Re: RC: Re: Where does the UAE stand?

[CMKSAGEHIL@aol.com]

In a message dated Fri, 21 Sep 2001 10:51:58 AM Eastern Daylight Time, "Barbara McCrary" <bigcreekranch@cruzio.com> writes:

> It is my understanding that Muslim women are looked at in a very different
> manner than we look upon ours in America.  It's a MAN'S world over there,
> not based on capability but on status, which is definitely different.  Don't
> know enough about it to speak with authority.  I couldn't really adapt to
> their view of women; I'm much too independent and believe too strongly in
> the equality of people (including sexes).  

One has to understand that there is a great deal of variation in interpretation among Muslims just as there is among Christians.  Some extremely fundamentalist Christians are also very repressive of women, while on the other end of the spectrum there are Christian women who stand on an equal footing with men.  In this day and age, I'd venture to say that the latter is more common in the basically Christian world than is the former, but that is a relatively recent change, if one takes a historical look at things.
One of the things that struck me in the UAE was that women seemed to have a great deal of choice.  Many held jobs and had careers.  (My first mental picture of Dubai is going through customs after getting off the plane--and somewhere between a quarter and a third of the customs agents were women.)  Many women in the UAE wore Western dress.  The grocery stores and suqs had women shopping and doing business, in all modes of dress from a few that were completely veiled, a few more in Western attire, and the majority in "native" dress but not veiled.  In an evening spent wandering the parks of Dubai, I encountered many family scenes that were quite similar to American family scenes of a warm evening in a public park--just with different modes of dress.  Islam treatment of women ranges from this on to the extreme fanaticism that one sees with sects such as the Taliban that is so repressive in Afghanistan.  Some of the repressive sects are REALLY repressive, though--sort of like going back centuries in time for us
.

Heidi