I am tired of having to explain to grown men that random, unrelated women do not want your opinions and judgements on the choices that they make in their lives. Not unless they ask for it. That accosting and deriding a woman for her choices cannot be explained away as “enjoining good and forbidding evil”.
I don’t remember doing anything fun for Eid. Even when they would go for the Durbar (hawan sallah), we didn’t join them. Not once. I remember washing plates until my fingers wrinkled, climbing stairs with heavy trays until my thighs burned, getting cut by knives, getting injured by metal colanders, and burning my hands on hot pots. That is what Eid was for me.
…what about women from low-income families, who bear the brunt of disproportionate labor during celebrations? Shouldn’t they, too, be able to enjoy Eid without the weight of unpaid domestic work?
As a brown woman in a traditional South Asian Muslim home, there was much I bristled against almost constantly. The unacknowledged labour was not just expected but demanded from me. The requirement to keep my mouth shut in deference even if an older person, especially a man, was disrespectful, discriminatory, or just plain wrong in their frequent pontification. To always, always, always think of the collective – the family, the parents, the husband, the society, before my own needs or wants – because everyone matters. Everyone except me.
In Northern Nigeria, the intersection of cultural misconceptions and Islamic teachings often creates a paradox. While Islam advocates for women’s rights and equality, the prevailing cultural practices often stifle these very principles, relegating women to roles that deny them their autonomy.
There is a quiet, unspoken belief that a woman’s place in a man’s home is defined by her duties, not by her presence.
I remember the first time I felt truly seen and heard by a friend. She listened to me without judgment, without interruption. She validated my feelings, even when she didn’t understand them. And in that moment, I felt like I could breathe again. I felt like I was home.
I had placed my husband too dangerously close to Almighty Allah, and I had all these high hopes and expectations of him that I had forgotten that he was human, too, and that he could be influenced, selfish, and prone to mistakes, misdeeds, and forgetfulness.
Çambel’s intellectual capacity had always been running in front of her academic identity as an archaeologist. She may have written fewer publications than many, but has left behind monumental institutions, trajectories in managing, and, more significantly, a generation inspired by her vision.
Women need not be held to the unrealistic standards of the Ideal Muslimah, who by the way, is a fictional character with roots not unrelated to passive misogyny. The Ideal Islamic culture is not one of cancel culture, but one of constant repentance and improvement.
