Civilization has made woman an object of admiration or use, but it has deprived woman of her personality, the only thing that deserves appreciation and respect. Such a situation is seen very often, but it becomes most evident in various beauty pageants or in some specifically female vocations such as modeling. In this field, a woman is no longer a personality, or even a human being, and hardly more than a “beautiful animal.”
Civilization disgraced motherhood in particular. It preferred the calling of a salesgirl, model, teacher of other people’s children, secretary, and cleaning woman to that of mother. It was civilization that proclaimed motherhood to be slavery and promised to free woman from it. It boasts about the number of women that it has separated (it says “freed”) from the family and children so that they could be employees. Contrary to this, culture has always glorified the mother. It made her a symbol, a mystery, a sacred thing. It dedicated to her the best verses, the most stirring music, the most beautiful paintings and sculptures. While the agony of the mother continues in the world of civilization, Picasso painted his magnificent painting Motherhood and with his exalted hymn to the mother, he declared that for culture, the mother is still alive.
Homes for the aged go together with children’s homes. They belong to the same order of things, and are in fact, two states of the same solution. Children’s homes and homes for the aged re mind us of artificial birth and artificial death. Both are characterized by the presence of comfort and by absence of love and warmth. Both are opposed to the family and are the result of the changed role of woman in human life. Their common feature is the elimination of parental relationships: in a nursery, children are with out parents; in homes for the aged, parents are without children. Both are the “marvelous” products of civilization and ideals of each utopia.
The family, along with the mother, belongs to a religious concept of things, in the same way as a nursery, along with its employees, belongs to that other one.
[Islam Between East and West by ‘Alija Izetbegovic, p.181-182]
