I finished this book yesterday night, using only 2 days, in French version (Jamais sans ma fille). It's a book written by Betty Mahmoody. It describes how an American woman, Betty, who married an Iranian, went to Iran with her husband and daughter for a 2 weeks vacation, later realised that she was keeping hostage and might never leave Iran. Over 18 months in Iran, she was planning on her plan to escape with her daughter, in which she succeeded by crossing illegally to Turkey, and returned to US from there.
I have a lot of doubts about certain things she decribed about Iran. But the most unbelievable fact is that the Swiss Embassy, representing also USA, or even the US government, didn't manage to help her returning to her own country from Iran. She was not being kept by any terrorist organization, but by her husband. The family managed to call her and send letters to her, so they know where she lived. I remember a teenager American was littering in Singapore, and the Clinton government was making a fuss about the punishment imposed by the Singaporean government to him. And when their citizen was kept under hostage, they could do nothing about it?
Anyway, this book led me to understand how crazy a muslim country can be. I'm so glad that Malaysia is not like that. We have like 55% muslim population, already the constitutions are there to ensure respecting each other's religion and culture. The muslim population in Malaysia do not force the non-muslim to cover themselves like them. The Islamic laws do not apply to non-muslim. In fact, a lot of us non-muslim like to wear the Malay clothes. The school uniform for muslim and non-muslim are different, but you can see the non-muslim wearing the muslim uniform, by choice, but without the veil. In certain occasion we are asked to wear the Malay traditional clothes, like when meeting the Sultan or the royal family or during public Universities' commencemence. But in all of these occasions, a veil to cover the hairs is not imposed.
We were laughing and even enjoying some of the jokes the Islamic party leaders said. From time to time, these leaders want to execute Islamic rules to our daily life, but we always treat them as jokes. For example, one of the leader mentioned that employers should hire ugly women Vs the beautiful one as the later will be taken care of by their husbands. Then one suggested to change the Malaysian Airlines' stewardess' uniform, as sometime the male passengers accidentally see their breasts and this leads to sexual desire which will result in girls being rapped once these passengers touch down in somewhere. Ever time these kind of comments are published, we doubted these leaders are well equipped with enough intelligence in this rich Malaysian culture.
I hope Malaysia will never go under these stupid fundamentalists.
