Egypt: Never Send a Botanist to do a Biologist’s Job

Today’s New York Times has an interesting story about some of the social programs being implemented in the post-Arab Spring Egypt. The article focuses on pre-marital counseling sessions that are becoming increasingly popular in the country and quotes Osama Abou Salama, a professor of botany at Cairo University and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, telling attendees at a premarital counseling session that “a woman takes pleasure in being a follower and finds ease in obeying a husband who loves her.”

Setting aside the credibility of a botany professor leading this session – why couldn’t they have found, oh I don’t know, a biology professor – I assume the caveat here is the person giving the orders is a loving husband because why would a woman “find ease in obeying a husband” who hates her? By the way, if the husband hates the wife then it’s the fault of the wife as she should be “the flower that attracts a bee to make honey, not the trash that attracts flies and dirt.” So the fact that a woman hating man married his wife is because the wife’s behavior attracted this kind of person; this is why professors of botany should not be sent anywhere near anything related to biology. On the other hand, since this kind of woman is trash, maybe she would “find ease in obeying a husband” who hates her. This theory also kills the argument that trashy women are dynamos in the sack so they always have happy husbands. All I know is that I have hated a number of the women that I have been on dates with and none of them have found any ease in obeying me!

Egyptian women, however, don’t seem all that concerned. The article notes that a number of women in the session attended by the reporter agreed with Mr. Salama’s statement that a woman could not take a decision and handle the consequences of that decision while men could, “because God created us this way because a ship cannot have more than one captain.” I don’t want to judge this too harshly, especially since the women seem to be in agreement with not being the captain of their own ships and want to follow their men up and down the Nile; my only problem with this is that I wasn’t born in Egypt or married an Egyptian – either flowery or trashy or flowery in public and trashy in private.