HERE WE GO AGAIN.
For every good religious person I meet, there are 50 morons, and seemingly half of the latter have published a book. I’d like to draw attention to one of these books- once again about telling Muslim women how to live their lives. (Instructions include “SMILE! PRAY! BE GRATEFUL!” Yeah ok. So helpful.)
Optimistically titled “You Can Be The Happiest Woman In the World” , the book presents an interesting look into the starkly primeval mind of a strange little man and his opinions on women. It was first published in 2004, which is weird. I expected it to be far older, judging by the content. I mean the only occupation it suggests is cattle rearing. Who is the target audience? Poor farm women? The book also refers to itself as “A Treasure Chest of Reminders”.
It doesn’t mention what these reminders are of. Presumably God, but for me it conjured up reminders of Medieval pastoral scenes full of disease and war.
The Review:
The first thing that gave me a sense of foreboding was the cover. My copy has a murky green background and a dark, shapeless form that on closer inspection is the silhouette of a veiled woman clutching a Quran. It looks unintentionally terrifying, like the cover of a bad horror novel.
Introduction
Still, I approached this book with an open mind. Sometimes religious instruction books are kind of uplifting, or at least focus on the importance of the spiritual over the material. The introduction, for example, started off well, promising to bring hope to women in despair, address her “rational mind and pure heart” and not to care about “worldly adornments, false appearances or transient fashion.”
But then it abruptly changes tack and launches into a harangue about evil western literature. O_O Wait what happened?
“The way to happiness is to be found in clarity of knowledge and soundness of education. This cannot be achieved by romantic fiction which leads to frustration and depression. Indeed, the matter is more serious than that, such as the stories of Agatha Christie, which teach about deceit, crime and robbery. I have read the series entitled The Best of World Fiction, a selection of exciting, Nobel-prize winning stories, and I found that these stories contained many serious mistakes and a great deal of foolishness. How many people have fallen victim to articles or stories they have read.”
Yes well okay. In the introduction alone we can see this man’s disdain for those silly foolish Nobel laureates, and his presumable conviction that the entire lot of innocent women who read Agatha Christie are now out there, probably committing murder.
Chapter 1
After the introduction, chapter ones begins. First up is a single page that excitedly proclaims “WELCOME!” in all caps, under which are ten other welcomes (“Welcome, O’ mother of heroes and producer of men.”) After that is a single page that announces the word “YES!” in equally jubilant all-caps. Followed by ten more sentences starting with yes ( “YES to your beautiful smile that sends a message of warmth and friendliness to others. ) And then a page that exclaims “NO!” You get the picture.
After the strange YES NO lists is a 2-pager titled Ten Thoughts to Ponder About. One of my favorites from these ten thoughts is the inexplicable bullet point 6, which says “Be like a tall tree with high aims; if a stone is thrown at it, it simply lets its fruits drop.” I admit, I pondered this for a long time, because it sounded so insane. Out of all the motivational speeches and instagram quotes I’ve ever read, I was never once told to be a stone-pelted, fruit-dropping high-aiming goddamned tree.
Then is a single page titled “THINK ABOUT IT…”, with ten more bullet points to think about. I admit I pondered here as well, mostly about why these were under a separate heading instead of under the Ponder About section. It begins by instructing us to “be like the bee, which lands on fragrant flowers and fresh branches”. What does this MEAN? Be near clean good-smelling people? Avoid old people? What is with all these ridiculous similes?
Chapter 2
Right after “THINK ABOUT IT…” begins chapter 2. At this point I realize there is absolutely no point in organizing this book into chapters, because there is no reading order, and no sense of categorization. Every chapter is the same, with a few short anecdotes under an absolutely irrelevant heading, the paper-back equivalent of clickbait titles.
Chapter 2 for example, has a section titled “You have a huge wealth of blessings” but then doesn’t actually say what they are- instead it rants poetically about how “the clouds of worry will be blown away, the darkness of distress will be dispelled, and calamities will come to an end.” and ends by rhetorically demanding how often a woman gets talked about because of her good attitude, obedience to husband, and her modesty when she moves into a new neighborhood.
Another, provocative title is “The believing woman and the disbelieving woman are not equal”. Uh oh, here comes the arrogance. Sure enough, the writer says believing women from the believing lands are totes amaze while disbelieving women from the disbelieving lands are “cheap worthless products at offer in all places.” I, incredulous woman from the Incredulous lands, read it with a mixture of amusement and shock. “she is ignorant and foolish, a mere fashion model. She has no value, honor or religion.” Ok, wow. Let’s hope you can see what’s wrong with that statement and move on.
The rant ends with a very mysterious line that says “All people will live, the one who lives in a palace and the one who lives in a hovel. But who is the one who is happy?” You guys. This is rhetorical. Clearly the answer is the therapeutic, depression-curing hovel. For outright euphoria try a shipwrecked raft in the middle of the ocean it is BLISS.
In fairness, some of the writings are so enthusiastic that they are a bit uplifting. One section talks about how lucky you are to have been born Muslim, rather than any other religion. It says “Congratulations, for you offer five daily prayers, you fast, you go on pilgrimage to the house, you observe hijab. Congratulations, for you are pleased with Allah as your lord, Islam as your religion, and Muhammad SAW as your prophet.” This exuberant joy is very endearing, and if there are people out there who can feel this happiness in being Muslim I am glad of it. May everyone feel happy in what they believe.
But this sort of feel-good stuff is rather sparse. Most of the book is sermonic and wildly scatter-brained. A section called “Laziness is kin to failure” starts off by saying hey ladies work hard, and take care of your appearance. But right in the middle of this lecture the author has an outburst of sexism and cries “beware of sin! For it leads to grief, especially the sins that are very common among women.” What could these female-centric sins possibly be you ask? “Forbidden glances, wanton adornment, cursing, slandering, backbiting, denying one’s husbands rights” etc etc. Because of course. This is what women do. Sit around, seduce men and talk shit about people. Men never do this because they are out there committing male-related crimes such as killing and stealing I suppose.
Chapter 3
One of my favorite anecdotes because of its sheer insanity is titled “Old Women make heroes.” Such an eye-catching title. It brings to mind legendary warrior women or the likes of mother Teresa. Except you can kill your expectations right there, because this author’s prattling meandering idiocy doesn’t expose anything remotely heroic. These are quite literally a bunch of stories about women who are old. Yes, their sole collective defining trait is that they are old. They don’t even have names.
The first heroic old woman was told that al-Hajjaj would kill her son. To that, pat came her reply “If you do not kill him, he will die anyway.” WOW lady, way to be a sociopath. This does not sound like heroism to me, it sounds like terrible parenting. Maybe the author mistranslated the message or something because my first unadulterated impression is of a woman who doesn’t care if her son dies. Because he will die someday anyway. Happily, the author highlights what the important heroic bit was- “putting her trust in her Lord.” By telling al-Hajjaj that he could murder her son. WHERE does the trust in god part come in here???
The second anecdote is even more ridiculous. The author raves that we should “be like the old Persian woman who put her trust in Allah the day she had to be away from her chicken coop. She looked up towards the heavens and said ‘O Allah, protect my chicken coop for you are the best of protectors!” That’s it. That’s the entire story of Heroic Old Woman #2. Now I understand that the message here is to trust that god will protect your material possessions, and that is fine, but what is even remotely heroic about leaving a chicken coop unguarded? In an age of feminism, gender equality, and thousands of towering female figures, is THIS what the author is giving me to look upon as heroism?? Is this man unaware of what a hero is? Are there no better female role models in Islam that he could have turned to, rather than nameless old women who are coldly dismissive of their actual children but overprotective of chickens, and who I suspect he made up himself?
Final thoughts:
I just have to add that the portrayal of women in this book is troubling. Every woman is described in three ways- a mother, wife and a devout woman. She doesn’t really do anything other than worship and obey her husband. She has no job, no ambition, no character, and all her problems can be solved by being grateful. What about women who are actually depressed or troubled, and sincerely picked this book up to lift their spirits? It won’t do anything for them. It’s designed for very simple minded, impressionably young and married women.
It also mentions fairly often that a woman should rush to make her husband feel better. If he comes home stressed or tired she must wait on him hand and foot, and then try to solve his problem. Many women seem to have a problem with this notion, although I don’t understand why. If you remove the wife/husband and replace it with human/human it says one human sees that the other human is stressed, and tries to make that human feel better. This is GOOD. This should be encouraged. I don’t understand why PLEASING the husband is being confused with servility these days. Unfortunately, I think he said something nice by mistake and not by intention. Because the rest of the book is just super weird about the concept of being a wife- basically the guy you marry owns you.
There’s one story in particular that comes to mind- a woman goes crying to her dad and says sometimes she doesn’t listen to her husband and so she is scared to go to hell. Her father tells her yes, if she dies while her husband is displeased with her, she is being chucked straight into hell. Then the author tacks on some message about how the key to paradise is obeying the hubby. Yes. To review, a sobbing woman is terrified of going to hell because she doesn’t listen to her husband, and her father tells her lol yeah you’re totes going to hell for it. Very comforting. I’m sure heartbroken sobbing women love being told to obey a guy by another guy under the threat of eternal torment.
For some reason, this book also romanticizes poverty. It insists over and over that “poor women in mud huts” are happier than people who “live in mansions and sleep in silk sheets” because the poor woman believes in god and implies that somehow owning material wealth equals being astray from God. I wonder if he has ever met with or spoken to these happy poor women. Because I have, and the stories they tell chill me to my bones. The horrors they endure, the squalor they live in, the misery that they cope with- how can this author just gloss over it all and insist that they are happy? Certainly they are religious. Who needs religion more than the poor? How will they forge through life without a beautiful belief to cling to? Instead of reducing their struggle to a silly proverb, he could have spoken about empathizing with them or helping them, which Islam does stress on so deeply.
To be fair, you can tell the intentions behind the book are good, and it is trying to focus on things like the importance of inner beauty and trust in God, but its attempts are marred by the author’s poor writing ability and narrow range of thought. It is circumscribed within the same hackneyed anecdotes about camel-riding burqa-clad cattle-rearing uninspiring women from oral tradition. It has no wisdom, kindness, truth or beauty within it. It reads rather like a set of demanded instructions, without any empathy at all. The language used is uncannily like that of badly translated hadis, which is perplexingly common in modern Islamic books (why don’t people re-translate hadis into better, simpler English?). It is as if these authors rely solely on old Arabic translations to wield the English language.
Verdict
avoid this junk. Your brain cells will commit hara kiri