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Sunday, October 27, 2002Maha Muneef, a female pediatrician, emphasized that Saudi Arabia is progressing, albeit more slowly than many women would like. "My mother didn't go to any school at all, because then there were no girls' schools at all," she said. "My older sister, who is 20 years older than me, she went up to the sixth grade and then quit, because the feeling was that a girl only needs to learn to read and write. Then I went to college and medical school on scholarship to the States. My daughter, maybe she'll be president, or an astronaut." Another doctor, Hanan Balkhy, seemed ambivalent. "I don't think women here have equal opportunities," she acknowledged. "There are meetings I can't go to. There are buildings I can't go into. But you have to look at the context of development. Discrimination will take time to overcome." The second doctor reminded me of a woman with whom I shared an airport bus not long ago on the way home from a medical conference. She was dressed more like a New Jersey Italian than a woman of modest religious values. I was a little surprised when we struck up a conversation and she revealed she was a Saudi physician. She had the air about her of a woman breathing the last air of freedom. She had boxes of medical texts that she had bought from the vendors at the conference that she couldn’t purchase in her homeland, and she talked glowlingly of all the things she was able to do during the week long conference. She spoke glowingly about her country, too. She obviously loved it, and was looking forward to returning to her family, but she echoed the thoughts of the physician who spoke to Kristoff. A lot needed to change, but change would have to come slowly. She thought it would be a disaster to force sudden change on the country. She obviously enjoyed the privileges of a tolerant and progressive family. She had been allowed to go to school, to have a job, to travel alone to the United States, and to wear what she wanted. She was a marked contrast to some of the women I have met in my practice who live under a less tolerant and progressive male regime. I don’t have a large population of fundamentalist Islamic patients, but I do have a handful, and I can’t help but feel enraged by the treatment of the women at the hands of their husbands. Unlike my airport bus companion, they aren’t allowed to wear what they want, even though they’re in the United States. Even on the hottest days, they wear heavy black garments from head to foot. Their husbands, meanwhile, take full advantage of living in the West and dress in comfortable blue jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers. Maybe the wives chose to dress that way, but I don’t get the sense that they do. They act more like cowed creatures than women making a free choice. They walk behind their husbands, not beside them, and they rarely come into the exam room without their husband. It’s the husbands who do all the talking, and most infuriatingly of all, when they refer to their wives, even in their presence, they never call them by their name or refer to them as “my wife,” but only as an impersonal “she” with the tone of voice that is just a hair-breadth above what an indifferent dog owner would use. I want to say to those men, “In this office at least have the courtesy to refer to your wife by her name.” But, of course, I don’t. That wouuld be too confrontational and bordering on rudeness. Maybe I’m being overly sensitive. Maybe it’s just a cultural and language difference, but I don’t think so. These women literally have no voice. They won’t make eye contact, they won’t accept a proferred handshake, and they won’t answer questions. They seem acutely uncomfortable being adressed at all, as if they’re afraid they’ll say the wrong thing. And it isn’t just a language barrier. I have other patients who must rely on interpreters, and they aren’t shy about engaging me. They make eye contact. They speak freely to the interperter. They are anything but silent. The fundamentalist Muslim women, on the other hand, don’t say a thing. Not even to their husbands. When I see this sort of behavior in a woman from any other background I suspect abuse, but when I see it in a woman from a fundamentalist Islamic background I’m expected to view it as “normal”. I should emphasize that these families are a very small minority of my Islamic patients. I have plenty of patients who are practicing Muslims who enjoy healthy, respectiveful marriages; who have a choice in what they wear; who are allowed to talk for themselves; and whose husbands acknowledge that they have names. The problem that I have with the strictest fundamentalists is that they aren’t treating women with the respect and dignity that they deserve - and that they get away with it in the name of religion. And most of all, I object to those within that movement whose goal it is to make the rest of us live that way. posted by Sydney on 10/27/2002 12:00:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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