Boreal

FAREWELL POSTINGS

Why the Self-Loathing and the Danger it Represents

January 12, 2025

Taliban 'do not see women as human', says Malala Yousafzai.

BBC Jan. 12, 2024

I will die not having understood why so many women do what they do in spite, in my first semester at Simon Fraser, taking a course on The Psychology of Women hoping to improve on a dismal record of forming relationships with girls while in high school.

Marina of Pestalozzi College, Margaret… and later Lucette were not unlike the archetype of the women in the book; not so for the women of Islam.

My getting close and personal with Islam and reading—and yes— watching video testimonials of women and girls who, apparently having lost their self-respect, became convert of a religion that considers them less than human. It effectively destroyed the illusion that women like Lucette were the rule rather than the exception.

In reading Islamic scriptures I began to understand why this is so.

LITTLE BOYS LEARNING TO HATE LITTLE GIRLS

AND LITTLE GIRLS TO HATE THEMSELVES

(Abbreviated from Children and the Koran, Boreal Books)

Narrated abu Said al-Khudri:

The Prophet said, "Isn’t the witness of a woman equal half that of a man?"

The women said, "Yes."

He said: "This is because of the deficiency of the woman’s mind."

Bukhari 48.286

Little boys don’t believe that they are more special than little girls and little girls that they are inadequate until they are made to feel that way by adults. If they are born into a traditional Muslim family, their parents will justify playing favourites and their unequal treatment by having the children read a book in which a god does just that, while promising to welcome into his Paradise those who accept that this is the way it was always meant to be and live their lives accordingly.

A child’s concept of an invisible omnipotent being is not fully formed at the age you hope to implant an idea that will impact their behaviour for the rest of their lives. This means they may not be receptive to what they are compelled to read, or mouth word for word along with you. Little girls in particular may have difficulty accepting that their little brother is better than they are on the say-so of a ghost who wrote a book.

That is why children’s books, like the one we talked about in Getting Kids To Feel Nothing, introduce the concept of a god in conjunction with something or someone children can relate to: a person. This, of course, is not a problem for Christian parents and educators with their earlier variation of the same god having taken on all the attributes of a man. It was, however, a problem for the earliest clerics who had to find a way to get into a child’s mind when it is most receptive to being decisively influenced.

Around Muhammad, stories like those you find in My Book of Islam were woven to bring out a child’s natural empathy for someone they would come to see as a hero, someone they could trust. That trust, for little girls, will be tested when, to back up Allah’s negative assessment of their sex, they are told that their hard-done-by hero—who delivered God’s exact words regarding their deficiencies as human beings—more than agreed with what he communicated from on High. Allah, in His Koran, reminds us that:

1. Girls are inferior by at least one degree.

2:228 Divorced women should keep away from men for three menstrual periods. And it is not lawful for them to conceal that which Allah has created in their wombs, if they truly believe in Allah and the Last Day. Their husbands have the right in the meantime to take them back, should they seek reconciliation; and women have rights equal to what is incumbent upon them according to what is just, although men are one degree above them (what is meant here is that the men have a superior authority). Allah is Mighty, Wise.

2. Girls have trouble remembering things.

2:282 … And call to witness two witnesses of your men; if not two men, then one man and two women from such witnesses you approve of, so that if one of them (the two women) fails to remember, the other will remind her...

3. Girls have no more rights when it comes to sex than an inflatable doll (2:223) that boys may penetrate at their discretion, except when the doll is menstruating (2:222) because that makes the doll dirty.

2:223 Your women are a tillage for you. So get to your tillage whenever you like. Do good for yourselves, fear Allah and know that you shall meet Him. And give good news to the believers.

2:222 And they ask you about menstruation, say: “It is an impurity.” So keep away from women during their menstruation and do not approach them (do not have sexual relations with them) until they are clean. Once they get clean get to them as Allah commanded you. Allah loves the repentant and loves those who purify themselves.

4. When little boys grow up, because of their superiority and the wealth they will accumulate because of their sex (which they can use to purchase girls to marry), are in charge and can beat up girls for whatever reason, even for what they might be thinking.

4:34 Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made some of them excel the others, and because they spend some of their wealth. Hence righteous women are obedient, guarding the unseen which Allah has guarded. And those of them that you fear might rebel, admonish them and abandon them in their beds and beat them. Should they obey you, do not seek a way of harming them; for Allah is Sublime and Great!

5. That a wife can be shared among men like so much chattel after a husband has “satisfied his desire for her.”

During her public prayers she will loudly repeat verses like the following about how Allah made what the Arabs considered taboo legal so that his spokesperson could have sex with his daughter-in-law, whom he walked in on when she was half-naked and just had to have her.

33:37 And [remember] when you said to him whom Allah favoured and you favoured: (this is addressed to Zayd regarding his wife Zaynab) “Hold on to your wife and fear Allah”, while you concealed within yourself what Allah would reveal and feared other men, whereas Allah had a better right to be feared by you. Then, when Zayd had satisfied his desire for her, We gave her to you [Muhammad] in marriage; so that the believers should not be at fault, regarding the wives of their adopted sons, once they have satisfied their desire for them. For Allah’s Command must be accomplished.

How do you explain to prepubescent little girls the concept of menstruation and what Allah means when he warns little boys to “not approach” them when it is happening?

What about denying them intimacy, the understood meaning of “abandon them in their beds,” and encouraging boys to beat them because of what they might be thinking, e.g., illegal sex, Allah and Muhammad’s pathological obsession? It must be equally, if not more, difficult to get the message across to little boys without giving them a premature and precarious understanding of the ins and outs (pun intended) of sexual relations.

What about God’s befuddling description as to where babies come from and the gestation process? You are never sure exactly what your child will retain from Allah’s speckled bits of misleading information about conception and how an embryo develops inside the mother's body.

Why would parents want an asexual god who has never married or had children, and is proud of it, to teach their kids about sex and procreation and the rules governing what He refers to as a female’s “private parts”? You would think parents would be the first—mothers in particular, who are responsible for getting a child to the Khatmi-Qur’an—to want to avoid exposing their children to persuasive, obvious misconceptions and a misogynous philosophy.

*****

There is a very common ceremony practiced throughout most of the Muslim world called Khatmi-Qur’an. It is the ceremony to recognize and celebrate a child’s first full reading of the Koranic text in Arabic. Most children complete the first full reading of the Qur’an between the age of four and seven. It is the mother's responsibility to get her children to the Khatmi-Qur’an. Mosques around the world have the equivalent of Sunday school classes to assist the mother in getting her children "to master the proper pronunciation and to read the text clearly from the first verse to the last."

*****

In reality, it is probably too much to expect a believing mother, who has been conditioned like her mother and her mother before her, not to drown her children in Allah’s Wisdom. She has been cowed and lowered to the status of the animals to which Muhammad compared her.

Narrated Aisha:

"The things which annul the prayers were mentioned before me. They said, Prayer is annulled by a dog, a donkey and a woman (if they pass in front of the praying people)…"

Bukhari 9.490

Aisha said [to Muhammad]: "You have made us equal to the dogs and the asses."

Sahih Muslim

Women are mere animals who will burn in Hell for eternity for not being grateful enough for all the good things those with exclusive, unrestricted access to their “private parts” have generously provided for them out of the goodness of their hearts.

Narrated Uqba:

The Prophet said: "The stipulations most entitled to be abided by are those with which you are given the right to enjoy the (women's) private parts (i.e. the stipulations of the marriage contract)."

Bukhari 62.81

Narrated Ibn Abbas:

The Prophet said: "I was shown the Hell-fire and that the majority of its dwellers were women who were ungrateful."

It was asked, "Do they disbelieve in Allah?" (or are they ungrateful to Allah?)

He replied, "They are ungrateful to their husbands and are ungrateful for the favors and the good (charitable deeds) done to them.

Bukhari 2.28

Why would women put up with the beatings, the confinement, and the degradation yet attack those who say, “This is not normal”? Is it really that females are what God and His spokesperson said they are: mentally deficient?

Unlike the Creator of Everything and His spokesman, don’t be too quick to judge. Remember that believing women are initiated to God’s opinion of their sex during the first reading of the Koran as children—the start of a thorough indoctrination that will result in women literally hating themselves—making them inclined to adjectively yield to the men Allah has made their wardens for life.

Men, from boyhood, also can’t help but be influenced by God’s disparaging assessment of females, which may explain what can best be described as a contempt tinged with desire for the women in their lives.

From that first reading and for the rest of their lives, five times a day (for Sunni Muslims), women and girls will get down on their hands and knees at the back of any room in which they find themselves to worship a god who said those bad things about them, where they must loudly proclaim their shortcomings to all as part of their devotion.

As mentioned earlier, prayers mainly consist of repeating word-for-word revealed truths from the Koran. They may not fully understand what it means to be sexually assaulted, but during their prayers they are bound to reaffirm that their rape is a husband’s God-given right, as in Revealed Truth 2:223, “Your women are a tillage for you…” They are also bound to reaffirm that it is the right of a believer to rape a wife in front of her unbelieving husband.

4:24 Or married women except those your right hands possess (captives of war or slave-girls). This is Allah’s decree for you. Beyond these it is lawful for you to seek, by means of your wealth, any women, to marry and not to debauch. Those of them you have enjoyed, you should give them their dowry as a matter of obligation; but you are not liable to reproach for whatever you mutually agree upon, apart from the obligatory payment (the dowry). Allah is indeed All-Knowing, Wise.

According to a saying of Muhammad, this revelation was sent to reduce the resistance of some believers to raping their female captives in front of their husbands.

The Apostle of Allah (may peace be upon him) sent a military expedition to Awtas on the occasion of the battle of Hunain. They met their enemy and fought with them. They defeated them and took them captives.

Some of the Companions of the Apostle of Allah (may peace be upon him) were reluctant to have intercourse with the female captives in the presence of their husbands who were unbelievers. So Allah, the Exalted, sent down the Qur’anic verse: (4:24) "And all married women (are forbidden) unto you save those (captives) whom your right hands possess."

Abu Dawud 2.2150

How psychologically damaging for a woman’s self-respect to have to publicly acknowledge that, when all is said and done, she is, in essence, nothing more than a sexual object created by a god to reward males for they loyalty, whether as wives or as captives.

What may be a bizarre consequence of women’s instilled self-loading is the rise of the female suicide bomber. It is a relatively new phenomena with women perhaps trying to prove they are worthy of more consideration by doing what get Allah’s attention and respect.

They may get the Almighty to notice them, even praise their self-sacrifice, but the reward for the barbarity they will commit on His behalf will be nowhere near what male suicide bombers get. According to a Hamas website, the best a female martyr can expect if she died a spinster is to be “married to one of the people of Paradise.”

[Question] I wanted to ask: what is the reward of a female martyr who performs a martyrdom operation; does she marry 72 of the houris?

[Answer] … The female martyr gains the same rewards as does the male, with the exception of this one aspect [the houris], so that the female martyr will be with the same husband with whom she dies. “And those who have believed and their progeny, followed them in belief. We shall join their progeny to them. We shall not deprive them of any of their work; every man shall be bound by what he has earned” 52:21. The one who is martyred and has no husband will be married to one of the people of Paradise.

David Cook, Understanding Jihad, p.146

AN EVIL AFFLICTION

Narrated Abdullah bin Umar:

llah's Apostle said, "Evil omen is in the women, the house and the horse.'

Bukhari 62.30

Narrated Usama bin Zaid:

The Prophet said, "After me I have not left any affliction more harmful to men than women."

Bukhari 62.33

Muhammad’s reference to women as evil may have something to do with the story of Joseph, son of Jacob. That story, more than any other telling-tales from the Bible that made their way into the Koran—with the usual confusing modifications—may be responsible for much of the disdain that believing men have for women, if not outright hate.

When you hear or read about women and girls in countries governed by Islamic law being jailed after reporting sexual assault, blame Allah’s account of the story of Joseph.

Children can easily identify with the central character, which is one reason I suspect the authors of My Book on Islam included it in their catechism. Again—unfortunately, like much of what you find in the Koran—you cannot divorce the text from the message, whether it be one of hate, cruelty, intolerance or, in this instance, judgement of women as sexual predators and liars.

JOSEPH AND THE GOVERNOR'S WIFE

Joseph’s story will provide an opportunity for Allah to offer an opinion on rape and why women who complain of being raped are usually lying, and how you can tell, using the example of the wife of the Egyptian who bought Joseph. She will attempt to seduce the reluctant Joseph after being told by her husband to make his stay an honourable one.

12:21 And the Egyptian who bought him said to his wife: “Make his stay honourable; perhaps he will profit us or we may take him for a son.” Thus We established Joseph in the land and taught him the interpretation of dreams. Allah has control over His Affairs though most people do not know.

12:22 When he was fully grown, We gave him judgement and knowledge, and thus We reward the beneficent.

12:23 And the woman, in whose house he was, sought to seduce him. She closed the doors firmly and said: “Come.” He said: “Allah forbid. It is my Lord who gave me a good abode. Surely, the wrongdoers do not prosper.”

12:24 Certainly she made for him and he would have made for her if it were not for a sign from his Lord. And that was to divert him from evil and indecency. He was indeed one of Our sincere servants.

A woman can also be expected to lie about sexual assault, for example falsely accusing a man of attempted rape when in reality she was the aggressor.

12:25 They raced to the door, and she ripped his shirt from behind. When they met her husband at the door, she said: “What is the penalty of one who intended evil for your wife except imprisonment or severe punishment?”

Exceptionally, Allah, when relating this encounter, concedes that men can, on rare occasions, be the aggressors and how you can tell.

12:26 He (Joseph) said: “She sought to seduce me.” And a member of her household bore witness: “If his shirt was torn from the front, then she is telling the truth and he is a liar.

12:27 “But if his shirt is torn from behind, then she lies and he is one of the truthful.”

While admitting that men can, on occasion, be forceful in the pursuit of intimacy, Allah makes another generalization about women…that they are skilled in the art of deception. Notice the plural form of woman, “you women,“ in verse 12:28.

12:28 When he (the husband) saw that his shirt was torn from behind, he said: “This is part of your guile, you women. Your guile is indeed very great.

Her husband asked Joseph to overlook his wife’s attempt at getting him to share an intimate moment and told his wife to ask forgiveness for her sins.

12:29 “Joseph, overlook this matter; and you woman, ask forgiveness for your sin. You are indeed one of the sinners.”

In the Bible, the husband is a fellow by the name of Potiphar, “an officer of Pharaoh and the captain of the guard”; in the Koran, he is "the governor."

12:30 And some women in the city said: “The wife of the governor has been seeking to seduce her slave; he has infatuated her with his love. We see her in manifest error.

The husband’s wife, rather than ask Allah’s forgiveness for having sinned, invites Joseph to dine and perhaps exchange more than the usual pleasantries (it all depends on your interpretation of “Come out unto them” in the following verse) with some of the women who have been spreading rumours about her attempt to seduce him.

12:31 When she heard about their wiles, she sent after them and prepared for each of them a dining couch. Then she gave each of them a knife and said to him (Joseph): “Come out unto them.” But when they saw him, they admired him and cut their hands and said: “Allah forbid! This is no mortal, he is but a noble angel.”

The women are completely mesmerized by Joseph’s presence and cut themselves. Whatever the governor’s wife had in mind, her wily guests want none of it after seeing Joseph, and neither does he, judging by her reaction.

12:32 She said: “This is the one you reproached me for. I have in fact sought to seduce him, but he held back. If he will not do what I command him, he will surely be imprisoned and will be one of the humbled.”

In the Bible, Joseph is thrown in jail because the husband of the wife who tried to seduce him believed her lies about Joseph coming on to her. In the Koran, as can be expected, Joseph is not thrown in jail because of a woman’s accusation that he tried to have sex with her against her will; that would be unthinkable. It is Joseph who insists that Allah make it so to get away from his owner’s wife and her friends who may—by his expression “their guile”—also have wanted him, a prospect that he is finding more and more difficult to resist.

12:33 He said: “My Lord, prison is dearer to me than that which they call me to. If you do not rid me of their guile, I will be inclined towards them and will be one of the ignorant.”

Allah grants Joseph his wish, with a little help from the governor, and his entourage.

12:34 Thereupon his Lord answered his prayer and so rid him of their guile. He is indeed the Hearer, the Knower.

12:35 Then it occurred to them after they had seen the signs (of Joseph’s innocence) to imprison him for some time.

Joseph, Son of Jacob – My Book on Islam

The last two pages of Prophet Yusuf: Part 1 from My Book on Islam. There is no Joseph demanding to be thrown in jail. What the children are expected to remember is that a woman lied about wanting to seduce a man and an innocent man paid the price. That is what women do. Got that?

I can understand the self-loathing that the Koran early on imbues in women born into the religion which makes it difficult for them to question their indoctrination later in life. But, what about the women and girls who, as non-Muslim children have not had the Koran drummed into them, who whole-heartedly embrace the Book and the man?

Why would the Taliban see women as humans when so many, converts in particular, don’t consider themselves deserving of the appellation.

Is Islam serving a need for women to be dominated and disciplined by the equivalent of Gwen Stephani’s “bad boys” or are they to be compared to Pink’s “stupid girls?”

Gwen Stephani's Bathwater

So why do we choose the boys that are nasty...

Why do the good girls always want the bad boys...

…

I still love to wash in your old bath water

Makes me feel like I couldn't love another

I can't help it, you're my kind of man

Whoo-oo, doo-oo

Whoo-doo, doo-oo

No I can't help myself, I can't help myself

Pink's Stupid Girls

What happened to the dreams of a girl president

She's dancing in the video next to 50 Cent

They travel in packs of two or three

With their itsy bitsy doggies and their teeny-weeny tees

Where, oh where, have the smart people gone?

Oh where, oh where could they be?

The confident women of Sumer gave birth to Western civilization. The submissive women of Islam may help bring it to an end.

THE WOMEN OF SUMER

The Epic of Gilgamesh predates the Hebrew Bible by at least 2000 years, the Koran by an additional 1500 years, more or less. It was carved into clay tablets at the dawn of Western written history in ancient Sumeria (Sumer). In it you will find a story about the great flood and the Garden of Eden. How would Islam, which contains variations of the same stories as can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh and later in the Bible, reconcile the two?

The Koran contains references to twenty-five prophets who came before the Prophet Muhammad and it is clear that there are many more. In one tradition of the Prophet, more than 124,000 prophets were sent by God before He got fed up with His Message being badly transmitted or misunderstood and decided to send His last and greatest Messenger, the Prophet Muhammad.

Believers would maintain that the author of Gilgamesh was probably a prophet who was misquoted or who misunderstood Allah’s Message. For instance, how could someone possibly write that it was a woman who gave birth to humanity, not a man; or that it is a woman, as described in the following excerpt (translation by Stephanie Dalley) from that heroic poem, to whom we are indebted for the wisdom with which she endowed man and which allowed civilization to blossom?

Shambat loosened her undergarments, opened her legs and

he took in her attractions.

She did not pull away. She took wind of him.

Spread open her garments and he lay upon her.

She did for him, the primitive man, as women do.

His love-making he lavished upon her.

For six days and seven nights Enkidu was aroused and

poured himself into Shambat.

When he was sated with her charms,

He set his face towards the open country of his cattle.

The gazelles saw Enkidu and scattered.

The cattle of open country kept away from his body.

For Enkidu had become smooth; his body was too clean.

His legs, which used to keep pace with his cattle, were at a

standstill.

Enkidu had been diminished, he could not run as before.

Yet he had acquired judgement, had become wiser.

For the Sumerians it was the goddess Aruru, the mother goddess, who created Enkidu from clay—the Bible and the Koran would give that role to a man. For the Sumerians, women were a civilizing influence; for the illiterate desert tribesmen who would usurp her role in the creation accounts, she became the seductress, the harlot who caused mankind to be expelled from Paradise.

For the people of Sumer, their cities were Paradise. For the confident men of Sumer it was women as partners, homemakers and lovers who made this sedentary, civilized lifestyle possible, desirable and enjoyable.

For the tribesmen of the desert, trapped and fighting for survival beneath a monotonous, unchanging blue sky and a blaring scorching sun on a sea of dust and sand, the cities of Sumer would also have been seen as Paradise. Allah’s description of Paradise, as an oasis with buildings and women as pleasure providers, almost fits the description of Sumerian cities and their female inhabitants, with the exception that in Sumer, women were not second-class citizens.

Why would desert tribesmen, who would adapt, if not pervert, many of the events described in the Epic of Gilgamesh—including the story of the meeting between Shambat and Enkidu—blame women for mankind’s exile from Paradise? The seduction of Enkidu by Shambat was seen as a good thing by the people of Sumer; a wild, roving man is civilized by being intimate with a woman.

For the people of Sumer, being “civilized” meant acquiring wisdom; becoming capable of exercising judgement, of assessing situations or circumstances shrewdly and logically and drawing your own reasonable conclusions. For the illiterate, fatalistic tribesmen of the deserts of the Middle East whose very existence was constantly being tested by elements over which they had no control, which they believed was God’s way of trying their faith, this had to seem like blasphemy. Paradise was to be denied mankind because a woman was foolish enough to endow a man with god-like qualities.

It was the Sumerians who, more than five millennia ago, first carved the written word on clay tablets. According to Thomas Cahill, the period before the invention of writing saw an “explosion of technological creativity on a scale that would not be matched until the nineteenth and twentieth century of our era.” Writing may have been a result of mankind’s need to record this leap of knowledge, upon which memory could no longer be counted to chronicle or manage. Civilization could not progress any further without the means of recording it’s accomplishments for future generations to build upon.

The society that invented writing worshipped many goddesses. The greatest goddess of all, Ishtar, goddess of love and war, was worshipped by the people of the city of Uruk, perhaps the earliest settlement to deserve the name of city. It was in this ancient Mesopotamian city, on the shore of the Euphrates River, that the first words written five thousand years ago on clay tablets were found. If it was not a woman who imagined those first words then it was her civilizing influence that allowed the written word to be imagined in the first place.

Muhammad had an illiterate’s fascination with the written word which he saw as God’s way of establishing immutable limits on mankind’s imagination and free will, not expanding it. This is reflected in the Koran’s meticulous, incontrovertible instructions as to what a believer may or may not do; what a believer may think or say. If you followed God’s written instruction to the letter He would let you back into Sumer, back into Paradise.

The Koran, with its meticulous instructions as to what a believer may or may not do, what a believer may think or say, was perhaps the primitive tribesman’s way of using the invention of writing to establish eternal, unchanging limits on mankind’s imagination and free will in the hope of convincing God to let man back into Sumer, back into Paradise.

Writing as Allah revealed in verses from Surah 96, The Clot made man arrogant, thinking himself self-sufficient. This was not why He taught man how to write. He taught man how to write not to make him more self-sufficient, but less, by having man write down His unchanging instructions as to how He expected man to behave and how He was to be worshipped. Instructions which He then expected to be followed to the literal letter or man would have to answer to Him Whom all of mankind must eventually return.

96:3 Read by your Most Generous Lord,

96:4 Who taught by the pen.

96:5 He thought man what he did not know.

96:6 Yet, man will, indeed wax arrogant;

96:7 For he thinks himself self-sufficient.

The Koran is not so much a philosophy as a set of rules that could have been formulated by a child-like mind in the way they embody a child’s certainty in having absolute knowledge of the world around them and a child’s intolerance of others who won’t play the game by their rules. This child-like perception of an unchanging world has been competing with the grownup evolving world view of Sumer ever since Muhammad got his marching orders.

Narrated Abu Huraira:

Allah's Apostle said, "I have been ordered to fight with the people till they say, 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah', and whoever says, 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah,' his life and property will be saved by me except for Islamic law, and his accounts will be with Allah, (either to punish him or to forgive him.)"

Bukhari 52.196

This child-like unschooled understanding of what the written word is all about is the antithesis of the grown-up view of the people of Sumer who invented writing as a means to expand the capabilities of the human mind; who invented writing so as to allow future generations to build upon, to progress beyond, to question the limits of what their ancestors had ever imagined.

The Koran, taken literally, kills the imagination allowing insanity, irrationality’s bridesmaid, to settle in. We need the example of the women of Sumer today, more than ever.