(Week 2...And 1 too.) Okay, Ahmed really is all over the place..

I enjoy her style, and she's very informative, but she doesn't just talk about the Sassyrian Empire, but also Alexander the Great, the Byzantine, the inculsion of Christianity and other religious beliefs that effected women from the region, and the pervasive standards that women were treated in all aspects, not just familial....Hell, even the ideas on veiling are so shifted as well; I wonder how it became from just high-class women and "respectable women" differentiated from prostitutes, to all women wearing them...

While we are on this subject, I might as well bring out something that has seriously bothered me since I found this part in the book; supposedly, misogynist attitudes about women concerning divorce, property ownership, marriage, etc...were all carried over through cultural diffusion through the different cultures in the Middle East at the time, but not the treatment of day-to-day relationships between husband and wives, which were far better and more mutual? What the hell? Sure, I understand pressures from other males to act more aggressively, which lead husbands to take the aspect of wife degradation even more (I just see the logical extension behind it, nothing more.), but you'd think that base kindness and affection towards a member of a "lower class" on the scale of gender in the Middle East would be seen as novel and important to adapt, or at least make the women think that their treatment within society is wrong, and push for mutual treatment sooner.

The only conclusion I can come up with for something like this is simple and something I have seen before. Patriarchal pressures. The men band together, develop their own band of social understanding, and make assumptions about how their lives should be run, and how their women should be treated.

Well, history has shown us that assumptions make fools of us all. But something it hasn't shown all that well is something I'll likely be saying throughout the entire course in some way or another:

Patriarchy hurts men, too.