speak the name of their husbands directly,because it is viewed as immodest and disrespectful.3 In addition to this tradition that hasbeen adopted from Hinduism, women in Bangladesh are rarely referred to by their firstname, but are instead addressed as men's wives, brother's sisters, or father's daughters.4It is obvious from this simple fact that women are not viewed as individuals aside fromwhat they give to the world of men.To supplement these simple practices of suppression, there are also sacredconcepts and beliefs that exist in Islamic countries that display misogyny.5 FatimaMernissi writes:Banning mixing of sexes and advocating the separation of men and women as themeasure to alleviate all political crises is far from being a novelty in Muslim politicalhistory. It is a tradition, even a state tradition. Opposition forces claim past practice asthe basis for treating women with contempt. A Muslim Sovereign in a crisis, facinghunger riots or popular revolt, immediately has recourse to the traditional practice ofdestroying the stores of wine and placing a ban on women leaving their homes, andespecially on their using the same transportation as men, reducing them to the state ofimmobility in capitals like Cairo and Baghdad which are traversed by greatrivers....Wine and women - here we have the Gordian knot6 of the crisis. Tathir, theritual purification of the social body, requires the destruction of the first and theconfinement of the second.7This practice of seeing the women as the root of all problems is not something ofthe past or something of the present. It is pervasive across the centuries to the years thatIslam first originated. Mernissi gives us an examples of this:Al-Hakim, the Fatimid caliph who ordered his mathematician to regulate the waters ofthe Nile, turned to the other, more realizable, measures to calm the masses when thewaters continued to fall and the failure of the crops provoked enormous inflation. In th...
