the word is used in a transferred sense to refer to current Middle East practices.

1980. The Lebanese civil war shakes me, hurts and wounds me deeply. My world seems to crumble and fall apart into fragments of what I have held most precious. The tragedy makes me ask more questions. I try to explain its cruelty both scientifically and existentially, having both experienced it up close and seen it from afar. I discover that practices such as forced marriage and virginity, claustration, the veil, polygamy, repudiation, beatings, denial of freedom and of the possibility to achieve one's aims and desires in life - oppressions which motivated me to run away from Lebanon at the age of twenty-two - are closely connected to the internal war in Lebanon. I am therefore compelled to make connections between the role of women, the relationships between men and women, and the war. They become the central theme of an essay I later write on the subject.
- Beirut: The city that moves me
World Literature Today; Winter 2002; Evelyne Accad;