Gul Meena is a survivor. After nearly being bludgeoned, really stabbed to death by no less than her brother, she managed however, against all odds, to survive. As is common in many rural Muslim communities, especially in Africa and the Indian subcontinent, most specifically Pakistan and Afghanistan, she was married at an early age, in fact, Meena was married by her family when she was only 12 years old. At the time of her marriage, her husband was already 60. By her own account, she was beaten almost everyday, pleading with her family to help her, to no avail. Indeed, every time she complained, her family's consoling retort was to beat her more and scold her. When finally she mustered the courage to escape, she fled to Afghanistan. Knowing full well her family would be at her throat. She also knew that running with another man to Afghanistan would be anathema to Islamic customs - and a few days upon arrival in Afghanistan, her older brother tracked her down and with an ax, hacked her friend to death and struck her 15 times, almost killing her.
She spent days in the hospital with doctors contributing to her medication until she finally recovered. This story speaks not only of the brutality of religious traditions that have cropped up over the centuries, and none is it more gruesome and hideous than the dehumanizing constraints of Islam. Really an obscene, violent and misogynistic faith that deserves no place, no respect and no reverence in the pantheon of ideas, much more ideas that claim exclusive truths about life, salvation and death.
Gul Meena is a testament to the unassailable need that more than ever, science and reason should ever more be promoted, taught and encouraged. That secular humanism provides a better, wholistic and respectable alternative to the chronically abusive insinuations of organized religion, especially the faiths of the Abrahamic tradition. Islam can never be a religion of peace, a religion that respects women and a religion that empowers the human mind unless it is purged of its violent, medieval, feudal, ignorant and arrogant religious text.
Gul Meena is an event that happens everyday in rural Muslim countries, the fight for a secular global order must be advanced at ever more heightened intensity if we are to arrest the needless deaths of thousands of women over the world. All men are created equal. No man, either by faith, color, gender or wealth is subservient. We are all equal in our humanity. Fight for a secular humanist global order.
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