Abubakar Sulaiman Muhd
It is something we all witness in
our remote and immediate relation or in other families in our society. It is
disturbing and could affect one’s health if they fervently concern themselves
with the disheartening situation at all times, seeing people who are actually
involved, willfully abdicating their responsibility to arrest the problem
considering the pathetic condition it brings on the weak and vulnerable members
of our society.
If it is not my biological sister today,
it would be a girl in the next door neighbor and perhaps your sibling, right
inside your home, if you’re a resident of this community. It’s pervasive in our
society women quitting school for marriage. Unfortunately, if the marriage is
tied without due diligence and thorough investigation, the man might turn out later
to be a wrong husband. For some circumstances, largely inadequate or lack of
preparation - physical and psychological, the union would soon end in
separation few months after the marriage. By that time the girl might have been
conceived and is expecting a baby in no time. She would come back to live with
her family; judgmental eyes and gossiping words would be going round, reaching
men’ ears, hoping one of them would show interest in her. After another ill-advised
move for second trial, because she is seen as burden to her family, another
marriage would hastily be solemnized. She is divorced again. She is already
bored with tedious family life, the heavy pressure coming from the society; she
would become eager to be in her own home and be forced to accept a man, any man
who asks her marriage. Like the previous
experiences, her man would send her out, the third marriage fails. She would
try another husband, on and on it goes throughout her life.
Effort to educate her parents about
the consequence of sending her out this disgraceful way will always end in vain. Parents
always never seem to understand the grave implication they cause, acting like
they are getting rid of a burden, and or auctioning her out like a tomato
seller offering vegetables at a low price when the closing hour begins drawing
in and marketsgoers start dispersing.
One is always assailed by a nagging
and disturbing question on how society perceives marriage. A temporary life
with her husband, having sex experience for a little while, show the society
you’re once married and then get divorced few moons after to return to her
parents.
“Let’s her go so that we won’t be
the butt of joke and gossip subject of the society,” parents always think.
The
fear for the small talk that would follow won’t allow parents to let the girl
be well-equipped and well-prepared so that she could face the challenges ahead
– capable of handling nasty situations that might arise in the future from
unforeseen circumstances. Divorce, God forbid, not because it will never happen
the couple being educated. It is because we hate it. Like Death.
The source of my anger and
frustration that’s damaging my health besides the daunting task of explaining to
the parents the situation they’re putting in the girl, which as usual they seem
never to understand, is not the divorce per se or the subjugation she has been
receiving from the husbands.
You can feel the thud-thud of my
heartbeat, thundering rapidly and having difficulty sleeping whenever I try to
explain to a girl that her life has worth and meaning beyond marriage and she
fails to understand. Life having worth outside marriage? I must be crazy, she
would think. And then I realize she is already in condition of:
Losing her self-esteem, running
from bed to bed to display her deepest secret to several men, the core seat of
her feminity.
That her life is now neither here
nor there, residing in limbo and dancing on the brink of destruction.
I am not condemning marriage
institution because marriage in itself is not a problem. But it’s actually
gnawing up a caring heart the way some people are manipulating marriage as an
effective tool of committing injustices against women. Granted, some parents are well-meaning
regarding their intent to choose the best for their daughter, working to
prevent a gift coming to the family before her marriage. While they are at it,
the good intention of raising their children to be morally sound, they often
choose to ignore what boys are doing and seem to forget that the punishment is
the same in the sight of Allah. The society believes males are not going to be
seriously affected by their illegal sexual activities like females. The society
feels that the harm will be graver on females and therefore should be saved
before getting involved into activities that would bind them to bitter
consequences. They might also be unconsciously working in the hand of some opportunistic
elements who are lurking around silently and ready to take advantage of an
aspiring, but helpless, young lady to disallow the continuity of her education immediately
after the marriage.
I always struggle with the thought of
how people understand the injunction spelt out in our religion that says “dalabal
ilmu farithatun ala kullu Muslim wal Muslimati: knowledge is as compulsory to women as onto
men”. Considering this prescription, my thinking is that knowledge should come
first before marriage.
It’s my opinion to assert that a
mind filled with goal, intellectual drive and aspiration is not a space where
sexual thoughts would dwell and thrive, unless you have a base mind. I can see
that now you begin to ask what if she has a great sexual drive or is inherently
bad? In such case, this isn’t exclusive to school girls alone. The society is
poisoned and decided to be unjust against female right from the beginning since
there are already negative stereotypes
and preconceived notions attached to college girls as prime suspect of
premarital intercourse.
Some women are also not helping
matter when they are in high institutions of learning to engage in behaviors
that society believes deviate from the conventional norms. Convinced they have their freedom, they tend
to be ruthless in getting back at the society. Seeing this, the patriarchy is
provoked to punctuate her excess. And what next? - she got married.
But anyway, marriage is not a
problem even though I can understand that some people inclined to see it as
such, a conclusion wrongly drawn. I can only see it as an impediment in cases
where the girl is never to continue her studies on account of marriage. We
should not overlook the financial and logistic difficulties that parents and
husbands struggle with.
Education doesn’t coexist with oppression,
injustices, disease and poverty. It is apt to say arming a girl with education
is a weapon to protect her from wickedness and lack of it creates rooms for the
girl to be easy prey in the hand of a wicked husband. However, some parents are
stubborn and helplessly rigid in their stand, which sometimes brings about another
unhelpful situation. If a lady desires to get married while doing her studies,
her parents should have to listen to her in order to avoid falling into unnecessary
trouble. Care must be taken by the parents to ensure the prospective candidate
is a man that would respect the girls’ right to education to honor her wishes
and aspirations.
If her husband wakes up to the
other side of the bed after having a good night to allow her to continue her
studies, it serves as an advantage to her as a college married woman. This will
prevent bad guys from making amorous advances courtesy of her status and
commands revered esteem and nice treatment from her male colleague
sympathizers. She may realize that someone pities her and is doing her a
favor. Better to remain independent, proud and dignified.
I observe that not all people in
the society do view women education as a problem and possible threat to the men’
position as commander-in-chief in their little republic where she is always
expected to serve as a ceremonial head. The society is very skeptical and
suspicious of anything they suspect to be an agenda of imperial mission and
even worst, introduced with haughty arrogance. Otherwise, the culture of
allowing every single woman to peruse higher education would have gained
massive acceptance, as it appears to be an old injunction in our religion.
I doubt if there are people who
hold negative view on ‘this education’ other than the acquisition method and
its frequent wrong application, in which case such negativities can be found in
any other education system. People have realized too well, by everyday
experiences, that the benefit of ‘this education’ outweighs its disadvantages,
with opportunities or otherwise coming to individuals according to their
educational status: ignorance vs knowledge, college diploma vs degree and high
degree.
Why people choose to remain deliberate
obtuse if you ask me is in order to frustrate imperialist attempt at
downgrading them where other people from other shores believe that they are introducing
civilization - with blatant air of arrogance - for the first time to a people who
already have culture and civilization spanning centuries and ages. The society
is very, very determined to reject anything presented to them this way and
which they consider to be a clandestine
mission, set to gradually destabilize and erode their traditional values and
belief system.
This is why it always feels awkward
and uncomfortable to me to categorize a sort of knowledge and call it as only ‘formal’
or simply term it ‘Western’ education. What becomes of those great architects
who built a grand kano moat and those who excelled in Ajami literacy and
calligraphy, trade, governance and diplomacy thousand years before the coming
of Whiteman and the accomplishments of those great artists and heritages are
still cherished and practiced in our contemporary societies? The impression is
that their achievements are not formal and therefore should not be given status
of formal recognition. This line of thinking is denying vast bodies of
knowledge from across cultures and civilizations around the world its origin
and existence, and even when recognized it’s often with denigration. If we go
on this subservient way, everything is surrendered to a certain people when epistemistically appropriated as possession of
a particular culture.
With the smug feeling of weaning
people from barbarism and backwardness, you may notice that you are denigrating
a sort of established culture. They would rather hold their stand than make
concession even when it appears they are wrong. People aren’t actually
rejecting knowledge, but the overbearing manner of its introduction.
So if forces in the argument would
come, with genuine intention and not in lethal determination and antagonism, to
sit down and pragmatically approach the issue, the situation would not have
been such worst and the difficulty confounded. The society will be the winner
anyway. But it always seems each force in both side of the argument is
determined and never willing to reach agreement.
Everyone is welcome to their views.
Common sense has broad applications and if an idea is often yielding a bad
result, it won’t hurt if the allegiance to the rule would be reconsidered.
The prayer is for the parents to be
a little patient for a relatively short time so that the girl would complete
her studies before getting married. It just looks like delaying something that
will necessarily come. With education, there is likelihood that she can meet a
partner with similar accomplishments and goals to have a lasting marriage. Things
are not always easy for a married woman - juggling household chores with school
assignments or a woman in college who was once married – bearing a lot of
stigma and burden struggling to continue her studies.
PS
There are also parents who never
bear close investigation. They do not accept corrections and are quick to shut
down any discussion that challenges their views. They hold extreme views and
would threaten to curse their kids to a point one feels like she is committing
a sin correcting her parents even when they go wrong.
The impression is like parents are
above the humanly nature of making mistakes. They are very authoritative,
giving the impression they own the kids and should decide their future without having
the firsthand experience of the kids’ reality and experiencing their mental
universe. Convinced that they know more
than the kid, they dismiss anything she says outright since she is still a
little babe in arms. They don’t accept that their own kid could grow up to be
ahead of them in thought and ideas. But our society believes a child can be
richer than their parents. Where do we go wrong?…
You cannot be hostile to CHANGE and
succeed. You cannot avoid change because the only thing that is not changing is
change. Up and coming generations have understood this thing of modernity and
are no longer thinking in the binary way of their ancestors, where the result
is either 1 or 0. Be prepared, accept the change and alter the currents of the
age to suits your needs or you fade away.
(@abubakarsulai13)
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