That is the culture there, they work on that model, this US model doesn’t and it won’t fit just everywhere.

Pakistan is suffering from a split personality.  On one hand, they are growing and on the other, inflation and poverty are hurting the poorest of citizens.
Yes, absolutely, but then what do you get when you import the American value system and live on their standards?

I find it a bit of a paradox that we are so maligned by the rest of the world for our excesses, yet I see 1000s coming here every year for an opportunity they do not have in their home countries.
Yes, Allah has created some for the ultimate suffering and He sends them to there hells even on this earth.

There are those of us here in the US that would like things to be much simpler.  I think we are feeling the pain of that excess with our collapsing economy.  Greedy people buying homes they could not afford and greedy lenders taking advantage of people who don't understand the complicated world of mortgages.
It’s plain, the Shylocks of our world would die without their pounds of real human flesh. The system is based on bleeding humans.

It would be nice to live with my family for 10 years and have the money to buy a house outright.  However, I feel that I would have killed my father in law in that amount of time...    It would be nice to be able to go to my sisters house and drop off my children if I had to work.  Or watch her children if she had to work. 
Yes! But don’t you agree that it would be the best system in which the both of you could watch your children and neither of you was required to play for those Terms of Enslavement?

I do feel you are being a bit optimistic that women don't fall through the cracks.  Her father may be dead, she may have had no brothers or sons...  Everyone else is marriageable in Islamic society.  I would maybe be able to go live with a cousin or even my inlaws if I were widowed because in this country marrying your cousin is illegal.  A muslim woman does not have those choices.  She must quickly get married if she has no mahrams and society has not provided for her to be self-sufficient.
Angela, all I believe is that a system that doesn’t assign woman with her basic natural “worth” of a Deputy Creator is a scam, a plain simple fraud and absolutely haram.
I want to stay home when I have my first child and while they are too young to go to school.  That is a desire of almost every woman.  However, the idea that opening opportunity is a bad thing... that is beyond me.
Absolutely. Thank goodness, I will die a happy man (well I nearly did on 12^th June) in my community every woman holds and enjoys her status as a Deputy Creator. And, this Deputy Creator decree is my invention, because for ever I took God to be a bit better, more powerful and loving than my mother! For me, she was His Deputy. I may be wrong but for me that’s what she was!

Edited by Whisper - 12 November 2008 at 9:50pm

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=3906861&cl=10655326&ch=4226714&src=news

These men are the very epitome of evil.  I pray the girls will recover and be well, but they will obviously be scarred.  Very sad and troubling.

Edited by Whisper - 13 November 2008 at 8:46pm

Whisper, I am as seduced as the next woman by the declaration of woman as a Deputy Assistant Creator. I agree that women in Western society have largely been downgraded from their once respected role as such, to a role as mere 'productive' members of society, where production=wealth creation. I love the idea that women reach self-realisation, satisfaction if you will, by giving birth. But I know that this is simply not true for every woman.

Is it right to sanctify life? Obviously and emphatically yes. But is it right to equate a woman with God? Is it right to sanctify women as deputy creators, as something close to the divine? I think not, this creates some impossible conundrums. God is beyond us, by elevating a woman’s fertility to Godliness, is to place a burden upon her shoulders which no man could bear, let alone a woman. Perhaps this is one reason why we have known no great female prophets. Why did God entrust his message only to men? We know women are not less intellectually capable than men and the old excuse that women ‘have not been allowed to’ be like men works only up to a point. History is dotted with great female writers, artists, musicians, scientists etc. But they are tucked away in the pages of ‘exceptions to the rule’. Their society and circumstances did not allow for their complete recognition and they remain exceptions, and modern women are still trying to have them removed from the exceptions category and simply taken for granted, as we do the few great men.

The feminist push for women's education and eventual consideration as man's equal is confronted by this basic undeniable fact: women bear children and men do not. But what sort of consideration, under your Deputy Creator title do childless women have? The choice not to have children is often conscious and deliberate, not simply due to personal circumstances, or biological 'defects'. In the old days, a childless woman was called 'barren'. To be barren. Imagine the term; a waste land where nothing at all will grow. Imagine being described, your whole self, summing you up as a useless patch of wasteland. Lorca wrote a very powerfull theatre work about a barren woman in deepest Andalucia, called ‘Yerma’, it was inspired and set in a small community here in Almeria. On the other hand, an infertile man receives no similar label, yet I am sure his pain is no less accute.

If western society is to achieve anything more than a semblance of equality and balance between the sexes, then it must ACCEPT women- the feminine- in ALL her aspects. In a debate on Spanish TV after the appointment of a heavily pregnant woman to the post of Defence Secretary, a female journalist said in an intensely passionate and improvised speech: if you want to involve women in every aspect of society, in government, institutions, in the work place etc., you MUST accept her in all her manifestations: single, married, pregnant, mother and not a mother.
This is the basic paradox Western society has yet to embrace (there's not much else you can do with paradoxes ....) it is common knowledge that prospective employers (despite laws requiring complete equality) will rather look for a woman they can be sure will not one day announce her pregnancy and require subsequent paid maternity leave. A sign of the failure of the feminist movement is the fact that often these discriminating employers, are themselves, women

Angela, your dream of taking computers to the women of Afghanistan is wonderful, but it seems similar to taking digital watches to the Guarani tribesmen of the Amazon. Our Western desire to help people we perceive to be backward and lacking is often terribly mistaken in its assumptions, and woefully misguided in its intentions. As Whisper points out, often the women we wish to help by providing them with a key to independence, resent us for actually taking them out from under the protective role of their husbands.

You seem to want to separate the cultural traditions from 'education', you say: "Tribal Culture and Economics need to be separated. Tribal Culture and the access to Education need to be separated. One has to look at their "culture" and see what is important and what has become a tool to oppress"

but I think it is far better to try to incorporate, to include and adapt education within the millenia old traditions of tribal culture, rather than create an 'either or' education. Cultures do not change. Here in Spain there are many many aspects of the culture, at the 'street' level if you like, which are almost exactly as they were during the days of the Moorish rule. That this is so, is hotly denied by such statesmen as our previous president, Aznar, and people totally immersed in the centuries of Arab denialism Spanish society is just starting to come to terms with, and which was instigated by and largely kept alive here, by the Catholic church. But the mere fact that Spaniards go on holiday by the thousands to Muslim lands and find a weird sense of feeling at home, is testament to the persistence of cultural habits, customs, perspectives etc., despite the ravages of time, the efforts of reformers, or the edicts of laws.

.(... I just want to come back and by way of edit, add that I don't condone nore wish to see perpetuated throughout time the barbaric 'customs' perpetrated against women in some tribal cultures! It's just that I do not think one can change many aspects of a culture from the outside ... time has shown that with good governance, and yes, education, societies can rectify their ways: we gave up witch burning quite a few years ago!)

Edited by Duende - 14 November 2008 at 5:47am