A GOD WHO HATES WOMEN
A Woman's Journey Through Oppression
Majid Rafizadeh
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264 pages; Rs 295
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Indoctrination has been and remains the most formidable weapon of all times, the horror of which we are witnessing today in the rise of the Islamic State. The world's most dangerous dictators have thrived on their ability to indoctrinate people. Entire countries, like North Korea, are being ruled on their regime's power to brainwash populations.
The most dangerous kind of indoctrination is the one that has religion backing it. The concoction that emerges then is both inflexible and lethal. And, often, the worst victims of this deadly brew are women.
Mr Rafizadeh's book - a memoir - is a result of this deadly brew that poisoned his experiences growing up in a society where the interpreters of religion believed and preached that "men are in charge of women" and where choice remains an alien word for girls, many of whom were married off at age nine.
This is a personal journey, both emotional and violent, of the author's mother who was born in Syria, was all but rejected by her own mother for being a girl, was married off to the first suitor, who would often beat her like an animal, got divorced at 18 after she had a child, was then treated as a blot on the family by her mother and siblings, was married off again to a stranger - an already-married man from Iran about whom her family knew nothing and into a country they had never seen or were ever going to see.
Through his experience of his mother's traumatised life and stories narrated by his aunts, her cousins and the father he didn't speak to for years, Mr Rafizadeh pieces together this woman's life.
A large part of the book is about the violence she endures both in Syria and Iran. Through her life, Mr Rafizadeh draws attention to the lot of women in both the dominant Muslim sects - Shia and Sunni - in which he grew up.
What stands out starkly is the enigmatic behaviour of his father, who could well have been a child prodigy had Mr Rafizadeh's orthodox grandfather not pulled him out of school. The author's father shuns religious fundamentalism, questions matters of faith and goes to the extent of inviting trouble by saying that "Abraham Lincoln was more productive than Muhammad", while at the same time often beating his wife (Mr Rafizadeh's mother) and justifying her humiliation and pain by telling her that god, too, believed that women were inferior to men.
On one occasion, when comparing Persians and Arabs (Mr Rafizadeh's mother is Arab), his father thunders, "Persians had the greatest civilisation in the world, so how can they ever be like the dirty Arabs, huh?" And then he goes on to explain how everyone in Persia had the "same rights before the courts of law, and women had the same rights as men when they got married and divorced".
The author says it was much later that he saw the incongruity between what his father said then and what he said when quoting from the holy book while justifying thrashing his mother.
The desperation of women to hold on to their husbands and their place in society in a cruel patriarchal milieu is also evident in the "pregnancy competition" the author's step-mother - his father's first wife - gets into with his mother.
Religion, politics and civil war only magnify the atmosphere of violence in which the author's mother - ironically called Amira (princess in Arabic) - struggles to survive. Her journey to Iran with her new husband happens when the unknown country to which she is heading is in the throes of the 1979 Islamic Revolution led by Ruhollah Khomeini. The government that would come to power would only make the fate of women worse in the name of religion and god. "Religious ideologies," writes Mr Rafizadeh, "can justify even the most horrible crimes against humanity by claiming that such acts are warranted in order to serve their God."
A God Who Hates Women is a daring book, and an honest one, in which the author looks religion in the eye and asks some hard questions. He talks about the hardships women live through every day of their lives because of an indoctrinated society and culture that thinks nothing of them. He talks of his own birth, on the bare cement floor of a cold room - his mother alone during the delivery, while his father is with his first wife in another house.
In some ways A God Who Hates Women reminds me of another book - Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. One scene, in particular, is common in both: When the husband stuffs his wife's mouth with stones, forcing her to chew, hitting her, leaving her bloody and with "shock, fear, guilt, shame, and intense, excruciating pain". That encounter was in Kabul; this one in Syria. That one was fictional; this one real. In both, the plight of the woman is the same.
Mr Rafizadeh, who has chosen a different life, of free speech and democracy, leaves the reader with some questions: Where is Syria heading now? Will women in these societies ever have it better? But those are subjects for other books to come - several other books.
