If all goes well, the Kurds will conclude on their own that it is in their interest, while in America, to do as the Americans do. In Muslim communities in the United States, terrible conflicts can arise between generations of a family. Working With Women While Kurdish women enjoy freedoms not found in more conservative Muslim societies, the position of women is still very different from that of women in the United States. If American service providers themselves urge Kurdish women to assert themselves, the men in the community are likely to take it as an insult to their honor, and their support and cooperation in resettlement efforts will be lost. A better approach might be to involve men in all activities, or to cast women-oriented programs as family programs.
Muslim women react differently to American women and their behavior.
Some Muslim women take the freedom of American women as an indication that they have no men who love them enough to take care of them. Other Muslim women might be impressed by the apparently free behavior, and try to copy it without understanding that it is part of a much larger cultural system based on non-Muslim assumptions about the positions of men and women in our society. Muslim tradition has it that men and women cannot control their impulses and therefore should not be placed in situations where their impulses can get them into trouble. Although this view is not entirely foreign to us, in modern America girls and boys alike are taught that they are responsible for their own behavior and are urged to abide by moral principle, whether or not anyone is watching them. Much of Muslim perception about western women stems from this difference in basic principle.