Boreal

FADE TO BLACK

Triumph of the Irrational

A Mother’s Influence

The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilization. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between rationality and barbarity. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on one hand, and the violation of these rights on the other. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings.

Wafa Sultan, outspoken Syrian-American woman during a debate broadcast on Al-jazeera.

Women’s bizarre embrace of Islam is largely responsible for their gender being treated like beasts. “Being wired for submission” may have something to do with women who convert to Islam wanting to be dominated, but that is undoubtedly not the case for the vast majority of girls raised in traditional Muslim households. In that environment they are at the mercy of their mother's upbringing.

It is their mothers who will raise them according to how they were raised, and how they were raised has everything to do with an older man who married too many teenagers he could not control. To keep them in line, he enlisted the help of the god for whom he spoke. Allah had anticipated His spokesman’s wife management problems, and written down instructions in His Koran about how they should behave and how you put His fear into them to get them to act accordingly.

Daughters raised according to Islamic scriptures, will grow up, just like their mothers, accepting of the maltreatment that comes with being compared to an animal as normal, as will their daughters and so on… but not before developing a loathing for their gender. That loathing is there for all to see when they traverse public spaces in attire that is a testament to an ingrained self-hatred masquerading as a mix of piety and arrogance.

Their defence of the man who made the animal comparison, and who may have had issues of his own that had nothing to do with his upbringing, is further testament of the lasting toxic impact of denigrating scriptures on the female psyche.

Muhammad was a prudish man, his lust for young women notwithstanding. Prudish men are known to be both attracted and repelled by the sex act, a trait often shared with misogynous males. For both stereotypes, a woman is both an object of desire and of contempt.

That contempt is clearly evident in the hadiths but also in the whole Arab patronymic naming nomenclature (whereby a part of a personal name is based on the name of one's father) rests on a father’s ability to trace his ancestry through his father’s name (it is expressly forbidden to do so using a mother or daughter’s name). That is why today, as it was then, Arab names often contain the conjunctions ibn/ben meaning son of, or Abu meaning father of.

Could this prudish, late middle-aged man’s struggle between contempt and desire for the dozens of mostly young females he secluded within his household be responsible for the double standards in Islamic law and the disdain for females evident in many of Allah's Revelations concerning the fair sex? Did contempt win out, relegating believing women to a class by themselves, the lowest class?

According to Islamic law and tradition, there were three groups of people who did not benefit from the general Muslim principals of legal and religious equality – unbelievers, slaves and women. The woman was obviously in one significant respect the worst-placed of the three. The slave could be freed by his master; the unbeliever could at any time become a believer by his own choice, and thus end his inferiority. Only the woman was doomed forever to remain what she was.

Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong, Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response

Whatever the reason that believing women are treated like beasts, and forever stuck in an inferiority rut—like other neat little god-inspired, man-made constructs of Islam—it is to be admired for the ingenuous way it maneuvers women into becoming their own worst enemy.

Women and girls in societies dominated by the Koran and the example of Muhammad may have no choice, but what is the excuse of their counterpart in the West who know better, or who should know better? Muslim women in the West, where they have a voice, who simply parrot Allah’s and Muhammad's male-centered, misogynist point of view have abrogated their responsibility to elevate the debate in favour of gender equality.

They are selling out their sisters in Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Somalia, and on, promoting—from their stance in a society that considers them equal—a prejudiced view of women which, if widely accepted, would reduce their status to that of their sisters living in obscurity in male-dominated societies where the Koran and Muhammad’s sayings and example rule the land.