One week ago, a colleague approached me about a film she had recently watched. Coincidentally, I had been following a similar story via Amnesty International, with whom I have been a supporter since the moment Islamic culture became a part of my life, not on a religious level, but rather a personal one: my own daughter, Aaliyah. I was willing to watch _The Stoning of Soraya M._ mostly because, like most people I know, I am sinfully curious, but also, I desired to understand the psyche of those culprits who administer such brutal punishments as casting stones upon the “guilty.”
Needless to say, I was not surprised with the plotting and lies that led up to Soraya’s verdict; however, the slow and painful reenactment was one I almost could not bear, but still I watched it because I felt it was my duty as a woman--as a human being--to feel the pain caused by selfishness in its most wicked form. It seems almost cruel to say that the recreation was beautiful, but in all reality, beauty is not always pretty. Beauty is sometimes what is birthed from the deformities of societal blindness. It is what forces us to see beyond the safety of our own personal realm.
Societal blindness is what happens when we as a people only see the wrong-doings of far-away nations, like those whose belief systems seem to have frozen in Biblical times. It is what our media (both conservative and liberal) portrays as being one that is inhumane and like nothing we could ever fathom. It is a way of living that the majority of us judge, but sadly, one that mirrors our own in many ways.
The night I watched _The Stoning of Soraya M._ I, like my counterparts, began to curse the Islamic culture and everything for which the Mullah stands. I cursed Mankind. I cursed my daughter’s ethnicity. Then, as I sat in my bedroom analyzing the events of Soraya’s life, I had an epiphany. I realized that, in previous years, while joining and (minimally) funding organizations that reach impoverished women as far as India and the Middle East, I have been developing societal blindness. I realized that I am guilty of standing by and allowing women in my own country to be stoned, even if only symbolically.
We condemn cultures that most of us have only ever read about in National Geographic, but we have failed to see that America’s women are also at risk. Our mothers, sisters, daughters, and friends are all vulnerable to abuse. Just because women in America do not wear burkas and are allowed to drive cars, does not make them any more liberated than those women we see on television with netting across their eyes walking home with the week’s water supply upon their heads. Just because women in America suffer silent abuse because their fathers or husbands have a reputation to uphold, does not make them anymore liberated than the women whose fathers and husbands cast stones at them while the townspeople silently watch.
I cried many times that night. I cried for Soraya. I cried for her daughters. I cried for the scores of women who are abused and killed each year. Everywhere. But mostly I cried for the ignorance that is a pandemic, and one that will continue to create barbaric behaviors all over the world. For years, monetary donations appeased my subconscious, but were merely a contradiction to the problem I wanted so desperately to cure. After all, money (or the lack thereof) is often what cultivates abuse. And so I decided that it is my obligation, not as a human, not as a woman, but as a teacher, to give a minute amount of my courage, strength, and compassion to each and every young woman who walks into my classroom. It will be my belated gift to women like Soraya in lieu of the money that will never save them.
May Courage and Strength and Compassion always be a part of your content standards.
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