Barbella
Senator
"Who Is the Arab Man?"
It's a question that many women in Germany are asking themselves in the wake of Cologne. There is myriad anecdotal evidence of German women experiencing the culture clash firsthand. There are reports of men who refuse to shake hands with women. Some female teachers have to deal with fathers of students who refuse to speak to them, or parents who don't want a woman teaching their child. And there are instances in the business world where men refuse to work with women and demand that a woman's male superior be appointed as their point of contact in dealings. "This macho culture can already be found in Germany," says Ahmad Mansour, a Palestinian-Israeli who works as a psychologist focused on integration issues.
Do Muslims hate women, or are they afraid of them? Either way, no one in their right mind can possibly condone this:
In predominantly Muslim regions, the state of women's rights is especially troubling. Polling indicates that the majority of Muslims do not take it for granted that men and women have the same rights. The Pew Research Center in Washington surveyed 38,000 Muslims between 2008 and 2012. More than half -- and a whopping 87 percent in the Middle East and North Africa -- held the view that a woman should always obey her husband. In fact, only a quarter of those questioned in the Middle East and North Africa felt that daughters and sons should inherit equal shares of their parents' money, and only a third said that women have the right to get divorced.
Sineb El Masrar was born in Hanover in 1981, the daughter of Moroccan immigrants. She's also a member of the German Islam Conference and a pioneer in the Islamic women's movement. Her book "Emancipation in Islam -- a Reckoning with Its Enemies," is set to be published in Germany next month. "There is a misogyny, a hatred for women," she says.
On the other hand, maybe, MAYBE there IS a glimmer of hope, especially for some of the smarter, younger, more open-minded and compassionate ones:
Young men are also beginning to seek alternatives to narrow patriarchal role models. Asmen Ilhan is a case in point. A few years ago, the young man from Berlin caught himself pigeonholing the girls in his class into either "sluts" or "non-sluts," into girls who had a boyfriend, went out at night or wore tight pants, and girls who behaved in a way deemed appropriate by the Turkish community.
At the Carl-von-Ossietzsky High School in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood, the question of which girls were considered "sluts," and which ones were not, was an important one -- both for the boys who kept a close eye on their sisters, even though they themselves were making out and having sex with girls, and for the girls, who were better off staying away from men altogether. No one would have been shocked to hear someone yell in the schoolyard: "I'll kill my sister if anyone touches her." And it would have been hard to tell whether statements like that were meant seriously.
Program to Change Minds
Ilhan was always caught in the middle. His parents came to Germany from Turkey in the late 1970s, and he was born in Berlin. To Germans, he was a Turk, and to Turks he was a Kurd. He was never accepted as a traditional Muslim because his father is an Alawite. His mother is involved in the women's movement within the immigrant community: a word like "slut" would never have been allowed at their dinner table.
But different rules applied in the classroom. Girls were expected to be pure and quiet and boys strong and loud, the latter fixated on their predetermined role as guardians and future breadwinners. Ilhan had already gotten used to this division, if only to fit in, but when he was 16, he began having doubts.
At the time, a friend invited him to join a group that met regularly to question their concept of how girls and boys should behave. The group members were at odds with a culture in which the honor of an entire family depended on whether a daughter was still a virgin at her wedding, and in which boys were obligated to defend that honor -- whether they liked it or not.
Ilhan and his friends became part of a project, called Heroes, in which young men from immigrant families campaign for women's rights. It has already trained 35 young men. Those who become "Heroes" are given a certificate to hang in their rooms. The program includes various role-playing games: In one, a strict father sends his son to bring home his sister, who is hanging out with friends, in another, a family forbids a son from marrying his Swedish girlfriend. The boys also play the role of the girl.
Heroes has held more than 1,000 of these role-playing workshops in schools and youth centers in the last seven years. Even the German president has visited the award-winning project. A photo taken on the day of the president's visit hangs on the wall, across from a poster with a quote from Albert Camus: "Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear."
A Bizarre Understanding of Honor?
"Cologne brought our issues to the fore," says theater teacher Yilmaz Atmaca, one of the co-founders of the Heroes project. Ilhan, now 23, studies psychology and works as a group leader. Seven boys from the program got together in the first week of January to try to come up with an explanation for the Cologne sexual assaults. In their view, the assaults reflect a bizarre understanding of honor. "I'm afraid that the perpetrators felt that women who were wearing Western clothes and were out alone at night had no honor. This is precisely the attitude we want to prevent with our work."
http://www.spiegel.de/international...-germany-after-cologne-attacks-a-1073751.html
It's a question that many women in Germany are asking themselves in the wake of Cologne. There is myriad anecdotal evidence of German women experiencing the culture clash firsthand. There are reports of men who refuse to shake hands with women. Some female teachers have to deal with fathers of students who refuse to speak to them, or parents who don't want a woman teaching their child. And there are instances in the business world where men refuse to work with women and demand that a woman's male superior be appointed as their point of contact in dealings. "This macho culture can already be found in Germany," says Ahmad Mansour, a Palestinian-Israeli who works as a psychologist focused on integration issues.
Do Muslims hate women, or are they afraid of them? Either way, no one in their right mind can possibly condone this:
In predominantly Muslim regions, the state of women's rights is especially troubling. Polling indicates that the majority of Muslims do not take it for granted that men and women have the same rights. The Pew Research Center in Washington surveyed 38,000 Muslims between 2008 and 2012. More than half -- and a whopping 87 percent in the Middle East and North Africa -- held the view that a woman should always obey her husband. In fact, only a quarter of those questioned in the Middle East and North Africa felt that daughters and sons should inherit equal shares of their parents' money, and only a third said that women have the right to get divorced.
Sineb El Masrar was born in Hanover in 1981, the daughter of Moroccan immigrants. She's also a member of the German Islam Conference and a pioneer in the Islamic women's movement. Her book "Emancipation in Islam -- a Reckoning with Its Enemies," is set to be published in Germany next month. "There is a misogyny, a hatred for women," she says.
On the other hand, maybe, MAYBE there IS a glimmer of hope, especially for some of the smarter, younger, more open-minded and compassionate ones:
Young men are also beginning to seek alternatives to narrow patriarchal role models. Asmen Ilhan is a case in point. A few years ago, the young man from Berlin caught himself pigeonholing the girls in his class into either "sluts" or "non-sluts," into girls who had a boyfriend, went out at night or wore tight pants, and girls who behaved in a way deemed appropriate by the Turkish community.
At the Carl-von-Ossietzsky High School in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood, the question of which girls were considered "sluts," and which ones were not, was an important one -- both for the boys who kept a close eye on their sisters, even though they themselves were making out and having sex with girls, and for the girls, who were better off staying away from men altogether. No one would have been shocked to hear someone yell in the schoolyard: "I'll kill my sister if anyone touches her." And it would have been hard to tell whether statements like that were meant seriously.
Program to Change Minds
Ilhan was always caught in the middle. His parents came to Germany from Turkey in the late 1970s, and he was born in Berlin. To Germans, he was a Turk, and to Turks he was a Kurd. He was never accepted as a traditional Muslim because his father is an Alawite. His mother is involved in the women's movement within the immigrant community: a word like "slut" would never have been allowed at their dinner table.
But different rules applied in the classroom. Girls were expected to be pure and quiet and boys strong and loud, the latter fixated on their predetermined role as guardians and future breadwinners. Ilhan had already gotten used to this division, if only to fit in, but when he was 16, he began having doubts.
At the time, a friend invited him to join a group that met regularly to question their concept of how girls and boys should behave. The group members were at odds with a culture in which the honor of an entire family depended on whether a daughter was still a virgin at her wedding, and in which boys were obligated to defend that honor -- whether they liked it or not.
Ilhan and his friends became part of a project, called Heroes, in which young men from immigrant families campaign for women's rights. It has already trained 35 young men. Those who become "Heroes" are given a certificate to hang in their rooms. The program includes various role-playing games: In one, a strict father sends his son to bring home his sister, who is hanging out with friends, in another, a family forbids a son from marrying his Swedish girlfriend. The boys also play the role of the girl.
Heroes has held more than 1,000 of these role-playing workshops in schools and youth centers in the last seven years. Even the German president has visited the award-winning project. A photo taken on the day of the president's visit hangs on the wall, across from a poster with a quote from Albert Camus: "Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear."
A Bizarre Understanding of Honor?
"Cologne brought our issues to the fore," says theater teacher Yilmaz Atmaca, one of the co-founders of the Heroes project. Ilhan, now 23, studies psychology and works as a group leader. Seven boys from the program got together in the first week of January to try to come up with an explanation for the Cologne sexual assaults. In their view, the assaults reflect a bizarre understanding of honor. "I'm afraid that the perpetrators felt that women who were wearing Western clothes and were out alone at night had no honor. This is precisely the attitude we want to prevent with our work."
http://www.spiegel.de/international...-germany-after-cologne-attacks-a-1073751.html
