ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Fatima is Fatima The Social Customs of Hejaz The Social Customs of the Hejaz Fatima is the fourth and youngest daughter of the Prophet of Islam. She is the youngest daughter of a house­hold to which no sons survived. She is a girl born into a society where both the father and the family place special value upon a son. The social order of the Arabs had passed beyond the Age of the Matriarch centuries before Islam.

During the Age of ignorance, prior to the mission of the Prophet, the Arabs had established the Age of the Patriarch. Their gods had become masculine whereas their idols and their angels were feminine (that is, daughters of the great god, al-lah ). The tribes were governed by `white beards' and the family was ruled by the grandfathers. Essentially, their religion was a kind of ancestor worship. They adhered to whatever beliefs and practices their fathers had had.

It was against the religion of ancestral fathers that the great prophets, mentioned in the Qur’an, revolt. When con­fronted with the revolt against ancestor worship and myths which sought out their first fathers, the tribes stood for the preservation of the masculine traditions. It was a kind of inherited, imitative worship based upon the principle of father worship. The Prophets bring a revolutionary message. They try to awaken a thought based on the principle of worshipping God.

Beyond this, the difficult life of the tribes of the dry desert is filled with hostility between one tribe and another, for the basic principles of life are 'defend and attack' and `keep your promises'. In this society, the son plays a special role which is based upon the `uses and needs' of the society's social and military principles. According to a universal principle of sociology, where profit is substituted for value, being a son is by and of itself of the highest essence.

It means embodying virtues, meaningful social and ethical values and human nobility. For this very reason, being a girl or having a daughter is humbling. Her frailness is substituted by `being weak'. Her `being weak' pushes her towards slavery and slavery causes her human values to lessen. She becomes a creature who is the slave of a man, the disgrace of her father, the toy of a man's sexual urges and the 'goal' or slave of the home of her husband.

Finally, this creature always shakes her man's sense of honor because she is the highest form of shame and disgrace.