Farid would take a fourth wife if he could afford one. This 29-year-old gravel supplier says he has already received a dozen calls from single women in his neighborhood who want to join his three current wives. He is something of a catch. His hillside house has no water or electricity, but his business hauling gravel provides a steady income. The fact that he has three wives and seven children, three of them sons, is a mark of his status in the community.

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One of the many unique things about Farid, the subject of this video, is his openness about his impotency. He was diagnosed within the first few months of his marriage. In other households, the issue would be hushed up and the woman would often be blamed for this state of affairs, allowing the man to hastily divorce or take another wife. Not so with Farid. He chose to tackle the issue head-on.

The subject of male impotency is rarely, if ever, discussed in the Middle East. The taboo operates on many different levels: it challenges the roles of men as all-powerful providers, of women as passive child-bearers, and of children as the sole purpose of wedlock.

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Fatima Gailani believes that women’s rights can be achieved by a return to the teachings of the Koran. She is one of a small but growing number of Islamic feminists in the Middle East who are seeking to challenge both the dominant patriarchal culture in the region, and the assumptions of an earlier generation of women rights activists in the West.

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In this video you will see Mohammed Ramazan, who came within a few moments of blowing himself up during an attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul earlier this year, allegedly gunning down at least two people before he was captured. Ramazan’s views and his lack of remorse for his actions are clearly those of a deeply disturbed young man with only a tenuous grip on reality. But he is also a creation – or a perversion – of Afghanistan’s mullahs and Taliban commanders, who took an uneducated Pakistani with almost no knowledge of the Koran and told him to kill in the name of Islam.

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Few verses in the Koran are more controversial that those advising Muslims on how to treat women. Among the most hotly contested is 4:34, which suggests men should punish a disobedient woman first by admonishing her, then by isolating her in the bedroom. If neither of those work, the Koran advises him to beat her.

That verse can be a jarring discovery for first-time Koran readers. How do Middle Easterners who are seeking reform come to terms with "wife-beating" verse, as it¹s sometimes called? Is it just a case of sweeping it under the table, along with other ancient customs now deemed less than acceptable? Can there be a compromise for devout Muslims, who passionately believe in the Koran as the word of God?

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My last video post on a would-be Afghan suicide bomber prompted some serious
debate on this page. One viewer asked whether the bomber, Mohammed Ramazan, was representative of the thousands who have blown themselves across the Middle East: uneducated, isolated and preyed upon by mullahs with perverted views of the Koran. Or is there another path to extremeism, like the one that sucks in the malcontents we
usually associate with al Qaeda -- sophisticated, university-schooled, but
just as hate-filled?

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