The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (14 page)

Aisha, the most beloved of Muhammad’s many wives, admonished women in no uncertain terms: “O womenfolk, if you knew the rights that your husbands have over you, every one of you would wipe the dust from her husband’s feet with her face.”
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Individual Muslims may respect and honor women, but Islam doesn’t.

The great Islamic cover-up

The Qur’an directs that women must “lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what must ordinarily appear thereof; that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their husbands, their fathers” and a few others (Qur’an 24:31).

Muhammad was more specific when Asma, daughter of one of his leading companions (and first successor) Abu Bakr, came to see him while “wearing thin clothes.” “O Asma,” exclaimed the Prophet, “when a woman reaches the age of menstruation, it does not suit her that she displays her parts of body except this and this, and he pointed to her face and hands.”
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In our own day, this covering has become the foremost symbol of the place of women in Islam.

Just Like Today: Girls die for the burqa

A
graphic example of the oppression that Islamic dress regulations for women engender came in March 2002 in Mecca, when fifteen girls were killed in a fire at their school. Saudi Arabia’s religious police, the
muttawa
, wouldn’t let the girls out of the building. Since only women were in the school, the girls had shed their all-concealing outer garments. The
muttawa
preferred the girls’ death to transgression of Islamic law—to the extent that they actually battled police and firemen who were trying to open the school’s doors.
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Child marriage

The Qur’an takes child marriage for granted in its directives about divorce. Discussing the waiting period required in order to determine if the woman is pregnant, it says: “If you are in doubt concerning those of your wives who have ceased menstruating, know that their waiting period shall be three months. The same shall apply to
those who have not yet menstruated
” (Qur’an 65:4, emphasis added). In other words, Allah is here envisioning a scenario in which a prepubescent woman is not only married, but is being divorced by her husband.

One reason why such a verse might have been “revealed” to Muhammad is that he himself had a child bride: The Prophet “married ‘Aisha when she was a girl of six years of age, and he consummated that marriage when she was nine years old.”
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Child marriages were common in seventh-century Arabia—and here again the Qur’an has taken a practice that should have been abandoned long ago and given it the sanction of divine revelation.

Just Like Today: Child marriages in the Islamic world

T
his has touched millions of women and girls in societies where the Qur’an is absolute truth and Muhammad is the model for all human behavior. More than half of the teenage girls in Afghanistan and Bangladesh are married.
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Ayatollah Khomeini told the Muslim faithful that marrying a girl before she began menstruating was “a divine blessing.” He counseled fathers: “Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house.”
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Iranian girls can get married when they are as young as nine with parental permission, or thirteen without consent.
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With child marriage comes domestic violence: “In Egypt 29 percent of married adolescents have been beaten by their husbands; of those, 41 percent were beaten during pregnancy. A study in Jordan indicated that 26 percent of reported cases of domestic violence were committed against wives under 18.”
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Wife-beating

Muhammad was once told that “women have become emboldened towards their husbands,” whereupon he “gave permission to beat them.” When some women complained, Muhammad noted: “Many women have gone round Muhammad’s family complaining against their husbands. They are not the best among you.”
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He was unhappy with the women who complained, not with their husbands who beat them. At another point he added: “A man will not be asked as to why he beat his wife.”
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Another hadith recounts that on one occasion a woman came to Muhammad looking for justice. “‘Aishah said that the lady (came), wearing a green veil (and complained to her (‘Aishah) of her husband and showed her a green spot on her skin caused by beating). It was the habit of ladies to support each other, so when Allah’s Messenger came, ‘Aishah said, ‘I have not seen any woman suffering as much as the believing women. Look! Her skin is greener than her clothes!’”
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“I have not seen any woman suffering as much as the believing women”? Aisha doesn’t seem to have had any illusions that, in Nawal El-Saadawi’s words, “our Islamic religion has given women more rights than any other religion has.” But Muhammad is unmoved by Aisha’s alarm at the woman’s bruises: When her husband appears, Muhammad does not reprove him for beating his wife—in fact, he doesn’t mention it at all. And why would he, since Allah had already revealed to him that a man should treat his disobedient wife this way?

Muhammad even struck Aisha herself. One night, thinking she was asleep, he went out. Aisha surreptitiously followed him. When he found out what she had done, he hit her: “He struck me on the chest which caused me pain, and then said: Did you think that Allah and His Apostle would deal unjustly with you?”
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Just Like Today: Wife-beating

T
he Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences has determined that
over 90 percent
of Pakistani wives have been struck, beaten, or abused sexually—for offenses on the order of cooking an unsatisfactory meal. Others were punished for failing to give birth to a male child.
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An offer they can’t refuse

Muhammad emphasized that women were possessions of their husbands: “Allah’s Messenger said, ‘If a husband calls his wife to his bed (i.e. to have sexual relations) and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning.”
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This has become enshrined in Islamic law: “The husband is only obliged to support his wife when she gives herself to him or offers to, meaning she allows him full enjoyment of her person and does not refuse him sex at any time of the night or day.”
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Don’t go out alone

Islamic law stipulates that “the husband may forbid his wife to leave the home”
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and that “a woman may not leave the city without her husband or a member of her unmarriageable kin accompanying her, unless the journey is obligatory, like the hajj. It is unlawful for her to travel otherwise, and unlawful for her husband to allow her to.”
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According to Amnesty International, in Saudi Arabia “women…who walk unaccompanied, or are in the company of a man who is neither their husband nor a close relative, are at risk of arrest on suspicion of prostitution or other ‘moral’ offences.”
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Temporary husbands

Nothing is easier than divorce for a Muslim male: All he has to do is tell his wife, “I divorce you,” and the divorce is consummated. The apparent harshness of this seems to be mitigated by another verse from the Qur’an: “If a wife fears cruelty or desertion on her husband’s part, there is no blame on them if they arrange an amicable settlement between themselves; and such settlement is best” (Qur’an 4:128). But this call for an agreement is not a call for a meeting of equals—at least as it has been interpreted in the hadith. Aisha explains this verse: “It concerns the woman whose husband does not want to keep her with him any longer, but wants to divorce her and marry some other lady, so she says to him: ‘Keep me and do not divorce me, and then marry another woman, and you may neither spend on me, nor sleep with me.’”
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Meanwhile, the likelihood that a man may divorce his wife in a fit of anger and then want to reconcile with her later gives rise to another odd point of Islamic law: Once a Muslim woman has been thrice divorced by the same husband, she must marry and divorce another man before going back to him: “When a free man has pronounced a threefold divorce, it is unlawful for him to remarry the divorced wife until she has married another husband in a valid marriage and the new husband has copulated with her.”
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Muhammad insisted on this. Once a woman came to him for help. Her husband had divorced her and she had remarried. However, her second husband was impotent, and she wanted to remarry her first husband. The Prophet was unyielding, telling her that she could not remarry her first husband “unless you had a complete sexual relation with your present husband and he enjoys a complete sexual relation with you.’”
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This has given rise to the phenomenon of “temporary husbands.” After a husband has divorced his wife in a fit of pique, these men will “marry” the hapless divorcee for one night in order to allow her to return to her husband and family.

Prophetic license

When Muhammad already had nine wives and numerous concubines, Allah gave him special permission to have as many women as he desired: “O Prophet! Lo! We have made lawful unto thee thy wives unto whom thou hast paid their dowries, and those whom thy right hand possesseth of those whom Allah hath given thee as spoils of war, and the daughters of thine uncle on the father’s side and the daughters of thine aunts on the father's side, and the daughters of thine uncle on the mother's side and the daughters of thine aunts on the mother’s side who emigrated with thee, and a believing woman if she give herself unto the Prophet and the Prophet desire to ask her in marriage—a privilege for thee only, not for the (rest of) believers” (Qur’an 33:50). Such convenient prophecies are numerous in the Qur’an—Allah even commands Muhammad to marry the comely divorced wife of his adopted son (33:37).

Muhammad’s desire has borne bitter fruit. These two Qur’anic passages are just two elements of a pervasive assumption that women are not entitled to equality of dignity with men as human beings, but are objects to be awarded to men and used by them. Polygamy, of course, is a foundation of this assumption, and is moving westward with Islam. In late 2004, polygamy had become so common among Muslims in Britain that the British were considering recognizing it for tax purposes.
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Temporary wives

Shi’ite Islam, the dominant form of Islam in Iran, also allows for “temporary wives.” This is a provision for men to gain female companionship on a short-term basis. In a temporary marriage, or
mut’a
, the couple signs a marriage agreement that is ordinary in every respect except that it carries a time limit. One tradition of Muhammad stipulates that a temporary marriage “should last for three nights, and if they like to continue, they can do so, and if they want to separate, they can do so.”
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Many such unions, however, don’t last as long as three nights.

Just Like Today: Put down that book

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slamic hardliners in Pakistan were so opposed to the education of women that, in one tumultuous five-day period in February 2004, they burned down eight girls’ schools.
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The authority for this practice rests upon a variant Shi’ite reading of a verse of the Qur’an (4:24), as well as this passage from the Hadith: “Narrated Jabir bin Abdullah and Salama bin Al-Akwa: While we were in an army, Allah’s Messenger came to us and said, ‘You have been allowed to do the
Mut’a
(marriage), so do it.”
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Sunni Muslims, who account for 85 percent of all Muslims, claim that Muhammad later revoked this provision—but Shi’ites disagree. In any case, temporary wives tend to congregate in Shi’ite holy cities, where they can offer companionship to lonely seminarians.

Rape: Four witnesses needed

Most threatening of all to women may be the Muslim understanding of rape as it plays out in conjunction with Islamic restrictions on the validity of a woman’s testimony. In court, a woman’s testimony is worth half as much as that of a man. (Qur’an 2:282).

Islamic legal theorists have restricted the validity of a woman’s testimony even further by limiting it to, in the words of one Muslim legal manual, “cases involving property, or transactions dealing with property, such as sales.”
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Otherwise only men can testify. And in cases of sexual misbehavior, four male witnesses are required. These witnesses must be able to do more than simply testify that an instance of fornication, adultery, or rape happened; they must have seen the act itself. This peculiar and destructive stipulation had its genesis in an incident in Muhammad’s life, when his wife Aisha, was accused of infidelity. The accusation particularly distressed Muhammad, since Aisha was his favorite wife. But in this case, as in many others, Allah came to the aid of his Prophet: He revealed Aisha’s innocence and instituted the stipulation of four witnesses for sexual sins: “Why did they not produce four witnesses? Since they produce not witnesses, they verily are liars in the sight of Allah” (Qur’an 24:13).
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