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Something has to let go. A fatwa against Co-Ed schools?

By: Karthik :+: Under: Culture, Desi Ishtyle, Education, It Happens Only in India, Opinion, Religion
On: ⋅ July 11, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment
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When the world around you changes, you adopt to it. Right?

The second week into engineering school I faced one of the weirdest situations I had till date. Little did I know that this would be the first of a zillion more I would for the next four years.

“Could you ask her for her notes?”

I turned around and for a second figured I had heard him wrong. How could a grown man not talk to a woman?

He repeated it, “Could you ask her for her notes?”.

I shook my head, walked over and 10 minutes later, I ended up with her notes and her friendship for the rest of my life.

Classmates thought I was arrogant, cocky, flirtatious and very very confident. But I had been doing this all my life, I just knew how.

Over time, I figured from the exercise, that besides talking to women, I also knew about how to treat them. I did not put them up on a pedestal or look down on them from where I was standing. I addressed them like I would address a guy friend, I spoke to them as an equal.

This also led me to believe that me and my friends had one thing in common which my other classmates did not. We had met, spoken to and tried to understand women way early in life. I grew up with women who were not family, fought with classmates of the other sex and some of them even ended up being informants to my parents.

The opportunity to interact with women came via my co-ed school, situations outside school were limited. All this interaction spilled over to my social life early on. Birthday parties, marriages and even at the temple, I would always meet parents who loved me for the fact that I treated their daughter well and they had no qualms expressing this to my parents.

As cultures intertwine, technology finds its way into everyday life, something has to let go.

This does not seem to bode well with a few people, who are making news. Someone decided to issue a fatwa against Co-Ed schools.

Muslims I went to high school with and their parents never seemed to have a problem with this.

The weirdest part of this story is this one paragraph

The fatwa was issued last week following an e-mail from a follower asking whether Islam allows a female to attend coeducational institutions after reaching puberty.

The seminary routinely receives e-mail queries, especially those pertaining to the Islamic way of life. It did not disclose the name of the sender of the e-mail.

A seminary that uses modern technology does not realize the benefits of a co-education system?

To their credit, many Indian Muslims have spoken against the fatwa.

In a country where women have enough trouble to deal with from the second they are born, do we need to add more? Do we need to keep men and women on different sides of the aisle that when they finally are on the same side, men look at women as objects?

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