Women in Oppressive Islamic States

Jake Stryker


Laura Darrow

Eng 102

7/27/2010

The theme I find the most important in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is the open oppression of women in society. The reason I think this is so important is because similar situations have happened throughout history and are happening in places around the world today. The Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale is governed by an falsely altruistic but truly misogynistic right-wing religious party. While the measures taken to control women in The Handmaid’s Tale are more extreme than they are in any actual culture, there are cultures out there that make an effort to control many aspects of women’s lives in their states. The Handmaid’s Tale is in a way, a response to a fear of change in these oppressive states. Only, instead of a change for the better, the fear is that conditions could become worse if nobody cares enough to make them better.

While some Islamic states have feminist movements and women have gained more freedom than they ever had before, radical Islamist groups are trying to push them back. Two places that discriminate against women are Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. Both of these places have radical Islamist groups in place such as the Taliban. In Afghanistan, “an overwhelming number of women are illiterate. More than half of all brides are under 16, and one woman dies in childbirth every half hour. Domestic violence is so common that 87 per cent of women admit to experiencing it”. (Olivia Ward, Ten Worst Countries for Women.) In Saudia Arabia, “women are systemically marginalized, forced to veil themselves, may not go out without a guardian or work in public places. Women become detainees in their husbands’ homes.”. (Munir, Islamic Fundamentalism and its Effect on Women). In The Handmaid’s Tale, most women are forbidden to read and write. The handmaids are not allowed to go out on their own or even to where they want to go, “Why would we want to go from here to there? We would be up to no good and they would know it.” (Atwood 31). Even when Offred walks to the market, she must dress so that she is covered up, and must keep her head bowed down. This is the modest thing to do.

In many traditional Islamic societies, women are made to wear the burqa in public, or even in their house if there is a man around. The burqa is similar to the handmaid’s outfit, except the only opening is a slit for the eyes. The Taliban took to even more extreme measures, “In February 1998, religious police forced all women off the streets of Kabul and issued new regulations ordering people to blacken their windows, so that women would not be visible from the outside” (Rashid, Ahmed. Taliban). To me as an American and a westerner in general, these restrictions on women’s liberties are shocking.

Some Muslim women have spoken out against radical Islamist groups trying to control women. Other women have been beaten or killed for daring to speak out against prevailing authorites. Verse 4:34 of the Quran reads in part “Those [women] whose nushuz (disobedience) you fear, admonish them, and abandon them in bed, and strike them. If they obey you, do not pursue a strategy against them. Indeed, God is Exalted, Great" (Quran 3:34). According to the Quran, if a woman disobeys, you may strike them. This reminded me of Moira’s beating in The Handmaid’s Tale, when she tried to escape from the Red Center. She disobeyed by trying to escape, and in return they caught her and beat her, “It was the feet they’d do, for a first offense. They used steel cables, frayed at the end” (Atwood 91). This is yet another practice held in common with radical Islam. Saddam Hussein’s son Uday commonly prescribes “falaqa”, or foot whipping on people who displeased him (Uday Foot Torture, Youtube).

The women in the Red Center in The Handmaid’s Tale were there to be groomed to believe certain things, look and act a certain way and learn that there are consequences for speaking up. The women are there to be brainwashed. From a western perspective it seems like this is what must have happened to the Muslim women who claim pride in the restrictive orders imposed on them by their religion. One woman named Oumkheyr speaks of this pride in an eerily Gileadean fashion, “I wear the burqa for the simple reason that I am a Muslim and the Koran says that I must wear the full veil in order to be modest. I am proud of my Muslim faith and my modesty. I am proud to follow God's law” (Why I’m Proud to Wear the Burqa, CNN).

In Gilead, the strict new measures imposed on women stem from a religious group who interpreted the teachings of their faith in a most extreme way. As Aunt Lydia tells the women in the Red Center, “Ordinary is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary” (Atwood 11). Through time, her hope was that the women will forget their former freedoms, and that their offspring will never know them and therefore will not miss them. They will be taught to feel shame when they think thoughts that are not sanctioned by the people in charge. This seems like what may have happened in Islamic societies. Women who stand up for these things do so because it is what they know. Many women in western societies see the burqa as a sign of oppression, and many women in Islamic societies hold the opposite view. They see it a liberating and spiritual symbol, proud to wear it because they are pleasing their God. Traditional Muslim women in more open, western societies often feel shame as well. When they get a job and are required to conform to a dress code, they may experience “emotional responses of guilt, shame, and embarrassment that in turn trigger complex emotional responses.” (Research on Emotion in Organizations xxi)

These controls and even acceptance of these restrictions happens frequently when a religion has major control over the population and the society itself. Women who are proud to be Muslim and follow Islam’s strict laws may do so only because it is designated by their God and their religion. It is harder to reject an idea if it is a main tenet of one’s religion. If a person does so they face discrimination, punishment and exile. This is why I believe it is a detrimental thing for society to be governed by a religion. As we have seen throughout history, while religious texts may not change, the people in charge who interpret their meanings do. Any writing is open to interpretation, and oppressive regimes try to find a way to relate their agendas to a part of their scripture. If they can do this, they are allowed to pass unjust laws that betray the meaning of religions, while using quotes from religious texts as the pretext for their tyranny.

I do believe that the women’s world of Islam does need reformation, but we must be careful how we go about it. Trying to force democracy and freedom of choice is not the way to implement freedom. We must get Muslim women to speak openly, hear their views both pro-veil and against. We must not act superior or denote them as stone-age thinkers, but learn to respect their views. If we can learn to respect what they have to say, they may do the same to us, and then progress can begin to be made. A Muslim woman named Fatima Gailani is prepared to fight for this progress. There is a quote of hers in Jan Goodwin’s book Price of Honor, “It is time for Islamic women, the majority of whom are moderate, to take a stand. But to do that, we need to have a thorough knowledge of our religion” (78).

Sources

Ward, Olivia. "Ten Worst Countries for Women." Thestar.com. 8 Mar. 2008. Web. 26 July 2010. .

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. Print.

"Research on Emotion in Organizations." Research on Emotion in Organizations, Volume 4 : Emotions, Ethics and Decision-making 4 (2008): Xxi.

Munir, Lily Zakiyah. "ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM AND ITS IMPACT ON WOMEN." Emory.edu. Web. 29 July 2010. .

Uday Foot Torture. YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. 16 Mar. 2009. Web. 28 July 2010. .

Oumkheyr. "Opinion: Why I'm Proud to Wear the Burqa - CNN.com." CNN.com. 4 Feb. 2010. Web. 27 July 2010. http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/02/04/france.burqa.ban/index.html>.

Goodwin, Jan. Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994. Print.



Quran. 4:34. < http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/Pages/adifficultverse.html>

The Effects of Civilian Deaths in Iraq

Jake Stryker


Laura Darrow

Eng 102

7/23/2010

The Effects of Civilian Deaths in Iraq

Like most wars , the Iraq War takes a toll on the psyche’s of our soldiers. I use the present tense because the horror and suffering never ends after the war. Many come home with a sense of guilt for the things they did and saw in Iraq. Sean Huze’s The Sand Storm is a brilliant story which makes the reader feel the guilt and shame of the soldiers. Is also makes the reader have their own internal struggle alongside the soldiers, trying to justify their actions. Trying to make an excuse. One such part is during LCPL Dodd’s monologue, when he is talking about having killed numerous civilians, “Fuck ‘em. What the hell were they doing in a war zone anyways?” (Huze 3). I think of SGT Casavecchia as the conscience of these men throughout their monologues. He gives LCPL Dodd the answer he already knows, but doesn’t want to tell himself, “I think they lived there” (Huze 3). It is easier for LCPL Dodd to use his excuse that they were in a war zone, than to accept the reality that they invaded neighborhoods, not military grounds or “war zones”.

Many soldiers have experiences like this, and come home to be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or other serious mental health problems. According to a study by the the American Medical Associaton, “Thirty-Five percent of Iraq war veterans accessed mental health services in the year after returning home”, and according to the New England Journal of Medicine, 15.6 to 17.1 % of Iraq war veterans “met the criteria for major depression, generalized anxiety, or PTSD” (http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/newsletters/research-quarterly/V20N1.pdf, pg 4).

A large part of this was not so much troops seeing their comrades fall beside them, though that certainly did happen and must account for some trauma. A large part of the issues these troops have returning home is dealing with having seen large numbers of innocent men, women and children massacred. For some it is not from what they saw, but what they did, who they killed and for what reasons.

The total death count of American soldiers dead from the Iraq war as of February 6, 2010 was 4,365. I have found it hard to find information on how many Iraqi soldiers or “enemy combatants” have been killed. General Tommy Franks, the man in charge of the invasion of Iraq said , “We don’t do body counts” (http://web.mit.edu/CIS/pdf/Human_Cost_of_War.pdf, pg 16). This could be a reason why it is so hard to find an answer to this question. I have however found a 2008 Report for Congress that inquires into the number of civilian deaths in Iraq. The report consists of six separate sources with their own numbers, but the average number is 172,091 Iraqi civilian deaths from the start of the war in 2003 to August 27, 2008 (http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/110395.pdf, pg 19).

With most sources places the Iraqi civilian death toll over 100,000, it is no wonder many of our soldiers come home with mental health issues. While our troops were not drafted to war, many did not want to be there in the first place. Just as with the Vietnam war, many soldiers were morally opposed to “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. Like Huze writes about SSGT Adams, “he wasn’t fighting for the red, white & blue, He just knew the road home went through Baghdad” (Huze 19).

Many of the soldiers cannot be held completely responsible for their actions. As much as it may sound like the trials at Nuremburg, they were just following orders. The real responsibility needs to lie with the policy makers of our country and every one of us American citizens. We need to remember that we don’t just send people to fight and die for us, we send people to fight and kill for us. When we do that, especially today with the extremely devastating weapons we have at our disposal, we need to think about who it will effect. It will leave a resentment towards our people from nations overseas, and a resentment from our troops who return home and wonder why we sent them to do such things.

The stories in The Sand Storm do a good job of making you feel for the soldiers, as well as making you look at the way civilian casualties are played out while in Iraq at war. To further this understanding, one must look at the facts and the numbers that represent real people. The major media does not do a good enough job of portraying the costs of war, not only for our soldiers who may live with nightmares the rest of their lives, but for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people who will undoubtedly have similar if not even worse mental issues.

Sources

Huze, Sean. The Sand Storm: Stories From the Front. 3, 19. Screenplay. New York: Susan Schulman Literary Agency, 2004.

Hoge, C. W., and J. L. Auchterlonie. "Mental Health Problems, Use of Mental Services, and Attrition from Military Service after Returning from Iraq or Afghanistan." Journal of the American Medical Association: 295, 1023. Http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/newsletters/research-quarterly/V20N1.pdf. 5 Apr. 2009. Web. 20 July 2010. .



Burnham, Gilbert, Shannon Doocy, Elizabeth Dzeng, Ridyadh Lafta, and Les Roberts. "The Human Cost of the War in Iraq." Human Cost of the War in Iraq: 16. Http://web.mit.edu/CIS/pdf/Human_Cost_of_War.pdf. Center for International Studied, Massachusettes Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusettes, 13 Oct. 2006. Web. 20 July 2010. .

Leland, Anne, and Mari-Jana "M-J" Oboroceanu. "American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics." American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics (2010): 19. Http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/139347.pdf. Congressional Research Service, 26 Feb. 2010. Web. 20 July 2010. .

Img URL: http://www.thelastminuteblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/bush-faces-of-the-dead-large.jpg

Research Proposal

Jake Stryker


Laura Darrow/Eng 102

7/16/10

Essay topic proposal

I am going to compare the roles of women in three 20th century dystopian novels: Atwood’ The Handmaid’s Tale , Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. There are three female protagonists between the books, and they all have their differences. This is due to the different natures of the separate dystopian societies, and therefore must be a byproduct of the times the writers came from. I will do research on the world events around the times each novel was written.

By researching actual historical events I believe I can better understand why Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, and why Huxley and Orwell wrote their dystopian literature as well. I should be able to find out by looking at significant world events and the powerful societies of the age why the roles of women in the novels are such a way. The 20th century was full of writers who must have had a worry about terrible times lying ahead, and I want to know why, and how that contributed to their envisioned dystopias. Margaret Atwood is the only female writer of the three, and that may have something to do with the differences between the role of women in the three novels.



1984

Brave New World

The Handmaid's Tale

Mid-Session Check-in Blog

Jacob Stryker

Mid-Session Check-in Blog

7/9/2010

I have enjoyed taking this class, it is going better for me than my Eng 101 online. There are some things that I don’t find necessary, such as using a webcam and making a blog. I don’t see a point to the blog: We turn our assignments in through blackboard anyways, and nobody responds to other people’s blog. That is just my style though, I prefer a more straightforward way of learning. I don’t feel that I need to do these new things, I would rather be told what assignments I need to do and do them.

With that out of the way, I can say that I have thoroughly enjoyed reading Tim O’Brien’s and Sean Huze’s work. My plan in life is to go into law and/or politics, and I feel like if more politicians would read things similar to these men’s work they would not be so willing to commit our country and our young men and women to war. I have not found The Handmaid’s Tale to be as interesting. I am still in the beginning though, so it may end up getting better. Overall the reading material has been interesting, and I am glad I had the opportunity to read the works in class, since I probably wouldn’t have ever heard of these writings otherwise.

I feel like the biggest issue with my writing is using correct MLA style all the time. I cannot remember off the top of my head how to put things in the correct format, so normally I have to go back to the examples in the Week 2 Assignments folder. I have tried using a couple different internet sites for MLA citation, but even there I have gotten different answers. It probably confuses me so much because I don’t see MLA citation a whole lot. Sites all over the internet use different ways to mark their sources, and some are similar but slightly different.

If I have any goals for the rest of the semester I would say I’d like to get MLA citation down as well as proofreading my own work. I don’t think there are too many grammatical errors in my writing, but I’m sure there are parts where it could sound better if rewritten in a more engaging way. Overall I just want to end up with a good grade here, while picking up some tools for the rest of my college career.

Essay 2

Stryker


Laura Darrow

Eng 201: Essay 2

2 July 2010

I want to compare CPL Waters monologue from The Sand Storm and a part of “How to Tell a True War Story” from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. The situations in these two stories are surely different from almost every outside look. Thirty-plus years apart and in completely different parts of the world, yet they are the same. The similarities come from the internal pain and suffering that the soldiers go through and their inability to deal with it.

In both of these stories there are young men who have been thrust into infernos of mortar and gun fire. They had come together with their fellow soldiers only to have them killed before their eyes. Coming from a society where violence is really not extremely rampant, these men did not have a very high threshold for witnessing and committing brutal acts. Because of this inability to process seeing death, both men built up rage.

CPL Waters grew to loathe the enemy, and with that comes a sort of base racism. He began to think of everybody there as an enemy, because they don’t wear uniforms, they don’t conform to rules of war, and will use civilian areas as places to launch attacks. Waters was sitting on the truck eating his lunch when he saw, “a pile of half a dozen rags” with “one still alive and kicking. Well, maybe not kicking” (Huze 8). The man was not kicking because both of his legs were blown off. In normal places, what Waters did then is unimaginable. He laughed and hopped off the truck to walk up to the suffering “rag”. All Waters wanted at that moment was to kill this man. He was just another scumbag that had a hand in the demise of his fellow marines. This is not the roughest part of the story. When the man silently pleads for Waters to shoot him, Waters changed his mind and at the same time got a sick thrill out of it. He took on the role of a sadist, sitting there watching this man slowly bleed to death while he continued eating his lunch.

In The Things They Carried, Rat Kiley loses himself in a much more physically extreme way, but I would argue that it is more mentally extreme to eat lunch while watching somebody bleed out. In “How to Tell a True War Story” Tim O’Brien tells about Curt Lemon dying. The lining behind the story of his death is Rat Kiley’s reaction to it. They were apparently best friends, and while nobody was directly responsible for Lemon’s death (meaning he was not shot by an enemy you can see, an enemy you can shoot back), but he stepped on a I.E.D, “He was playing with Rat Kiley, laughing, and then he was dead” (O’Brien 78). A cold booby trapped explosive planted in the ground killed his friend, there was nobody to place the blame on at the time. Rat Kiley didn’t have an enemy to watch writhe and squirm in pain waiting for their death. Rat Kiley had a baby water buffalo. He took his gun out, pointed it at the baby water buffalo and started shooting. As O’Brien pointed out, “it wasn’t to kill, it was to hurt” (O’Brien 78-79). He shot it over and over, and everybody sat there staring, not saying a word. He blew off parts of the buffalo’s body, his leg, ear, mouth. By the end Kiley was crying, and to be honest, so was I. I missed Curt Lemon. I didn’t want to kill the buffalo, but I had to. Once I started I couldn’t stop and the release felt good. O’Brien does a damn good job of putting you behind the skin of his characters.

Both of these men could be said to have had serious mental breakdowns. In CPL Waters case I found it much more chilling than I found it saddening. Here was Waters, fighting a War on Terror, and yet he sits there and does the same thing back. He terrorized that dying Iraqi man by being so cold towards him, by showing no mercy but staring directly at him. I can imagine he cocked his head to the side, like a curious dog, and gave a quick smile. That is terror to me.

In Rat Kiley’s case however, it wasn’t a desire to terrorize something or somebody. It was depression and helplessness. A frustration at not being able to express his feelings to anybody else in his company. Maybe he felt like he wanted to talk to Lemon about it, but then gets even more hurt remembering that he won’t be able to again.

You can see that these two situations and two ways of coping with it are completely different, but it is the same thing they both felt. They were scared, helpless and we cannot forget, young. While they dealt with their issues in different ways, they are the same problems that countless other soldiers will end up facing, and then there will be countless stories told about how they coped with it. Both of these writers are aiming for the same goal, they want to get people informed about the war. They want people to stop saying “support our troops” and actually start doing it. They want to rid society of the stigma that faces soldiers when they openly speak out against government war policy. It seems like they aim to put people into war, without ever having them enlist in the Armed Forces. By that, I mean that they do such a good job of relating their experience, they truly make you feel what they are describing, and so in a way you get to go to war without ever having to.









Works Cited

O’Brien, Tim. “How to Tell a True War Story.” The Things They Carried. 1990. 2 July 2010. Print.


Huze, Sean. The Sand Storm. New York: Susan Schulman Literary Agency, 2004. Print.

Operation Homecoming

Stryker

Laura Darrow

Eng 102

2 July 2010

I was pleased that we had an assignment available about Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. I had watched this only a month or two prior to taking this class during a time in which I watched a lot of war documentaries. First watching Operation Homecoming I was surprised at the movie’s style. It is a series of poems and writing from soldiers and their families, yet it plays similarly to a documentary. When you get to hear the words read to you and see the images put alongside the poems, memoirs, letters and essays, it makes the experiences seem much more real and true.

I feel like there are elements from both Tim O’Brien’s and Sean Huze’s styles in the movie. Of course it is hard to relate other peoples writing’s to one of theirs. I feel like these soldiers who have written their stories each have their own style because they all had their own experiences. Even if two men were at the same place at the same time, a foot away from each other looking at the same thing, they will retell that experience differently. Things don’t get recorded by what you see, rather your thought process and mental state also affect how you will perceive things.

Some of the writers such as Sangjoon Han seem to have a more O’Brien approach to writing. He wants to get the truest story out, and to do so he cannot make it one true story. He says it is a story he has heard from many soldiers, so to make it true for all of them, he couldn’t make it true for only one. While O’Brien brings a deep and personal emotion to his writing, Huze uses raw emotion, not trying to glam it up. I feel like “Men in Black” by Colby Buzzell can be compared to Huze’s style of writing. In the story the character tends to think freely, and the story is brutally unglamorous. Nothing extraordinary about it, just getting shot at and being an inch from death, being scared out of his mind. One thing that is similar to Huze’s story in “Men in Black” is when he sees people he believes to be civilians and asks his squad leader what to do. “Just fuckin’ shoot ‘em! These people have no fuckin’ business out on the street whatsoever!”. While the gunner did not shoot to kill, in Huze’s play there is a situation that is related. LCPL Dodd describes the action from earlier that day, “Yeah, there’d been some ‘collateral damage’. That’s the nice way of saying we killed a bunch of civilians. Fuck ‘em. What the hell were they doing in war zone anyways?” (Huze 3).

One old veteran who is a commentator on the film says that at first it was different, but then war is still always war. Today’s war is all volunteers, whereas in past wars there was a draft instated. After reflecting for a moment the man said, “but I suppose it’s all the same once you get there”. Several of the stories talk about the pain soldiers come back with from killing civilians while at war. When you are here in America, and you hear that a group of marines killed 100 civilians, most are outraged, pissed off at the troops. Then of course there’s the gung-ho people who would have us just bomb everybody if it gets the few we are after. After reading Huze’s play and watching this movie, among other things, I still must say that I am disgusted by a lot of the slaughter that takes place there. But once you hear these stories, you know that they are just as disgusted, and it is worse for them because they are the ones who committed the acts. While still being angered by stories of civilians and journalists being killed, I can begin to empathize with some of the soldiers.



Works Cited

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. Robbins, Richard. The Documentary Group.

Huze, Sean. The Sand Storm. NY: Susan Schulman Literary Agency, Jan 2004. Pg 3.