IF MEN WERE WOMEN: CHRISTIAN REFLECTIONS ON GENDER IN THE HIV AND AIDS CRISIS

“If Allah had meant for us [women] to ask questions, he would have made us men.” This shocking statement opens the movie Brick Lane based on the novel of the same name by Monica Ali.1 Due to an arranged child marriage, a. young Bangladeshi girl, Nazneen, is being sent to urban England from her rural homeland. When she begins to ask questions about life and death, she is silenced, being told instead to learn to accept her fate as a woman in today’s world.