Thanks for posting that. See, the New Yorker has very good stuff from time to time!
I know you are interested in the way Islam treats women.
I'm becoming educated on the way Hindu women are treated in India, little better.
I saw Water, by Deepa Mehta, in the theater last week, so rented the other two films in the trilogy, Fire and Earth.
The Fire DVD has some commentary on the controversy the film caused in India, because two female characters in the movie, rejected by their husbands, become lovers. The commentary shows film of riots, theaters being destroyed by violence or set on fire, windows being smashed, both women and men just going mad.
The director has to go around with a bodyguard now!
I've been thinking for a long time now that when democracy and freedom comes to an authoritarian country with little or no history of freedom or individiualism, what is released is another kind of authoritarianism, which is fascism.
Like animals or birds that have never been free before, running back into their cages for safety.
(Water is beautiful, about an eight year old girl whose husband(!) dies, and she is forced to go live in an ashram with other widows. Set in pre-Ghandi India, I think things are a tiny bit better now, but Fire is contemporary, and one of the husbands tells his wife that divorced women have a terrible time in India.) |
