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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

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?

 If women like Malala, Lucette and Marina are the exception, than the Renaissance, which marked the end of the Catholic Church’s dominance in Europe allowing for a flowering of the arts and sciences, and the Enlightenment which ushered in the Age of Reason—what Mark Lilla described as The Fragile Exception—is doomed.

After centuries of strife, the West has learned to separate religion and politics – to establish the legitimacy of its leaders without referring to divine command. There is little reason to expect the rest of the world – the Islamic world in particular – will follow.

We in the West find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that can leave societies in ruin. We had assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that political theology died in 16th-century Europe. We were wrong. It's we who are the fragile exception.

Mark Lilla, professor of the humanities at Columbia University, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West (2007):

The women of Sumer gave birth to Western Civilization. The women of Islam may 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.

96:8 Surely, unto your Lord is the ultimate return.

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.