The bride price sparked competition between Zeba’s mother and aunt. Whose daughter was worth more? Zeba’s mother won the battle this round, but kept in mind that Zeba’s dowry set the precedent for future daughters.
Honor crimes are nothing new, and neither is the manipulation of religion to justify these crimes.
BY: Molly Lower
I was only nine years old when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996, changing my life and the lives of many others forever. I fell asleep every night listening to the sounds of rockets and gunfire. Although everyone suffered from the takeover, women and children…
Fighting toward women’s legal and social right — without fear — to have a voice, to exercise unfettered freedom of speech and expression will undermine their inequality, their subservience, their lack of ownership of their own lives, over their own sexuality, over their religious…
I would say that as girls were buried alive before the advent of Islam more than 1,400 years ago, they are being systematically and metaphorically buried alive again.
BY: Raheel Raza
Women and people as a whole have different definitions of what freedom is. The meaning of freedom in my society is understood by most girls as whether or not they can dress a certain way, smoke or drink, rather than striving for intellectual freedom.
As the adoptive mother of a Chinese girl who was abandoned on a wintry street in Hefei when she was just a few days old, I have always told my only child that she can be anything she wants to be.
BY: Elizabeth Titus
Apologetic literature struggles, and seldom succeeds, to reconcile the gross abuse of women in many Muslim-majority societies with claims that Islam provides for and upholds the rights of women. The fact is, Islam teaches that no human being is superior to another and certainly no one…
In Morocco, the laws will have to adjust to deal with the fact that women are building and supporting households, equal to their male counterparts. But developing a culture in which men and women are viewed as having equal human rights instead of one that holds the belief that a man is the one…
In conflict, every fiber of a mother’s sense of being shudders into protective overdrive. She will push herself across…