Incomplete Men; Complete Women

There should be tagline attached to the name of our country; ‘A Country of Incomplete People’. This is because the majority of people we see around us, perhaps ourselves included, are incomplete. We lead incomplete lives, juggle with incomplete relationships, boast of incomplete romances, engage in incomplete tasks, dream incomplete dreams for which we achieve incomplete realizations, remain mired in incomplete sins, and finally, after all is said and done, die, wailing and lamenting, a sorrowful, incomplete death.

Of all the people in our society, it is the man who can singularly be labeled as being incomplete. It is the man who remains the fearful, nervous, spineless being paranoid of shadows, fettered to unknown fears, tethered to imaginary chains; a traveler of sorrowful roads who never gives up mistaking mirages for oases.

Despite his incompleteness, it is this same wretched, incomplete man who bears the brunt of physical and psychological abuses, entirely and completely, who takes the brunt of indictments completely upon himself, and then responsibly and completely suffers the sentencing to the end. Therefore, it is unfathomable that unless a woman responded to his hello, he could have had the guts or the nerve to grab her hand. That is indeed an incomprehensible thought because the man of our society is, at core, an utter weakling. A coward being, he is not afraid of sin itself; he is afraid of the accusation of sin. But when push comes to shove and matters transgress further, it is the man who is piled with the abominable culpability of the act. As for the daughter of Eve, she is solaced as a mute, mindless, wax doll devoid of intellect and emotion that melted into a puddle by no doing of her own. The state of the matter is, however, much to the contrary.

Much to the contrary, opposed to the man, the woman is not only wholly complete, she is also supremely well versed in both the arts of either completing a man or leaving him, deliberately and malignly, incomplete. In our society, Adam’s better half is not half but complete with full intellect and a complete razor-sharp intuition. She loves completely with passion, trusts blindly with conviction, stands on unshakeable grounds of belief, and loathes with a savage brutality. For her, there is no distinction between love and life. In juxtaposition, the man prefers to keep love, life, career, vocation, and faith in neat little unconnected cubicles in his mind. He fails to realize that it takes two hands to clap; the only way one hand could clap is by beating the chest in mourning. However, this doesn’t stop the incomplete man from beating the drum of his incomplete masculinity. Even though, in his heart of hearts, he is well aware that it will take nothing but a woman to make him whole and complete him.

A society that has no objection to the jeans and t-shirt attired husband of a veiled woman has no right to pass judgment on the hijab-less wife of a man with a beard.

If the humanity in this beloved nation was judged on the scale of tolerance, perseverance, and tenacity, then incontrovertibly all the men would be declared women and all the women would be deemed men. Despite this, the heavens groan when the ‘complete’ honor of this incomplete man decides to take a turn.

‘I saw your daughter at the bus stop talking to a young man,’ ‘Your sister is not wearing a hijab,’ ‘Why is your wife’s picture on Facebook?, Have you no sense of right and wrong and religious honor? I would never allow such blatant immorality to continue in my own house’ etc. etc. etc.

The Lord alone possibly knows what people gain from or what purpose they have when they engage in such uncalled for judgmental and condemnatory analysis of other people’s affairs. The proverbial noses of incomplete men seem to work with heightened completeness when they go poking into other people’s lives and businesses. Perhaps they resent the happiness and the tranquility of others’ home and hence maliciously finds ways to disrupt this serenity by playing the role of the serpent, beating the drum of their own incomplete and, often entirely, misplaced sense of morality. They have neither the desire nor the inclination to consider the age of people they are maligning, the compassion to understand the trials they may be going through, the formidable wars they may be engaged in, or the enormous problems that they are toiling to surmount.

There is no empathy for any of these issues, but there is a long line of ‘suggestions’ on how to fix the ‘issue’ at hand. The title of this document of suggestions is ‘If you wish to control women, keep them forever the slipper on your feet’. One question, if that really is where they wished to see the hapless souls, why did they even bother bringing them into their lives and their homes?

If the man earns money, does it make him the sovereign, the lord, the uncrowned master of body, mind, soul, emotions, aspirations, desires, wishes, and actions?

Man earns money, but children neither eat money nor do they sleep on it.

Man earns money, but these pieces of paper and round disks of metal neither bring peace nor joy, happiness or profound repose.

It is the woman who translates this paper and metal into a home, happiness, peace, and joy.

The so called man of our society spends his day at work, at labor, and out in the ‘honorably masculine’ world all day to get his fill of curses, biases, discrimination, prejudices, lies, resentments, jealousies, and unfairness. At the end of his ‘valor’ filled day, when he returns home in hundred pieces it is the woman who consoles him, soothes him, feeds him, and puts him lovingly back together again and sends him out a ‘complete’ man in the morning into the same vicious jungle of life.

Still the man never remembers that it was Islam that abolished the exploitation and abuse of women by providing for them the protection, emotional security, and human dignity in the form of Nikah. But the man of today, the incomplete man, is so bygone that he prefers to give the measly creatures no more respect than an animal he keeps tied in his backyard.

Shame on such masculinity!

In reality, women are like punctuation of life. Some are commas, some semi- colons, some question marks, and some an endless line of ellipses.

Lucky are the men who get full stops in their lives. It is these full stops that bring their incomplete lives to a halt, to fullness, to completion.

Hats off to the complete women of an incomplete nation. May they persevere and survive in the midst of incomplete men.