A depressing theme to my news this morning. I heard an interview with the author of Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan on NPR's Morning Edition on the way to work. Norma Khouri used to live in Jordan, and she had a close friend who fell in love with a Christian man. The friend dated the man in secret, and when her father found out, he killed her for shaming their family. Apparently, Khouri herself had to run away from Jordan, as she was in danger of being murdered by her own family for helping the couple meet in private. Then, while looking at the daily news on the desk, I ran across this story on CNN about an Egyptian woman who, fearing her husband would make good on his threat to kill her if she had another baby girl, drowned herself after giving birth to a daughter. The sad thing is, while I don't know all that much about Islam, even I know enough to know that many of these supposedly religiously-based actions and attitudes are actually neither proscribed nor endorsed by the Koran. So before one even gets to addressing the possibilities for equal treatment of women within Islam, one has to disentangle what is actually Islamic from a whole host of violently misogynistic tribal beliefs and practices that the leaders of these cultures simply do not want to give up. All in the name of "resisting Western influence."

But is equal treatment for women really only a "western" value? (I'll leave the question of the true state of Western women's equality and safety within their culture for another time.) Would allowing women to be people rather than chattel really be un-Islamic? Did Mohammad want women to be treated like children, or be secluded within the house for their entire lives, seeing so little sunlight and getting so little physical activity that their bones get soft and their health suffers terribly? Are Eastern values really about women getting mutilated by their mothers, beaten by their fathers and brothers, and killed by their husbands?

I don't know. It's just sad to see a culture that has so many beautiful aspects and such an interesting history enshrine and normalize such terrible practices.