Why We Left Islam (4 page)

“Grandma, doesn’t Allah understand Persian?”

“Well, no. You must speak to Allah in Arabic.”

“But you just said Allah made everything. If he made the Persian language, then how come he can’t understand it?”

Following these types of arguments during which time Grandma was cornered and did not have an answer to give, I completely discarded religion and Islam. My dislike of religion was reinforced when I started studying
Sharia
in high school. What I learned was so humiliating to women and so oppressive that I even hated to read the book.

I did not understand why divorce was a unilateral right of a man, or why women had to surrender their children to their father’s family when their husbands divorced them or when the husband died. Why women inherited half as much as their male siblings and why a boy could do what he pleased and girls were denied all rights. Why we always had to wait for men and boys to finish eating and then we nourished from their leftovers. Why was my body everyone else’s property except mine? If I stood at our doorstep and talked to the neighbor boy, every male relative of ours made it his responsibility to force me inside the house. I felt like a prisoner. In fact, the only males I could actually talk to were the ones chosen for me.

Indeed, one of the most disgusting aspects of Islam to me was the process of
khastegary
(matchmaking). In this process, women
within a man’s immediate or even extended family would search for a suitable girl for their male relative. Each time my family members visited a girl as a potential wife for my uncle or cousins, their evaluation of the poor young girl would make me sick. It was as if they were buying a piece of furniture. The only thing important was her physical features. In addition, she must be a virgin. In the case that a girl’s virginity cannot be proven, her parents must pay the groom and his parents for all the wedding costs and the marriage is annulled the next day.

When I was a teenager in Tehran, I went to a relative’s wedding. This girl was only fourteen years old. Her parents were so concerned about her virginity that they were practically glued to the newly married couple’s bedroom door. They stood there until the groom, a thirty-year-old man, came out of the room. They then entered and removed the bloody sheet from under their raped daughter and with jubilation offered the sheet to the groom’s parents as the proof of their daughter’s virginity. I never wanted to be treated in that manner on my wedding night.

There are so many laws in Islam that will turn off any educated person completely. Yet we are still told that Islam is a religion of peace. One such law is the Shiite custom of
sigeh
, or temporary marriage. I call it religiously sanctioned prostitution. Marriage in Islam is a contract between a man and a woman’s guardian for a specified length of time. It is almost like acquiring leasehold on a property.

In a permanent marriage, a man marries a woman for ninety-nine years because no one is supposed to live that long. In reality, most husbands die way before this period is over since they marry in their late thirties and early forties. Women who have been given away by their guardians when they were quite young get a chance to live alone in peace the rest of their lives. In a temporary marriage, the man specifies the term of the contract. He asks a woman or her guardian if she would marry him for any amount of time from ten minutes to an hour, a week, or some months for a specified amount of money. If she or her guardian agrees to the terms, then they are married and the marriage is annulled when the time has elapsed. In truth, this is a legal way
for a man to enjoy the company of the young woman without any long-term commitment.

Another barbaric Islamic law is that of the
mohalel
. A man actually pays another man to marry his three-times-divorced wife for one night, have sex with her, and divorce her the next day so that the husband can remarry his divorced wife. Years ago, one of our distant relatives divorced his wife three times under rage and then was sorry and wanted to get back with her. However, the
mullah
would not remarry them unless she would marry another man and spend a night with this new husband (allowing him to have sex with her) and then be divorced the next day and remarry her ex-husband.

I recall what a circus this was. The ex-husband was desperate to find a man and pay him to marry his mistakenly divorced wife for one night and then divorce her the next day. Since his ex-wife was a very beautiful woman from a distinguished family, the man needed someone he could trust to actually divorce his wife the next day. So finally he asked one of my father’s workers to marry the woman. The husband then paid this man a substantial sum of money. The man slept with the husband’s wife for one night and they were divorced the next day and the couple was able to get back together. What was appalling to me was that none of the women in the family thought much about the consequences of this one-night stand. Perhaps it was because they had all been raped on their wedding nights by a strange man (arranged marriage) and getting raped again by another strange man (
mohalel
) was not such a big issue. Alternatively, maybe many of them wished that they would be divorced so they could marry another man who would treat them better than their husbands did.

Now that I think about this law, I find it appalling and humiliating to women. In both cases—the first arranged marriages and the one-night stands due to divorce—the women are not consulted and they are forced to accept rape by a total stranger, first because of pressure from their parents, and then due to unspeakable acts by their husbands. Muslim apologists would tell you this law was put in place so men would not divorce their wives three times: a deterrent to divorce. In Islam a man has the unilateral right to divorce (by
itself a violation of a woman’s human rights), under the following procedures. A man can divorce his wife once, by telling her, “I divorce you,” and if they are faced with each other the divorce is nullified and they can resume normal relations. A man can divorce his wife twice—“I divorce you, I divorce you”—and then if they have sexual intercourse the divorce is nullified and they can resume their marital relations. However, a man divorces his wife three times—“I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you”—in the presence of a witness. Then, in order for them to get back together, the man has to find a
mohalel
. Many times these
mohalels
do not divorce the wife the next day. Moreover, there is nothing the ex-husband can do about it.

I found this law barbaric and inhumane for the following reasons. First, the woman’s feelings and rights are not considered and she is raped for one night by a total stranger. Second, the idea of a man paying another man to ravish his wife for an entire night is appalling. Finally, if the
mohalel
does not divorce the woman, she is forced to live a life in misery (unless the
mohalel
happens to be kinder than her ex-husband is) and away from her children by the first husband, if she had any.

After this circus in the family, I decided that I did not want to be a Muslim; however, I still did not have the courage to leave the faith completely. I left Iran with a small Qur’an in my pocket and passed under a large one coming out of our home on my way to the airport. Even though I had never prayed, fasted, been to a mosque, or performed any religious ritual in my entire life, I still believed in God and his Prophet Mohammad when I left Iran in 1964 to come to the United States of America.

After I learned the English language well enough to read, I read part of the Qur’an in English. I had never read the Qur’an. When I left Iran it was not translated in Persian or perhaps we did not know about it. I read some text of the Qur’an translated into English. I was appalled by such texts as the Surah of Lights, where God supposedly tells Mohammad, “Prophet, tell your wives, daughters, and other women who believe in me to conceal their eyes and their treasures from the sight of stranger” (
Qur’an 33:59
). My problem was to know how far a woman should be dressed to conceal her treasures, and besides, what are a woman’s
treasures? Was a woman’s treasure under her belt or her brain? The way the Muslims in my family and neighborhood acted, it was clear that a woman’s treasure was her virginity before marriage and her vagina after marriage. I resented that. Then I read more in the Qur’an and in other books, and after reading all these sayings and proverbs I was convinced that the religion only destroyed a human’s ability to think and act on his or her own behalf. I have listed some of these sayings below.

Your wives are your tillage; go in unto your tillage in what manner so ever you will.

Good women are obedient, as for those from whom you fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them.
Qur’an 2:223

I was standing at the edge of fire (hell) and the majority of the people going there were women.
Prophet Mohammad (Sahih Bukhari, Sahih Muslim Volume 4, Book 54, Number 464)

It is better to wallow in mud with pigs than to shake the hand of a woman.
An Islamic leader in Indonesia

A woman’s heaven is beneath her husband’s feet.
Islamic saying

Women should be exposed to the daylight three times in their lives. When they are born, when they are married and when they die.
Islamic saying

Later in my research on Islam I learned about the marriage of the Prophet to his first wife when he was twenty-four years old and sixteen years her junior. She was a rich, twice-divorced lady who proposed to Mohammad. Then after she died at age seventy-two, when he was fifty-six years of age, he married a seven-year-old girl. He supposedly had sex with her when she was nine years of age, and pronounced her mother of all Muslims at the time of his death when she was only eighteen years old so that she would never be able to marry another man.

In the last eight to ten years of his life, the Prophet Mohammad married some fifteen to forty-six women. Muslim apologists say that these women were all widows and that they had no place to go and no one to take care of them. So Allah ordered his Prophet to marry them. I find this excuse preposterous. Ayesha, whom
Mohammad married when she was only seven years old, was a child from a very well-to-do household and her father had become a Muslim years before she was born. Zynab was married to the Prophet’s adopted son Zayd and was quite happily married until Mohammad asked Zayd to divorce Zynab so Mohammad could marry her himself. In order to get the approval of the Gorish tribe, he brought the excuse that “a Muslim man is not allowed to raise another man’s child; therefore, Zayd is not his son, because he adopted Zayd prior to his ordination as a Muslim prophet.” That is the main reason adoption is not legal in Islamic countries. In addition, Reyhaneh was a beautiful married woman when her husband was decapitated by the Prophet’s bandits and she was taken to the Prophet’s bed the same night. These women were not widowed. They indeed had someone to take care of them.

When I read such stories my mind just exploded. How could so many people in this world follow a womanizer and a child molester? How could my grandfather make me a Muslim when I was six days old to be a follower of such a criminal? Then I came to the conclusion that he did not know about it. Alternatively, if he did, it was because he had been raised in such a barbaric culture himself and did not know better.

When my son was born, I did not give him any religion. I did not give him any religious education about God and his prophets. As a matter of fact, I did not mutilate my child, either. My faith in God was totally eroded on April 1, 1979, following the establishment of the Islamic Republic or the government of God, in the country of my birth, Iran—when the country experienced a dramatic return to the Dark Ages due to the establishment of the following Islamic laws. Women were the first victims of the regression. More than 130 years of struggle were repudiated by the medieval religious rulers. Bereaved of their constitutional rights, women were socially reduced to lower individuals and second-rank citizens.

In March 1979, Khomeini employed the
hijab
as a symbol of struggle against imperialism and corruption. He declared that “women should not enter the ministries of the Islamic Republic bareheaded. They may keep on working provided that they wear the
hijab
” (
Kayhan
, March 1979).

The Ministry of Education specified the color and the style of the suited clothing for the girl students (black, straight, and covered from head to toe for children as young as six years of age). To suppress the refractory women, the government set up special units. Patrols controlled whether women observed the Islamic habit on the streets.

The Islamic government went even further. During the last twenty-eight years, women’s conditions have continuously deteriorated. Nonetheless, in spite of the tortures (flagellation, stoning, imprisonment, and total segregation), Iranian women have not ceased their worthy struggle.

Under the Islamic rules, the family protection law has been abrogated. Polygamy has been reestablished. The Islamic Republic resolutely supports the practice of polygamy. Under the Islamic Republic, provisional marriage was sanctioned. Consequently, a man may marry four “permanent” and as many “provisional” wives as he desires.

Most Europeans have mistresses. Why should we suppress human instincts? A rooster satisfies several hens, a stallion several mares. A woman is unavailable during certain periods whereas a man is always active.
Ayatollah Ghomi,
Le Monde,
January 20, 1979.

The specific task of women in this society is to marry and bear children. They will be discouraged from entering legislative, judicial, or whatever careers which may require decision-making, as women lack the intellectual ability and discerning judgment required for theses careers.
Ayatollah Mutahar, (one of the principal ideologues of the Islamic Republic of Iran), on “The Question of Veil,” man’s testimony is equal to that of two women.
⁷