Quotes About Tradition

Of course, Storm-Lord! But why would a god marry a poor farm girl?" asked one of the bound novices, his voice thin and chirping as an insect. "All things must eventually mate," I shrugged, "having been cast into a man's flesh I must do as flesh does. And it hardly matters whether one mates with a woman or a rock or a river - the end result is the same. Once all the world wed stones and trees - but this is a degenerate age, and no one keeps to tradition.

It was a combination of old magic and a woman's wisdom with God's herbs, and most of it is lost. People then didn't write their wisdom down. They relied on the seanachai to tell the story aloud

stability. It is often noted that, of all existing institutions in the West, higher education is one of most enduring. Oxford University, the longest continuously running university in the English-speaking world, was founded in the twelfth century.4

like the Catholic Church, universities today bear a striking structural resemblance to what they were

Often the women are burned, so that the death can be passed off as an accident. The killer usually becomes a local hero: a man who has done what was necessary to clear his family name.

I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it.

She would have had to keep her headscarf on, never laugh, never smile—if she smiles at a man he will think, 'Ah, she loves me,' " Mohamed explained. As

The practice of mutilating women's genitals in Eritrea predated the arrival of both religions, and for hundreds of years neither faith had questioned it. The

Men raised in a culture of blood revenge do not change in a day.

My mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother all told me it was right, that without it a woman wouldn't be able to control herself, that she would end up a prostitute," said Aset, a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old whose own genitals had been mutilated when she was about seven years old.

In either culture, women somehow managed to get the wrong end of the stick. Women bear the brunt of fending off social disorder in the Catholic

fundamentalists asked that a male answer questions directed to her, on the grounds that a woman's voice is too alluring to be heard in mixed company. Nadia

trouble is, these people don't understand their own culture," said

To the contrary, he knew the ascetic beauty of such a way of being. He lived every moment mindful of the 613 commandments of the Torah. It was natural to him to separate the milk from the meat, to refrain from labor on the Sabbath, to abide by the laws of family purity in his relations with his wife. The disciplines of that monthly abstinence had only sharpened desire and sweetened their reunion. But to be without a wife entirely…that, to him, was no fit life for a man.

asked how, if he never had spoken before to women outside his family, he was able to serve as spiritual counselor to the village women. My friend looked at me strangely. "They put their problems to him through their husbands, of course," he said. "But what if their husband is their problem?" That possibility hadn't crossed either man's mind.

The old man was appalled by the prospect of women driving. He clapped a bony hand to his heart and gazed heavenward: "I hope I never see it in my lifetime," he said.

To the gnarled old imam, sending his daughters out of the home—to walk in the streets, even if veiled, to sit among strangers, even if all girls—was wicked. His

Such laws can be even more humiliating for older women. A widowed grandmother, for example, may have to rely on the permission of a grandson if he is her closest male relative.

She'd been married at twelve, before her menarche, and had been pregnant or lactating ever since.

Mullahs have been making an issue of field hockey lately, because you have to run and bend. And

The women have been told it's written in the Koran that they must do these things," she said. She could tell them it wasn't but, as an outsider and a woman, her word meant little against the word of the village sheik.

one in five Muslim girls lives today in a community that sanctions some sort of interference with her genitals.

Marse Willa Viley

Green Christmas, white Easter