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21 " Inside, I gagged. The floor was awash with excrement. Blocked toilet bowls brimmed with sewage. The place looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Nobody had noticed, because nobody who mattered ever went in there. "
― Geraldine Brooks , Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women
22 " Widespread mutilation seems to have originated in Stone Age central Africa and traveled north, down the Nile, into ancient Egypt. It wasn’t until Arab-Muslim armies conquered Egypt in the eighth century that the practices spread out of Africa in a systematic way, parallel to the dissemination of Islam, reaching as far as Pakistan and Indonesia. They "
23 " Save the Children, an organization whose research has proved repeatedly that money in women’s hands benefits families much more than money flowing to men. "
24 " Swirling a glass of ice splashed with Scotch, the host seemed oblivious to the contradiction between what he’d just finished saying and what he was now showing me. After his second drink, he began to tell me about his failed marriage, to an American. “She insisted on riding around in my Rolls without covering her face. Of course, everyone stared at her,” he said with distaste. After "
25 " Even the women began to see us as something so foreign to their community that nothing we said could possibly be of any relevance to them. We "
26 " With this assertion, many mainstream Muslims wash their hands of the twin brutalities that shape the lives of perhaps a quarter of the women of Islam. "
27 " Mental cruelty, nondisfiguring physical abuse or just plain unhappiness are rarely considered grounds on which a woman can seek divorce. "
28 " Janis Karpinski and a few of the instructors fasted all day along with their troops. “I wanted to show solidarity with them, but I also wanted to know exactly what their physical condition was. If "
29 " They were all men, all middle-aged, all of a type: intelligent and elitist, yet deferential to the point of groveling before the king. The "
30 " Politics needs a certain mental ability,” explained Ahmad Saati, the university’s spokesman. “Very few women have this kind of mind.” I "
31 " Rehab had been cursed indeed. There was no way Mohamed could have raised the money to buy his secret stash of gold without scrimping on his family. I imagined the lies he’d told, as he denied her every little luxury. Four years of privation: the punishment for having only a daughter. "
32 " if her husband and children are suffering from her absence or her preoccupation with politics, then this is not Islam.” It "
33 " It astonished me that Muslims, who put such store on emulation of their prophet, didn’t wish to emulate him in something so fundamental as fathering daughters. Muhammad "
34 " In either culture, women somehow managed to get the wrong end of the stick. Women bear the brunt of fending off social disorder in the Catholic "
35 " One program that deplored the high incidence of wife beating drew hundreds of letters from angry men, who insisted that beating their wives was a God-given right. "
36 " fundamentalists asked that a male answer questions directed to her, on the grounds that a woman’s voice is too alluring to be heard in mixed company. Nadia "
37 " In fact, the majlis was an intensely feudal scene, with respectful subjects waiting humbly for a few seconds’ opportunity to whisper in their prince’s ear. "
38 " A scandal had traditionally been an easy way to dispose of an inconvenient woman. "
39 " asked how, if he never had spoken before to women outside his family, he was able to serve as spiritual counselor to the village women. My friend looked at me strangely. “They put their problems to him through their husbands, of course,” he said. “But what if their husband is their problem?” That possibility hadn’t crossed either man’s mind. "
40 " The old man was appalled by the prospect of women driving. He clapped a bony hand to his heart and gazed heavenward: “I hope I never see it in my lifetime,” he said. "