Having It Both Ways
Dec 28, 2005
My other colleague D said he met a young woman from M’s home country. She is single and nice. Do they want the hook up? M starts asking questions about her. When he hears she has been in Dubai for two years he voices hesitation. He says that when young single Middle Eastern women live in Dubai for too long they aren’t good anymore.
Being the way that I am, I asked for clarification. M knew what was coming and avoided answering me, but I joked with him and prodded him until he finally spit it out:
“When girls live here for too long they become too free and start to act like sluts. They also get really materialistic.”
I saw that coming from a mile away. And, it's not just Dubai. Girls from Turkey and Lebanon are routinely called sluts and whores within the oh-so-pious Arab and Pakistani communities.
This Muslim male mentality goes much further than that -- it's pathological. It is also, as Fatima says, deeply hypocritical. An extreme example which I'll never forget came from Athena at Terrorism Unveiled. Here it is from November 30, 2004:
Today I was visiting the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan and my roommate, we’ll call here Sally, went with me because she had to meet with the same professor as I.
She started crying in the taxi on the way back home telling me about her experience the other night with her Jordanian boyfriend, we’ll call him Malik.
Sally and Malik haven’t been dating for very long and I won’t go into the details of their relationship, but she really did like this guy, and I liked him as well. He seemed very Western, spoke English well, acted respectably, dressed nice, came from an affluent and well-off family. He even lived in Europe for two years and had relationships with girls there.
They went out to eat last night and she brought up the subject of honor killings. Malik nonchalantly said that he would be willing to kill his sister or support his uncle or dad if they killed her if she had sex.
How can one not recoil with horror?
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