The Story of Zahra Reflection

At the beginning of this unit I knew little to nothing about the world outside the boundaries created by my mother, which is a mile radius of my house. I cared an infinitesimal amount about things that didn't affect me directly. However, that changed drastically after reading The Story of Zahra and also after the presentation of my fellow peers. The aspect that caught my attention the most was the treatment of women, just because of the fact that I can relate to it the most. I have always known that women were inferior in comparison to men, that was common sense to me and about 50% of the world population. Despite the fact that I knew the struggle most women in other countries have to endure I was naïve to the exact extent that they had to struggle. Reading The Story of Zahra took some of that ignorance I had and widen up my perception greatly.
In the beginning of the book Zahra is abused mentally by her mother, father and even by society. There was one part of the book that really stood out to me. It was revolved around how her brother would get the meat every time and she wouldn’t even see a morsel of the meat upon her plate. “Every day, as we sat in the kitchen to eat, her love would be declared: having filled my plate with soup she serves my brother Ahmad, taking all her time, searching carefully for the best pieces of meat. She dips the ladle into the pot and salvages meat fragments. There they go into Ahmad’s dish. There they sit in Ahmad’s belly.” (al- Shaykh, 1994) That may seem very insignificant to an outsider, but I believe it really had a toll on Zahra. Think about it, the simple act tell Zahra that she doesn’t deserve the meat just for the simple fact that she is a female. That’s not the only intent in the book where she is put second to her brother or just males in general. Later on in the novel we see that Zahra has been abused several times physically and emotionally.
When reading a book you don’t think these things are happening in real life.