The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (13 page)

PC Myth: Islam values pre-Islamic cultures in Muslim countries

Islam doesn’t just denigrate and devalue non-Muslims, but also leads Muslims to denigrate and devalue the pre-Islamic cultures of their own countries. “In 637 A.D.,” notes the Nobel Prize–winning author V. S. Naipaul, “just five years after the death of the Prophet, the Arabs began to overrun Persia, and all Persia’s great past, the past before Islam, was declared a time of blackness.”
⁴⁰

There was nothing unusual in that. It is a scene that has been repeated throughout the history of Islam. Islamic theology so devalues non-believers that there is no room in Islamic culture for any generosity toward their achievements. Muslims call the age before any country adopted Islam the time of
jahiliyya
, or ignorance. Naipaul explains that “the time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology.” An example of this is how Pakistanis denigrated the famous archaeological site at Mohenjo Daro, seeing its value only as a chance to preach Islam:

A featured letter in
Dawn
offered its own ideas for the site. Verses from the Koran, the writer said, should be engraved and set up in Mohenjo-Daro in “appropriate places”: “Say (unto them, O Mohammed):

Travel in the land and see the nature of the sequel for the guilty…

Say (O Mohammed, to the disbelievers): Travel in the land and see the nature of the consequence for those who were before you.

Most of them were idolaters.”
⁴¹

Just Like Today: Muslims devalue ancient sites of other religions

M
uslims in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus attempted to turn the fourth-century monastery of San Makar into a hotel. In Libya, the daffy Colonel Qaddafi turned Tripoli’s Catholic cathedral into a mosque. And in Afghanistan, of course, the Taliban government dynamited the famous Buddhas of Bamiyan in March 2001. Could the Christian monuments of Europe possibly suffer the same fate?

If the warriors of jihad, who are as energized today as they have been at any time during the last millennium, get their way, they certainly could. Edward Gibbon, author of
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, observed that if the eighth-century Muslim incursion into France had been successful, “perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.”
⁴²

That day may be yet to come.

Chapter 5

ISLAM OPPRESSES WOMEN

O
n March 18, 2005, a Muslim woman named Amina Wadud led an Islamic prayer service in New York City. Because she is a woman, three mosques refused to host the service, so it was set for an art gallery, but the galley withdrew the invitation after receiving a bomb threat. Finally, it was held in an Episcopal church. A Muslim protester outside the event fumed, “These people do not represent Islam. If this was an Islamic state, this woman would be hanged, she would be killed, she would be diced into pieces.”
¹
Undoubtedly true; nevertheless, Wadud maintained that such treatment was fundamentally un-Islamic: in the Qur’an, she asserted, men and women are equal. It is only by distorting the Qur’an that Muslim men have come to regard women as only good for sex and housekeeping.
²

Guess what?

• The Qur’an and Islamic law treat women as nothing more than possessions of men.
  
• The Qur’an sanctions wife-beating.
  
• Islam also allows for child marriage, the virtual imprisonment of women in their homes, “temporary marriage” (i.e., prostitution—but only for Shi’ites!), and more.
  

PC Myth: Islam respects and honors women

It’s widely accepted, almost to the point of being axiomatic, that Islamic mistreatment of women is cultural and does not stem from the Qur’an—and that Islam actually offers women a better life than they can enjoy in the West. The Los Angeles-based Muslim Women’s League claims that “spiritual equality, responsibility, and accountability for both men and women is a well-developed theme in the Quran. Spiritual equality between men and women in the sight of God is not limited to purely spiritual, religious issues, but is the basis for equality in all temporal aspects of human endeavor.”
³

Another Muslim women’s advocate, the Egyptian Dr. Nawal el-Saadawi, who has run afoul of the Egyptian authorities because Muslim divines consider her opinions less than Islamic, goes still further: “Our Islamic religion has given women more rights than any other religion has, and has guaranteed her honour and pride.”
⁴

In the same vein, the
Christian Science Monitor
in December 2004 featured several Latin American female converts to Islam.
⁵
One of them, Jasmine Pinet, explained that she “has found greater respect as a woman by converting to Islam.” Pinet praised Muslim men for their respect for women: “They’re not gonna say, ‘Hey
mami
, how are you?’ Usually they say, ‘Hello, sister.’ And they don’t look at you like a sex object.” The
Monitor
reports that there are forty thousand Latin American Muslims in the United States today, and that “many of the Latina converts say that their belief that women are treated better in Islam was a significant factor in converting.”

For readers who might find this surprising—given the burqa, polygamy, the prohibition of female drivers in Saudi Arabia, and other elements of the Islamic record on women that are well known in the West—the
Monitor
quotes Leila Ahmed, professor of women’s studies and religion at Harvard: “It astounds me, the extent to which people think Afghanistan and the Taliban represent women and Islam.” Ahmed says that “we’re in the early stages of a major rethinking of Islam that will open Islam for women. [Muslim scholars] are rereading the core texts of Islam—from the Koran to legal texts—in every possible way.”

But did the Taliban really originate the features of Islam that discriminate against women? Will a “rereading” of the Qur’an and other core texts of Islam really help “open Islam for women”? These are some of the texts that will have to be “reread”:

Women are inferior to men, and must be ruled by them: “Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other” (Qur’an 4:34)

The Qur’an likens a woman to a field (
tilth
), to be used by a man as he wills: “Your women are a tilth for you to cultivate so go to your tilth as ye will” (2:223)

It declares that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man: “Get two witnesses, out of your own men, and if there are not two men, then a man and two women, such as ye choose, for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her” (2:282)

It allows men to marry up to four wives, and have sex with slave girls also: “If ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with them, then only one, or a captive that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice” (4:3)

It rules that a son’s inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter: “Allah thus directs you as regards your children’s inheritance: to the male, a portion equal to that of two females” (4:11)

It tells husbands to beat their disobedient wives: “Good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them” (4:34)