The Bent Rib

"Vir et uxor consentur in lege una persona" - A husband and wife is considered in law to be one person. This is the underpinning maxim of the common law of coverture.

The idea that women is less than men has biblical roots. Women, it is said in the Bible, was made from the bent rib of Adam.

This emphasises two things - firstly that women is but a small part of man,and worse, they are made from a 'bent' part of men, meaning that they can never be just and fair.

It is also narrated in the first book of the Bible, Genesis, that Satan embodied himself in the guise of a serpent and made Eve not only to go against the command of God but also to persuade Adam to do likewise in eating the apple from the tree of knowledge. So womanhood from this day forth had been painted as gullible for succumbing to Satan's deception and for being scheming for persuading Adam.

The majority of muslims believe that the above depiction of Adam and Eve are similarly found in the Quran. I cannot agree with this. The same event as related in the Quran did not paint Eve as the temptress. The guilt was said to be borne equally by them (read Quran 07:019 to 07:026).

At Quran 20:120, it was related that Satan tempted Adam which made both of them transgress God's law. There is also no account of Eve being made from Adam's rib in the Quran.

But l digress....

It is from this collective memory, albeit not well anchored in scripture for the muslims, that injustice against the female sex springs from. Religion and customs had a heavy hand to play in the propagation of this injustice, which injustice invariably find itself into the law of the land.

Examples abound. In Brunei a female Muslim judge cannot sit in judgment where the accused is a muslim. The logic behind this escapes me. Is a female muslim more emotional and unlikely to give sound judgment if the accused is a muslim? Or having accepted that females should generally not sit in judgment, that the life of an unbeliever is of less value that it does not matter that he gets the less able judge? Either way it is discrimination - either agains womankind or religious discrimnation.

The Chinese has this customs that the property of a Chinese man dying without a will goes to only his sons. This has worked its way into our law in section 58 of the Probate and Administration Act, Cap 11.

It is in the administration of the civil service that one can see mark discriminations against the female sex. There had been improvement in this area, but progress had been slow.

Discrimination against females as with all discrimination is generally founded on fear that those discrimnated against may in fact be better than us, driven by our own lack of self confident.