Dear Attendants,
It is my great pleasure to be among you here today, as a speaker, at this international family conference held under the patronage of the State of Qatar. A conference attended by the UN’s Secretary General – Mr. Kofi Annan, the Arab League’s Secretary General and many other dignified figures and scientists specialized in family issues. Such a congregation would rarely be gathered except in such an international conference. My speech today will be on how to achieve a stable marriage and a harmonious family life.
Dear attendants, from where we stand now, we all represent peoples of various races, religions, civilizations and cultures. Yet, in the end we are the ones responsible for populating and reforming this planet. It is beyond any doubt that we have achieved great successes in the material life, in how to deal with it, how to employ it and utilize it according to our own objectives. Yet, the sweeping success of man in this area, throughout the past century, has been at the expense of ignoring many other aspects that bear more importance to man than the material aspect. Man himself is among the first things that have been ignored and deteriorated, and what has deteriorated most is his social stability and family relations. The family is, in fact, the main reason we are all gathered here today.
I think that the starting point for restoring family relations and regaining the lost amicability, intimacy, love, mercy and tranquility should start with the woman. The woman is the most important member in the family, or I would rather say the family IS the woman. She is half of the family and she brings up the other half . She is half of the society and she is responsible for the other half .
So if we are talking now about improving family life, we are actually talking about improving the condition of women.
I’m saying it to you all, loud and clear, the condition of the family will never improve unless we redress all injustice done against women; in the East, and the West. This is if we want improve her ability in practicing her role and providing kindness, compassion and mercy, and bringing up her children.
So what are the types of injustice that have been posed on the women of the Arab world? We want to redress the injustice done against women in the following areas:
Topic | Issues |
Violence against women | Crimes of harassment and honor, and the lenience of the judicial system in dealing with such crimes based on the slightest of doubts, rather than hard evidence. Hence, transgressing from all positive and Islamic laws. The absence of deterring punishments against the humiliation and beating of women. |
Financial rights | Depriving women of their rightful inheritance by force, specially in countryside areas. Parental discrimination against girls, favoring boys. |
Political rights | Depriving women of their right to participate effectively in voting. Depriving women of taking high government posts. |
Social rights | Widespread of illiteracy among Arab women. Depriving women of choosing their own partners and forcing them into marriage against their wish. Widespread of unemployment among women and favoring men in all posts despite their need for work more than men in some cases. Forbidding women from the freedom of traveling. Using polygamy as a general rule without any restrictions and regardless of whether it is absolute or conditional. Depriving women of all forms of compassion, mercy and social security. |
Islam has got nothing to do with all these forms of injustice, though some of them are done in the name of Islam. This is mainly the outcome of the misinterpretation of many verses of the Qur’an as and many Prophetic Traditions (Ahadith). Or due to the influence of wrong habits and traditions that we’ve inherited and that have negatively affected the behavior of the society.
Needless to say that this injustice is not just in the East but also in the West. There are other forms of injustice imposed against women in the West such as:
Sexual assault.
Humiliation and beating without any deterring punishment.
Women earn lower salaries than men.
Marital infidelity rates have escalated without any justice towards women.
Treating women as commercial goods in some cases.
Dear attendants, I am not here today to express my own views nor to give you my individual opinions and suggestions. I am here today to convey a message that I have been entrusted with by hundreds of thousands of Arab youth all over the world. Yes, I’ve come today to convey this message with which these youth, and non other but them, have entrusted me. But, there is a story behind all that.
I present a program on one of the Arab space channels called Suna’a al-Hayah (Life Makers). The main objective of this program is to utilize the Arab youth (whether Muslims or Christians) in development projects with the aim of making a better future for our countries. Thousands of the youth have adopted up the ideas in these projects and have started executing them. This has all lead me to ask them to send their dreams about how they envisage their countries 20 years from now. I asked them to dream about their countries and try to visualize how they would love to see them in 20 years' time.
I presented them with 23 domains of development to focus their dreams on; the domains of agriculture, industry, technology, tourism, women's affairs, family affairs, the interrelations between our countries and social tranquility. Consequently, the youth started reacting and they sent more than 787,500 dreams and suggestions to my website www.amrkhaled.net.
Honestly, I don’t know if anyone has ever asked the youth such a question before or not??
Afterwards, I asked the youth to vote on these suggestions over the internet, to be able to determine the most, then the least important dreams. Those who participated in the polling reached 1000,000,000 (one million) votes. Out of those were 136,000 votes in the domains of social tranquility, family affairs and women's affairs.
I came today representing these youth, who constitute the most crucial segment of the society and who are looked upon by specialists with great care and anticipation. I came today asking this dignified conference to adopt the dreams of these youth in areas related to women's affairs, family affairs and social tranquility.
Among the dreams they sent:
Illiteracy rates, of the Arab women, would drop down to less than 5%.
Redressing any social injustice posed on women.
Redressing any financial injustice posed on women.
Chances provided for women, to get jobs, would be equal to those of men.
Redressing any political injustice posed on women.
Dear attendants:
The aim behind such conferences is not just to exchange accusations; who is mistaken and who is wronged. We are all seeking the welfare of women and the family and seeking to restore the lost tranquility. We don’t want these conferences to become like mere debates between countries and religions.
If any of you aims to have no differences in our points of views, this would be totally unrealistic as well as unachievable. We represent different countries and cultures. We represent different races, religions and civilizations… and we will always do so.
What we should seek here is that each people and nation respect one another's culture. The Arab region has its own culture and any attempt to wipe out or obscure our identity will firstly be doomed with failure and secondly will lead to more animosity between us. This is the lesson that we should all learn from past history. What we are responsible for now, through this conference, is that in the third millennium better conditions for man should exist. This can only be done through specific work programs.
It is our expectation that this conference would turn into a useful work program regardless of religion, sex or race. On our part, we started a very humble experiment in Britain in the area of promoting the role of the family in a very modern and up-to-date mode. For some time, we have been tackling family problems from single-sided studies and theoretical approaches that go back to the first years of the Mohammadan Nation, regardless of the novelties of this age, that present other problems and solutions. For that reason we have taken the initiative to conduct the biggest field research (Qualitative & Quantitative Research) in the whole Arab area, specially dedicated to the problems of the Arab family. The research was conducted on 800 samples in each of the countries that were chosen for the field research and these are; Morocco, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, in addition to the family problems in Britain. We have thus concluded the largest field research tackling the problems of the Arab region. The research was supervised by specialized market research companies. Right now we are in the stage of desk research, to include the academic researches conducted about the family in the past ten years. Finally, we will issue a family guide that will include all the problems and the solutions in a novel and unconventional form.
This was the practical step that we took in order to reform the role of the family.
No comments:
Post a Comment