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077ecb7
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How easily Caleb had taken the teachings of his youth--the many gods, the animate spirit world--and simply recast them in terms of our teaching.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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bb191e7
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The practice of mutilating women's genitals in Eritrea predated the arrival of both religions, and for hundreds of years neither faith had questioned it. The
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Geraldine Brooks |
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My mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother all told me it was right, that without it a woman wouldn't be able to control herself, that she would end up a prostitute," said Aset, a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old whose own genitals had been mutilated when she was about seven years old."
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Geraldine Brooks |
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86dd3b4
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Inside, I gagged. The floor was awash with excrement. Blocked toilet bowls brimmed with sewage. The place looked as if it hadn't been cleaned in weeks. Nobody had noticed, because nobody who mattered ever went in there.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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31ced64
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Widespread mutilation seems to have originated in Stone Age central Africa and traveled north, down the Nile, into ancient Egypt. It wasn't until Arab-Muslim armies conquered Egypt in the eighth century that the practices spread out of Africa in a systematic way, parallel to the dissemination of Islam, reaching as far as Pakistan and Indonesia. They
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Geraldine Brooks |
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3658734
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Save the Children, an organization whose research has proved repeatedly that money in women's hands benefits families much more than money flowing to men.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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f759d89
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I never promised I would write the truth. I
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Geraldine Brooks |
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7294639
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Eved hamalek. The servant of the king.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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158456e
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some half-dozen children running in the fields or about the wetus--fewer
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Geraldine Brooks |
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3905af5
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Censura praevia or censura repressiva, the effect is the same. Either way, a book is destroyed. Better you do it than have us so intellectually enslaved that we do it for you.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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41108d1
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Swirling a glass of ice splashed with Scotch, the host seemed oblivious to the contradiction between what he'd just finished saying and what he was now showing me. After his second drink, he began to tell me about his failed marriage, to an American. "She insisted on riding around in my Rolls without covering her face. Of course, everyone stared at her," he said with distaste. After"
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Geraldine Brooks |
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9247346
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He instructed me how futile it is to wallow in regret for that which cannot be changed and how atonement might be made for even the gravest sins.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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d4fe76a
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And he'd grown as a cactus grows, bitter and prickly and tough enough to survive what came his way.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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9664083
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The T is the oldest subway system in the United States, and I figure if it has lasted this long, it must have been built right in the first place. The train I took from the airport gradually filled with students. They all seemed to be wearing T-shirts with messages on them. Signaling each other like fireflies. NERD PRIDE, said one, and on the back: A WELL-ROUNDED PERSON HAS NO POINT. Another one: THERE ARE ONLY 10 KINDS OF PEOPLE IN THE WOR..
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Geraldine Brooks |
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c2ece0e
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The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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c961b15
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You cannot right injustice by injustice.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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153ac38
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How do we tumble down a hill? A foot placed incautiously on an unsteady rock or loosened turf, an ankle twisted or a knee buckled, and of a sudden we are gone, our body lost to our own control until we find ourselves sprawled in indignity at the bottom. ... For sin, too, must always start with but a single misstep, and suddenly we are hurtling toward some uncertain stopping point. All that is sure in the descent is that we will arrive sulli..
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Geraldine Brooks |
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caec60c
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Even the women began to see us as something so foreign to their community that nothing we said could possibly be of any relevance to them. We
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Geraldine Brooks |
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0f4f071
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man will silence the voice of his conscience when it suits him to commit sin. But
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Geraldine Brooks |
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1709b75
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With this assertion, many mainstream Muslims wash their hands of the twin brutalities that shape the lives of perhaps a quarter of the women of Islam.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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993ee83
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Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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e36cb9b
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the truth from his ears, waxed strong.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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de9f59f
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So it is, out here on this island, where we dwell with our faces to the sea and our backs to the wilderness. Like Adam's family after the fall, we all have things to do.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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bec549d
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Perhaps the giver of the name had meant to trick Cheepi, the devil-god, into thinking him unloved and therefore leaving him alone.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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6fef99f
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Mental cruelty, nondisfiguring physical abuse or just plain unhappiness are rarely considered grounds on which a woman can seek divorce.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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d9c226f
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the man who has been wealthy is dunned more civilly than the fellow who has ever been poor.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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68ade79
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Janis Karpinski and a few of the instructors fasted all day along with their troops. "I wanted to show solidarity with them, but I also wanted to know exactly what their physical condition was. If" --
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Geraldine Brooks |
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220f4a1
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They were all men, all middle-aged, all of a type: intelligent and elitist, yet deferential to the point of groveling before the king. The
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Geraldine Brooks |
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03b4a81
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Politics needs a certain mental ability," explained Ahmad Saati, the university's spokesman. "Very few women have this kind of mind." I"
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Geraldine Brooks |
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6bbf876
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Rehab had been cursed indeed. There was no way Mohamed could have raised the money to buy his secret stash of gold without scrimping on his family. I imagined the lies he'd told, as he denied her every little luxury. Four years of privation: the punishment for having only a daughter.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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9e138fe
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if her husband and children are suffering from her absence or her preoccupation with politics, then this is not Islam." It"
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Geraldine Brooks |
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e810678
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It astonished me that Muslims, who put such store on emulation of their prophet, didn't wish to emulate him in something so fundamental as fathering daughters. Muhammad
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Geraldine Brooks |
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a02216a
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In either culture, women somehow managed to get the wrong end of the stick. Women bear the brunt of fending off social disorder in the Catholic
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Geraldine Brooks |
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e8822a5
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One program that deplored the high incidence of wife beating drew hundreds of letters from angry men, who insisted that beating their wives was a God-given right.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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ae8b50e
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fundamentalists asked that a male answer questions directed to her, on the grounds that a woman's voice is too alluring to be heard in mixed company. Nadia
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Geraldine Brooks |
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c5e2d71
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In fact, the majlis was an intensely feudal scene, with respectful subjects waiting humbly for a few seconds' opportunity to whisper in their prince's ear.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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cace699
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A scandal had traditionally been an easy way to dispose of an inconvenient woman.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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f39b97b
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asked how, if he never had spoken before to women outside his family, he was able to serve as spiritual counselor to the village women. My friend looked at me strangely. "They put their problems to him through their husbands, of course," he said. "But what if their husband is their problem?" That possibility hadn't crossed either man's mind."
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Geraldine Brooks |
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eaaed42
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The old man was appalled by the prospect of women driving. He clapped a bony hand to his heart and gazed heavenward: "I hope I never see it in my lifetime," he said."
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Geraldine Brooks |
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a99c957
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To the gnarled old imam, sending his daughters out of the home--to walk in the streets, even if veiled, to sit among strangers, even if all girls--was wicked. His
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Geraldine Brooks |
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e3265e6
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the dangerous female body that somehow, in Muslim society, had been made to carry the heavy burden of male honor.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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16bbaee
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The women have been told it's written in the Koran that they must do these things," she said. She could tell them it wasn't but, as an outsider and a woman, her word meant little against the word of the village sheik."
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Geraldine Brooks |
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b3e213a
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I've watched them. Watched them walking with this stupid smile on their faces into the biggest risk you can take in this life.
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Geraldine Brooks |
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db5173b
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I had begun this journey following him into the hidden corners of his world and here it ended with him crossed over into the brightest heights of mine.
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Geraldine Brooks |