Self Worth!!!!!!

I always try to find a topic from my everyday life experience. May be, this is the reason why I take so long to find a new topic to write. Sometimes, I hate to be not knowing what to write and at the same time, I am glad that I have something to write about life experience. This time, I got the idea from hubby's sweet and beautiful niece Fatima. That day, she was so worried about her dark complexion. So, she asked her uncle, "Mama(uncle), how can I be brighter like aunty?" Hubby's reply: "There is nothing wrong with having a darker complexion." Fatima: " It is a problem. Nobody is going to marry me.(Even though she is only 10!!!)". Hubby: "Who told you that?". Fatima: "I know that. Every time you guys look for wives, you always look for the girls with the bright skin. I am not bright so no one will marry me!!!!". This conversation with little Fatima has left me stunned and hubby speechless. She has pointed out a very crucial fact which the adults love to ignore. In our culture, all the guys want to marry girls with brighter skin tone. That is their first priority. If they cannot get that, they look for girls whose fathers have lot of money to buy expensive gifts for the newly married couples or the girls who are the potential sources of income. I know, every girl would say, "If I work then I'll be independent. I can spend my money anywhere I feel like." Of course, you are independent and that is a good thing but you don't want a man to choose you just based on your earning capability or your father's wealth. Ironically, most of the girls actually justify this behavior by saying that "It is just a gift from my father. There is nothing wrong with this.", ignoring the fact that it has cost a fortune for their fathers to buy these gifts. May be there is nothing wrong with it but to me, there is something wrong with it. I don't want my man to love me based on these material stuff or outward beauty because these are only temporary. I might loose these money and beauty in future, only thing that will prevail is my inner beauty and piety. If the man loves me only for these worldly belongings then he is not going to love me those are lost. There is a hadith where prophet (SAW) mentions the qualities a man should look for in his wife to be. According to the hadith, a man should choose a wife based on her piety not beauty or wealth. But we do the totally opposite. This is the most sexist attitude. To me, these men do not consider women as persons but as commodities. Believe it or not women also get used to these kinds of attitude. They start thinking that this is the only reason men marry women and they start tolerating all the ill behaviors they get from their husbands later on. People say that years of living together like this forms a bond between them which can compensate for the actual love in a marriage. The bond definitely forms but this is not the bond of love, this is the bond of necessity. Guess what, this "necessity bond" never compensates for the bond of love. This huge gap without love always exists in their relationships. My writings are not to blame men for everything but these are to point out the flaws in our culture which we practice religiously, sometimes more than our religion. When I heard Fatima's conversation with her uncle, it made me realize that these little girls are growing up with low self esteem. It is not because we are teaching them to be like that but our actions and decisions are indirectly making them question their self worth. Do we really want our sisters, nieces and daughters be like that???? I do not know if I can ever change little Fatima's conception about herself. I wish I could tell her, "You are beautiful, you are unique, you are smart that you saw what none of us could see. You have opened our eyes and has made us look at things in a different way and you have made me proud to be your aunty. May Allah make every girl and every woman as open minded as you are and give us the courage like you have to speak our mind. Ameen!!!"