Distant View of a Minaret” Critical Analysis Essay

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“DISTANT VIEW OF A MINARET” CRITICAL ANALYSIS ESSAY In Islamic communities, people believe that gender inequality is natural and that men’s dominant position over women should be acknowledged and accentuated. There are the Islamic restrictive norms that clip women’s wings and even give them no right to make decision on their own future. For that reason, it is common that most of Islamic women are forced into arranged marriages in which they have to spend their lives with their dictatorial husbands. In “Distant View of a Minaret," Alifa Rifaat depicts a tragic life of such a marriage’s victim, a devout wife but satisfied by her life partner neither sexually nor emotionally. That the wife has suffered her husband’s tyranny, indifference, and infidelity for a long time gradually changes her into an unhappy, frigid and even hard-hearted wife. After marriage, due to the fact that the wife has no major decisions under the strict protection and rules of her husband, her effervescent personality turns droopy. First of all, she must have abandoned all personal ambitions in order to benefit her husband only. For instance, she must have yielded to her husband’s pressure to live in a small, noisy flat in the center of the city instead of the house with a garden in a peaceful community that she used to dream about before marriage because it was convenient for her husband to go to work (1133). Moreover, not only is her sexual aspiration unfulfilled, but such righteous need also used to be rudely criticized by the husband. The last time she had endeavored to prolong the intercourse until she too climaxed was the time “he made an indelible tattoo mark of shame deep inside her.” The incident plunged her into abject misery, so she just blamed herself and “had to submitted to her passive role” of a servant rather than a life partner (1132). As a consequence, her life becomes
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