A God Who Hates (15 page)

Under this law the childhood of many young girls is violated throughout the Islamic world. In many Arab countries such as Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, hundreds of crimes are committed every year against the rights of underage girls, who have no control over their lives, by men from the Arabian Gulf states. These men with their illicit money and their nonexistent morals take advantage of the poverty running rampant in these countries to buy minors for money. For each girl purchased by one of these monstrous pigs, it is the beginning of a journey of suffering, which usually ends with the underage girl being returned to her family after her childhood, her womanhood, her honor, and her reputation violated in exchange for trifling sums of money, in the name of marriage in accordance with the law of God and his Prophet. The minor returns to the hell of her life after she’s been abandoned in a society, which does not respect her plight. If she is able, she lives out the rest of her days as a morsel to be chewed over, mercilessly and without embarrassment, in the mouths of others.

There are other marriages of Muhammad’s, such as his marriage to Zeinab, that are ruinous to the proper relationship between a man and a woman. Zeinab was the daughter of Muhammad’s paternal aunt and the wife of his adopted son Zeid, hence his daughter-in-law. One day the Prophet went to Zeid and Zeinab’s home. The doorway was covered by a cowhide curtain which the wind lifted, allowing him to see Zeinab unveiled in her room. He was moved with admiration for her. Zeinab invited Muhammad to come in, but he refused and retraced his steps, murmuring: “Praised be He who changes hearts.” When Zeid learned from his wife what had happened, he went to Muhammad and told him: “Perhaps Zeinab pleased you and I should leave her to you.” Muhammad told him: “Keep your wife.” When you think about it, what we have just witnessed is a son who is passing his wife along to his father as if he was asking a friend of his, “Do you like my shoes? Shall I take them off so that you can have them?” Since this “sanctified” marriage took place, women in Islam have been put on and taken off like shoes for centuries.

But, Muhammad was unable to resist his desires and the rock began to tumble down from the mountain peak, verse after verse, enabling him to give free rein to those desires, while the Angel Gabriel began to shuttle back and forth, up and down, until he had resolved Muhammad’s dilemma. In the first of these verses from the Koran, God reprimanded Muhammad for having concealed his feelings: “You sought to hide in your heart what Allah was to reveal: you were afraid of man, although it would have been more right to fear Allah” (33:37). On his first journey Gabriel legislated for Muhammad to fall in love with a married woman, even though that woman was his daughter-in-law. Then the second verse rolled down, which ordered him to marry Zeinab: “And when Zeid satisfied his desire, we gave her to you in marriage” (33:37). Marriage to the wife of an adopted son was not acceptable in pre-Islamic Arab society, and a third verse conveniently descended in order to invalidate Zeid’s adoption and deter those who were beginning to criticize Muhammad’s marriage to his daughter-in-law. “Muhammad is the father of no man among you. He is the apostle of Allah and the Seal of the Prophets” (33:40).

The Muslim male, as portrayed here, is a poor soul who cannot control his instincts and, therefore, has the right to give them free rein in any manner he chooses. When God’s Prophet coveted his adopted son’s wife and God ordered him to satisfy that desire, this behavior, for Muslims, became enshrined in both religious and secular law. Muhammad banned adoption in order to justify his socially unacceptable marriage—by the standards of the time—to the wife of his adopted son. This ban put an end to a social system that at the time helped save many children who, for one reason or another, had been left fatherless, and the ban, to this day, continues to rot the soul of Muslim societies.

Many children who have lost their mothers or fathers in these societies end up as victims for whom no just solution can be found. The father’s new wife in these societies neither regards nor treats her husband’s children from another wife as if they were her own. Her belief in her faith, which bans adoption, prevents her, both consciously and unconsciously, from treating them warmly; new husbands behave similarly toward the children of their wife’s first marriage. Orphanages in these societies are nothing more than corrals where even life’s most basic moral principles are not observed. Society regards these children with contempt, as most of them are the offspring of extramarital relations. Revenge is taken on their fathers through them, and people refuse to adopt them because of their belief in Islamic law, which forbids adoption yet proposes no alternative. We all remember the disaster that faced the world in the wake of the war in Bosnia. Some 30,000 children were born illegitimately in the course of this war and, as their Muslim mothers refused to take care of them, they were distributed to Western countries, with the United States taking the lion’s share. No Muslim country offered to take in a single one of these children.

Of all Muhammad’s marriages, however, his marriage to Safia was the most horrific of all. Safia Bint Hayi was a Jewish woman whose husband, father, and brother Muhammad had killed when raiding the Khaybar tribe. She was taken prisoner in the course of the raid by one of Muhammad’s men named Sahm. Muhammad took Safia from him, gave him seven other female prisoners as compensation, and married Safia the same day he killed her husband, brother, and father. Once again, a woman is given no opportunity to make a decision regarding her marriage or, ultimately, her fate. Safia finds herself in Muhammad’s arms from one day to the next and does not have the right to accept or refuse what he decides to do with her.

When discussing the deteriorating position of women in the Muslim world some defenders of Muslim law protest, claiming that Islam revered women, but that some of its followers had misunderstood the Koran and the Prophetic tradition. But I still have a question: Have the same followers misunderstood the Prophet’s attitude to women in his lifetime? Where are the Koranic verses or Prophetic traditions that can alleviate the ugliness of these attitudes? They are not to be found. How can we view the marriage of a fifty-year-old man to a six-year-old girl (consummated three years later) other than as rape? The answer is not to be found. How can we view the marriage of a man to his son’s wife as an acceptable act? There is no passage to make one think otherwise. How can we view a man’s marriage to his female captive after he has attacked her tribe and killed her husband, father, and brother except as a crime? We can’t because there are no verses or traditions to persuade us otherwise.

In order to understand Islam’s attitude to women, one has to think more deeply about the desert environment that gave birth to it. The tribe would go to sleep and wake to the rattle of the swords of another larger, better-equipped tribe. The raiding tribe would take the other tribe by storm, greedy for its land, its wealth, and its possessions. They would kill some of its men, and the rest would flee. Once the fires of battle had died down, the men of the victorious tribe would divide up the women from the defeated tribe among themselves just as they shared their livestock, possessions, and wealth. No tribe in Arab history was safe from raiding and its effects.

In addition to his fear of dying from hunger or thirst, a man in the Arabian Desert faced fear of another kind, a fear of which women were the source. He feared the disgrace he would suffer should she fall victim to another man. A woman, as far as a man of that time and place was concerned, was a constant reminder of his own failure and shame because he might fail in his attempts to defend her when his tribe was raided. Disgrace would fall on him, if she fell into the embrace of another man. His attitude toward her stemmed from his own feelings of inadequacy because of his possible inability to protect her. His hatred was not directed against the real wrongdoer responsible for his disgrace because he himself might one day be in the position of the raider, defeating another man and taking his women. Rather, his hatred was directed at a woman who might be his mother, his sister, or his wife. Since then there has been only one criterion by which Muslim male honor is measured: how well he protects the area between a woman’s knees and her navel. He holds her responsible for this burden; subjected to shame, he is dishonored, and his treatment of her takes on the cast of a twisted sort of revenge.

Islam was born into an environment that sanctioned the capture and rape of women, holding them—not the man committing the crime—responsible. Islam did not proscribe what was already permissible. On the contrary, it legalized it and enshrined it in canonical law. Man’s need to take his revenge on women because he considered them a source of disgrace was a pressing one, and his ogre legislated for him to satisfy that need. A large number of verses concerning women were revealed to its Prophet. These enormous boulders came down from the mountain to smash the heads of women, distorting their human form. Anyone who reads the Arabic literature, which describes the Prophet Muhammad’s raids and how he distributed the booty and captives, will understand the nature of the trap into which Muslim men and their wives fell. Muhammad provides the example that Muslim men are supposed to imitate while Muslim women are supposed to take their example from his wives.

For fourteen centuries Muslim men have been unable to free themselves from the domination of their Prophet, and Muslim women have not managed to do better than his wives. Muhammad legalized for himself and his men the rape of the women captured in the course of their raids in a verse that tumbled down from the top of the mountain and fell into Muhammad’s lap. The Koranic verse says: “Marry women who seem good to you: two, three or four of them. But if you fear you cannot maintain equality among them, marry one only” (4:3). Women who seem good to you? Men viewed marriage as nothing more than a response to their desires, without reference to the woman’s feelings regarding the marriage. And men did not curb these desires, satisfying them with any woman he was able to acquire, just like so much chattel.

A man’s wealth alone limited the number of women he was able to marry. The Koran distinguishes between two classes of woman: the free woman and the slave. The slave woman has no rights to freedom. Islam limits the number of free women a man may marry to four, if he can treat them all equally, and, if he cannot—to one. A slave woman does not enjoy the same rights as a free woman, and so a man may marry them as he pleases, so long as he can afford to buy them. What does Islam mean by equally? Equality in this case, in the Islamic sense of the word, means that the man must divide his sperm and his wealth equally among his four wives. If he cannot do this, he must take only one wife. How equitable the ogre is in what he accords to men and their oh-so-fortunate wives!

What have Muslim men and women got out of this complex “equitable” worldview that allows men to give free rein to their desires and turns women into a commodity to be bought in accordance with the requirements of those desires? Where is the concept of “family” or “children” in this dictionary that is so hard to read? Does either word have a definition in the Islamic lexicon? And what are the responsibilities of a man whose desires produce a whole army of children, as is the case with the family of Osama bin Laden, a man with innumerable brothers and sisters and a father who has had more wives than anyone can count?

Even if a Muslim man is able to give each of his four wives—and any other women he may have acquired—the same proportion of his property and his sperm, how can he divide his time and energies among the children who come into this world as the result of his unbridled desires? What price have we, as Muslim men and women, paid for this boulder that tumbled down from the top of that mountain? It has shattered us and torn a whole nation limb from limb, leaving the true concepts of “marriage” and “family” in ruins.

A Muslim man can see himself only in terms of his ability to pump out money and sperm. The Muslim woman, for her part, sees herself only as an incubator for his sperm and as a piece of furniture he has bought and paid for with his money. The man alone decides when to take possession of this object and when to deposit his sperm in it dictating a relationship in which human feelings have no value.

Because of a relationship that devalues true human feeling, the Muslim family is experiencing a crisis of love with children as its first victims. When my father courted my mother he was already a married man with five children, four girls and a boy. His excuse was that his wife was suffering from incurable tuberculosis. My grandfather agreed to the marriage without considering the feelings of my mother, who was only sixteen years old at the time. My father was forty. He argued that my father was a prosperous man of good reputation from a well-known family, and so he paid no attention to the opinion of my mother and grandmother. Women, he believed, should not be asked for their opinions in the same way one would not ask one’s furniture for the answer to a question.

My father’s first wife is said to have died neglected and forgotten in a hospital far out of town where tuberculosis sufferers were kept in isolation. My mother moved in to live with my father and his five children. His eldest daughter was one year older than my mother. In this vortex my mother lost her equilibrium and no longer knew if she were a wife, a mother of five, or one of his children, who looked on her as if she were one of their peers.

In the course of ten years she bore eight children. Although my father was by nature a peaceable and calm man who treated my mother well, I never saw my mother happy for so much as a day. She was not good at controlling life inside the home and the quarrels between her and her four stepdaughters continued day and night.

In that clamorous and teeming household I was born and lived the early years of my childhood. The nature of the relationship between my four half-sisters and my mother was a source of torment to me, as I was torn between the two opposing sides. My sisters got married to escape the way my mother treated them. A year after my youngest half-sister got married, just as our life seemed to be getting calmer, my father died suddenly as a result of a car accident and my mother lost what was left of her reason.