Women and Family in Syria

Women in Syria have begun to take an active role in how they live in society. For instance, women have begun to remove the hijab as a form of revolution in customs. Not every women agrees with this change though, and some women even label these "revolutionary" women as atheists and betrayers. Syrian culture shows women in Syrian have a relative Westernized style of dress, often seen wearing tight clothes that cover the legs and arms, but is it not unheard of to see skin, but conservative dress still dominates. This may seem progressive to a point, but women in general are still heavily burdened by the law. For instance: women cannot marry without permission of a male guardian, Muslim women do not have the right to marry outside of Muslim faith, adultery is twice as punishable for women as it is for men, men have more parental rights than women, women must provide ample reason for a divorce while men simply need to say so, and much more. Due to reasons like this, Syrian families have often come to value sons over daughters, and as of 2012, the male/female sex ratio for the population is 1.03 (CIA). Polygamy is allowed in Syrian culture, though only if a man can provide and attend to each wife equally. In a story about a Syrian girl in 2007, Zahra al-Azzo was kidnapped and raped by her abductor in Damascus, and when they authorities found her, they sent her to a prison believing it was the only way to protect her from her family, who they believed would likely kill her and blame her for being raped (NY Times). Within a month of marrying her cousin in an attempt to restore her honor, she was stabbed in her sleep by her brother and died in the hospital. According to this article, 300 girls and women die each year in Syria in honor killings.

In our own culture, these things are unheard of. Honor killings, diminutive familial and social rights, and polygamy are all things that are unknown to American culture. Sure, women are not equal to men, but they are not at such a drastically different level as they are in Syria. Women here can be bosses, they can be powerful, they can dress as they please, they have equal rights to property and family, and they certainly aren't killed for being raped. Although it may seem like Syrian culture is backwards and wrong, it isn't. Their culture is simply different than our own. For them, it may seem that our women are given illicit rights, that we are giving them unnecessary power, and so on. I believe that, though I do not agree with Syrian culture, we live in two different societies, and that I have no right to look down on them as much as they have no right to look down on us. Harsh judgments have often done more damage than good, after all.