facts bro she said somali men are lazy because the women make the aqal. Meanwhile women in Pakistan are being enslaved and forced to make mud bricks in order to pay off the debt their husbands have incurred.
“Living without running water, and often trapped by their employers for the rest of their lives, these women are forced to work in brick kilns, agricultural fields and other hard labour industries to clear debts which overshadow their families
https://time.com/16225/the-pakistani-women-brick-makers-enslaved-by-debt/
The biggest issue with bringing it up was how she utilised it to score gender points and also her lack of understanding.
She was projecting her modern views of gender dynamics back to our dhaqaan claiming it’s the source of our problems that we’ve with women, especially what she terms as naag nool dhaqan.
Unfortunately one of the major setbacks that has befallen Muslims in the west is that they look at their culture and religion through the lens of their adopted western views. For muslim women this means the adoption of feminism.
Instead of analysing issues properly the blame is shifted entirely to either dhaqan, men and even diinta sometimes. Our people have gone through colonialism, civil war and resettlement to the west, all of this upheavals have had huge negative impacts on us yet people belittle these factors when considering societal issues that we face.
Now for her women making aqal was yet another example of how lazy somali men are and how our dhaqaan enabled them to be just that. Women worked harder because this is what an cadaan gaal stated so, completely ignoring the fact the gaal is judging nomadic people he came across based on his standard of gender roles of people living in cities where construction of houses etc was the domain of men. Furthermore one has take into consideration the racist beliefs of gaalka.
Somalis also lived in towns made of stone who was in charge of making them ? The life of a nomad is a very rough life where people move constantly and as such it’s very important that everyone did their part in ensuring their survival. This is common among all nomadic people and it’s why you’ll notice a similarity between different ethnic groups when it comes gender roles.
Women in these societies had domain over anything pertaining to the house including maintaining, setting & dismantling of their traditional aqals. Just look at nomadic people like turks, mongols, native americans, Inuits and even bedouin arabs. Men helped out as well and also were the ones in charge of making them. Not all traditional male skills were taught to just men alone.
Laakin all of what I just explained above never is considered and instead cultural norms are simply taken out of context and critiqued based on the world views of the individual doing the critiquing
