Religion has been a part of society for thousands of years. Throughout our Women’s Worldwide Literature course, we have learned how Religion plays a part in women’s lives around the globe. Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam have influenced women’s stories we have read, heard, and analyzed over the semester. In each story where religion is mentioned, it plays a specific role and affects women’s lives. Conflicts are seen internally and externally about what faith means to each woman.
In Under the Udala Trees, Ijeoma faces conflict with Christianity and her life. Her mother can be seen taking a strict interpretation of the bible and using those words to try and pressure Ijeoma on how she should and should not act. For Ijeoma, her sexuality and beliefs cause her to question her faith and ultimately can be seen taking what the bible says to a looser interpretation that provides guidance and framework to how one should live, not literally. One example of her questioning her mother’s take on faith is when her mom is talking about how it was Adam and Eve, not two females he created, “Also, what if Adam and Ever were merely symbols of companionship? And Eve, different from him, woman instead of man, was simply a tool by which God noted that companionship was something you got from a person outside yourself? What if that’s all it was? And why not?” (Okapranta 83).
Hinduism was explored in the documentary “The World Before Her”. We saw how two young girls living in India take very different paths, one a pageant contestant and the other a Hindu nationalist. For Prachi. viewers saw how these young girls were being groomed to fight and use weaponry to preserve their faith and save their country from the west, Christianity, and Islam. She said she was willing to die for her faith at a young age. This is the opposite of many of the women’s stories that were explored. Here we see how with modernization; it can cause people to revert to the most conservative beliefs and preservation even if that means turning to violence. In both the pageant world and Prachi’s situation, girls are thankful (despite Prachi’s father occasionally beating her) to be alive because they were born females and many families would have had them killed. Yet these two women credit the modernity of India, as the reason for their opposite paths.
Arguably the religion with the most misconceptions about the relationship between women and faith, Islam was the religious focus of several course materials. In Moghad’s TED Talk, “What is it like to be Muslim in America”, she emphasizes how important religion is and encouragement to attending religious practice. Those who are radicalized, or extremists are those who are not active in their religious community and lack bonds with those of their faith. Another aspect looked at within the faith, is in Three Daughters of Eve. Throughout the novel, Peri tries to figure out who God and her faith are to her while dealing with contrasting views. While her family came from a traditional viewpoint, she viewed God as, “a maze without a map, a circle without a center; the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that never seemed to fit together” (Shafak 34).
While it is important to recognize the significance that religion plays in women’s lives around the globe. When examining behaviors and customs, it is important to be familiar with the country’s history and roots, not just what their faith is. For example, in the reading Do Muslim Girls Really Need Saving, Lughod explains “the question is why knowing about the “culture” of the region, and particularly its religious belief and treatment of women, was more urgent the exploring the history of development or oppressive regimes in the region” (Lughod 598). This provides an eye-opening statement that many people have the wrong focus when examining what is going on in a region.
To try and help other women around the world, we must take a step back and make sure that we understand their faith and history properly. In doing so, it will allow for a better plan of action and not sheer oblivion. This can be seen in the much-discussed example of women not needing liberation through the removal of their burqa and that burqas were not created by the Taliban. We also need to better understand what we can do specifically to help. The reminder the Lughod provides reader, especially those in the west is to, “be aware of differences, respectful of other paths towards social change that might give women better lives.” (Lughod 603). We need to speak with those who live within these areas to figure out what can be done to help lift these women and create lasting benefits, or if they even need help from the west.
Another aspect that needs to be focused on regions that are heavily rooted in faith, is that other are not trying make them become too progressive and try to enact drastic changes at once. In an article that I used for a commonplace post, women in Iran this past October were given the ability to attend a soccer match for the first time since 1981. These women finally got the chance to attend a professional soccer match after the ban was put in place as a part of the Islamic Revolution. It was interpreted that their faith should not allow women to be involved in sports and the idea that men and women should be separated. However, there were global pressures especially from FIFA to make this change and were still able to adhere to their faith women and men are seated in separate sections within the stadium. As the last nation to have a ban on women attending soccer matches, Iranian women are ecstatic for this opportunity to cheer on their nation. This example stuck with me throughout the semester because it shows how women want to balance having the right to do everyday things while still seeing themselves as respectful to their faith. As FIFA president Gianni Infantino said, “History teaches us that progress comes in stages, and this is just the beginning of a journey” (Vahdat).
Overall, I found the text to provide a wide variety of examples of how faith affects women around the globe’s lives. While the effect and extent of influence may be in various contexts, these materials we read made me think deeper with to what extent is religion is a factor. What drives women to interpret their faith in a certain way? Why do some women hold onto quite literal translations of their religious materials, white others take it more figuratively? Does modernity come into play?
Works Cited
Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others.” American Anthropologist, vol. 104, no. 3, 2002, pp. 783–790. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3567256. Accessed 22 Apr. 2020.
Okparanta, Chinelo. Under the Udala Tree. Farafina, 2016.
Shafak, Elif. Three Daughters of Eve. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.
Pahuja, Nisha, director. The World Before Her. Storyline Entertainment, 6 June 2014.
Vahdat, Amir. “Iran Women Attend FIFA Soccer Game for First Time in Decades.” AP NEWS, Associated Press, 10 Oct. 2019, apnews.com/9f168224782641b9a7e9ff7a4e88675c.
“What Is It like to Be Muslim in America.” TED, 15 Mar. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzkFoetp-_M.
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