Fatima

Last week, I evaluated a little girl named Fatima in the psychiatric emergency room where I work who was suffering from an adjustment disorder. Among other difficulties at home and at school, she listed that her 23 year-old friend had died at the beginning of this year from breast cancer. The woman had been diagnosed and died less than six months after. A young woman, this came as a shock to her family and friends, and particularly this little girl who looked up to her and felt as if the woman were the older sister she never had. The patient especially felt as though she could not process the loss because she had so little time to spend with her friend before she died, and had never been able to say goodbye. This little girl is Muslim.

I encouraged my patient to talk more about her unresolved feelings. One of the questions I asked was if this was her first time losing someone so close to her. She said yes. We talked about her friend's decline, and then the mourning process afterward. She told me that Muslim women are not allowed to go to funerals. She asked me if Christian women are allowed to go to funerals and I avoided answering because a) I am not Christian and she asked in a way that assumed I was b) I did not want to ruin our rapport by telling her I was Jewish, unfair to assume I would, but eh, who cares, and c) because I am a therapist, I am not supposed to share personal information of that sort with my patients, but rather encourage them to express why they are asking the question. I replied that it sounds like, in some way, she was upset because she could not attend the funeral. Her reply was that she must accept this because it is part of her faith. I suggested that although she respects her religion, she might still be upset about this and that may be affecting her ability to recover from the loss. She admitted that this was the truth.

This upset me very much. I do not understand how a religion could place a limit on a woman's right to be present at the burial of someone so close to her. Grief is a natural human emotion that should not be minimized, ignored, or forbidden. The passing of someone dear to us, the attendance of a funeral, or visiting of graves should be allowed everyone. Not only is it a reminder of the impermanence and fleeting nature of life, but it is also allows us to have--at the very least--a time and place a to say goodbye.

While I now realize not all Muslim communities forbid women from attending funerals, I continue to lament the devalued role of women in most fundamentalist religious sects.

At a young age, my mother told me that in Judaism, women are not seen as equal to men in the eyes of G-d and that part of a religious man's daily prayers thank G-d that his was born a man.

I would like to take this in another direction. I am going to thank G-d everyday (okay, well, not exactly, because as I mentioned before, I've had a hard time believing in him) that I was not born a Muslim woman.