Uğur Zaman
Deniz Yükseker
Soci. 220 – Section 1
17.12.2009
Film Response – Children Who don’t Exist
Woman, The Most Unlucky Creature
The creation of the humanity requires just one thing for both genders from the past, to the
future: Belonging to each other. Especially in the prehistoric period in which there is a struggle of
surviving, people had to be strong to stay alive. However, this way was not for women because
the temperament of women is completely different from the necessity of the era. Therefore this
brought the idea of belonging to someone who completes women’s inadequate parts that is to say
men. However, this belonging issue has not been working equally because men’s view that
women are weak and need them to survive but they do not need women. This perspective about
women has always been an ongoing conflict from the very ancient times to the recent times. Even
in the recent times, there are many places that women are categorized as second class citizen.
Egypt is one of them. Some researchers believe that today there are 14.000 girls who were not
registered and are not legally citizens of the country. Some others believe that the number is more
than half a million. This issue brings us the question: Why many western countries’ citizens have
equal rights and the Egypt don’t? The answer is so simple: the wrong interpretation of the
religion. Because men who are Muslims believe that having more than one wife is their religious
right. However we cannot say that this is true.
In the old times when Islam did not exist in the Arabian geography, men did not even see
the women as human beings. We can say that in this geography, there were a guy married even
more than 10 women. They believed that they are just a bunch of servants who were created for
them. We can observe these behaviors in other places too. For instance; in the Europe in 5th
century, church made the decision that the redheaded women should be burned alive. The church
thought that if a girl born redheaded that means she has a devil inside. Just like in the Europe,
there is a tradition which is exactly like that. If a father has more than one girl, he was burying
one of them alive. With the spreading of the Islam, these kinds of attitudes were certainly
prohibited from the society. Prophet Mohammad married almost 12 women after his 50th age but
this was not for humiliating women, this was for protecting these women. Except one or two
women, most of his wives were widows and have children from their other marriages. With the
Quran’s order, the number for a guy to marry was limited as 4 and ordered to divorce the other
wives but keeping prevented their needs.
Just because this situation was interpreted wrong, the men in Egypt are still continuing
their conservative attitudes. They refuse to register their girls; they keep making orphan marriages and they don’t even think about the consequences of being a not registered girl in
Egypt. If a girl is registered and have a baby with another man, the government did not register
that baby until taking the permission of the father. Of course there are some people fighting
against that situation. As we saw in the clip, ‘Children Who don’t Exist’, when Dr. Iman Bibars
start to challenge 20 years ago, 70% of all women did not legally exist in Egypt. But with the
help of many victims, this situation is changing. The only way of changing these kinds of wrong
cultural attitudes is education which requires long time. Only with the help of education, people
can find proper role models to fallow.