One of the great scandals of modern Athens is the way it systematically ignores the plight of women in Islamic countries. By and large, even the most strident liberal feminists ignore the issue. It is something which is not talked about in the salons and polite circles.
Allah is a false god; a figment of human ingenuity and imagination; a creation of man. Like all idols, Allah ends up being a projection of the Unbelieving mind on to a cosmic screen. The Islamic construct of god is monistic, not trinitarian. The Islamic deity is the sole authority; the first and only important response of all that exists apart from the god is submission.
This means that Islamic societies are always authoritarian in culture and action: the world consists of superiors and inferiors, not equals. Allah requires total submission; amongst humans this necessitates that there be those who enforce the submission of Allah, and those who submit to the enforcers.
Throughout Islamic nations and societies--as required and taught in the Koran--the enforcers are males; the submitters are females. This is not an aberration--something which Islam will "grow out of". It is intrinsic to religion where the idol is conceived of as a monist deity.
Judy Bachrach is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. In the Summer 2009 edition, she has written a piece entitled Twice Branded: Western Women in Muslim Lands. We encourage everyone to read the article in full.
Below are some excerpts.
Every time I despair of the way women are treated in Muslim countries—and the few syllables Western leaders and op-ed columnists expend on their humiliations, mutilations, harassments, and, yes, murders—I turn to the Web site of Mona Eltahawy. Eltahawy spent her formative years in Egypt and Saudi Arabia:
A couple of years after I stopped visiting, a horrific fire broke out in a school in Mecca, home to the Muslim world’s holiest site. Fifteen girls burned to death because morality police standing outside the school wouldn’t let them out of the burning building. Why? Because they weren’t wearing headscarves and abayas, the black cloaks that girls and women must wear in public in Saudi Arabia.
And here is Eltahawy on a girl’s lot in Egypt:
When I was only four years old and still living in Cairo, a man exposed himself to me as I stood on a balcony at my family’s, and gestured for me to come down. At 15, I was groped as I was performing the rites of the hajj pilgrimage at Mecca, the holiest site for Muslims. Every part of my body was covered except for my face and hands. I’d never been groped before and burst into tears, but I was too ashamed to explain to my family what had happened.
To anyone who, like me, has lived in a Muslim nation, none of this behavior is either singular or surprising. It is the way men in most Islamic nations prefer things to be. We can talk forever about the nature of culture versus faith: how ancient rites and practices like the circumcision of girls (85 percent of all Egyptian girls have endured this procedure), or the tradition of keeping women ignorant and housebound, can corrupt a religion that never intended for these things to happen.
But it is no coincidence that women who must submit to Sharia law find themselves in a very bad place, wherever those women and those places happen to be. . . .
Bet let’s start with Islam as it affects women in their home countries. Last year, in a poll of 2,000 Egyptian men, 62 percent admitted harassing women: an activity most of those interviewed insisted was not really their fault as their advances, however intemperate and offensive to their victims, had after all been provoked by the women themselves.
Nor is this sort of harassment confined to Islamic women in Islamic nations. Western women who find themselves in the Middle East come in for their own fair share of daily insults, owing to their double deficit as women and foreigners. Every step outside the home or hotel is an invitation to a carefully directed barrage of verbal assaults, their components familiar and unvarying: vulgar and offensive remarks, leers and snickers, the occasional shove, all accompanied by grins of triumph. When I lived in Egypt, everyone in Cairo avidly watched the television series Dallas, and as a result became expert on the sexual habits of American women. And not simply expert, but unrepentantly predatory. After all, these were women whose husbands and brothers would not reflexively massacre those who insulted them. . . .
That’s the way it was in Cairo—and still is. Local women are of such negligible importance that they can be viewed as prey. On the other hand, foreign women are in a wholly different category: wild and yet easy, so menacing and just plain available they are invariably treated as prey. The foreigner without a murderous uncle by her side or a veil over her face is a communal dish. . . .
In other words—and here is a telling paradox of life in much of the Islamic world—whatever devout Muslims are religiously prohibited from doing to women (and there are plenty of strictures listed in the Koran: a man must lower his gaze in the presence of a woman, for instance, and also guard her chastity) is in practice resolutely ignored, all the more so when it comes to foreigners.
Why bother to observe prohibitions on a group so manifestly inferior? Eltahawy complains bitterly that the donning of the hijab, which she as an observant Muslim used to do, actually procures no real measure of safety for the wearer. “I was groped so many times that whenever I passed a group of men, I’d place my bag between me and them,” she writes. But not wearing the hijab or a veil in Egypt is the sure sign of a foreigner—a word that has become synonymous with “slut.” . . . .
You don’t have to watch a rerun of Not Without My Daughter, the harrowing story of Betty Mahmoody, who accompanied her Iranian-born husband back to his native country for what she was assured would be a two-week visit, to understand the possible consequences of such a venture. Mahmoody’s eighteen months of virtual house arrest under the vigilant gaze of her doctor husband and his relatives, her escape with her daughter on foot and on horseback are known to us only because her flight was successful. Had it not been, her account would have likely been buried with the rest of her.
Consider the case of Monica Stowers, an American who married a young Saudi she met at the University of Dallas, and with whom she had two children in Texas. In 1983, the young family packed up and moved to Riyadh. There Stowers discovered her husband had another wife he had forgotten to mention. After announcing her decision to return to the U.S. with her small children, she came in for another surprise: Saudi courts gave custody of the children to the father (Stowers was Christian). She went home alone.
Undeterred, in 1990 she returned to Saudi Arabia, gathered her children, and brought them to the U.S. Embassy. At which point, as The Wall Street Journal reported well over a decade later, embassy Marines were summoned to expel the family from the premises. The Saudi authorities had an even more effective solution: they arrested Stowers. She left the country. But at 12 years old, her daughter was still languishing in Saudi Arabia, married off to a cousin. . . .
It is, of course, the women who don’t get to fly home to New York—or indeed leave any airport without their husbands’ consent—who truly deserve international attention. And yet these are the very women our Western politicians, media outlets, and academicians barely acknowledge because, as I was constantly advised by European and American diplomats in both Egypt and also the Sudan when I visited, “We have no right to pass judgment on the customs and mores of other countries.”
Here are just a few of those customs and mores: in Turkey, a nation often cited as “moderate,” wife beating is so common that 69 percent of all female health workers polled (and almost 85 percent of all male health workers) said that violence against women was in certain instances excusable. In April, a new epidemiological study in the European Journal of Public Health revealed that one out of every five homicides in Pakistan is the result of a so-called honor killing. And in Mauritania, the age-old practice of force-feeding young girls—a life-threatening process that is intended to make them round and therefore “marriageable”—has seen a renaissance. Girls as young as five are herded into “fattening farms.” Those who resist are tortured.
It was only when our steadfast ally Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed legislation legalizing the rape of his country’s wives by their husbands that a powerful Western leader actually expressed a view on the subject. “I think this law is abhorrent,” President Barack Obama acknowledged when queried at a press conference in Strasbourg, France. Yet, our president had to be asked about the rape-facilitation law before daring to venture an opinion. Nor is he alone in his bashfulness. All over the world, Western leaders have proven uncommonly demure on the subject of women in Islamic countries. . . .
Accounting for exactly why it is that Islamic countries (or even countries like India, with large Islamic populations) are those that demonstrate the most antipathy toward their female citizens is no straightforward task. On the one hand, Bernard Lewis is correct when he writes that “Islam as a religion and as a culture should not be blamed for the tribal customs of some of the peoples who adopted it.” On the other, the Koran is fairly specific about the value of a woman. An Islamic man may accumulate up to four of her kind in marriage—and may divorce any or all of these wives swiftly and without offering a syllable of justification. In court a woman’s testimony is worth exactly half of that of a man. In matters of inheritance among siblings, the Koran insists that “the male [must get] twice the share of the female.” And finally—although of all the passages this is the one that provokes the most controversy—there are many Muslims who conclude that the Koran permits a man to beat his wife.
“Well, that’s Verse 4:34, and it can be interpreted different ways,” Hussein Rashid, a professor of religion and political Islam at Hofstra University, demurs. “The verb that is used for hit or beat can also mean ‘to break off’ or divorce someone.” This judicious interpretation of the most incendiary Koranic passage provokes laughter when I repeat it to the Somali-born firebrand Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Allah, she observes, “is absolutely brilliant except when He is speaking about the rights of women—then Allah gets all muddled up, doesn’t really mean what He says, and becomes a very confused God.” In fact, Hirsi Ali continues, “that the husband has the right to beat his wife is in the Koran. That a woman has to dress a certain way is in the Koran, that she must stay in the house is also there. And on it goes.”
And everywhere it goes. Sharia travels without a wrinkle on its burqa. It is no small irony these days that those fortunate countries where women have fought, passionately and at great cost, for equal rights—Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, for instance—have become home to certain Muslim immigrants who continue to violate the rights of women, abetted frequently by both the silence of the authorities and an abashed press. Why this silence? One of the least savory consequences of a colonial past is guilt: an insidious remorse that transmutes itself into a persistent reluctance to criticize publicly those who have now themselves taken on the role of oppressor—even against those who happen to oppress, openly and without shame, within the borders of liberal nations. “You hear people talking about the need to ‘respect’ other cultures. You want me to respect this awful behavior?” Eltahawy says. . . .
What Judy Bachrach is failing to grasp is the theology of Islamic idolatry. The Scriptures tell us that man becomes like the gods he worships. Those who worship a monistic, authoritarian god end up being enforcers and subduers. The subjugation of women in Islam testifies to the essence of the idolatry itself.
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