Another sad story of abuse of women in Islam has come to us out of Yemen. A 12 year old girl died from
internal bleeding caused by
intercourse three days after being married to an older man. I quote from the article, "Child brides are common in Yemen, where the United Nations estimates that one in three girls are married before age 18. Most are married off to older men with more than one wife, according to a study by
Sanaa University."
Certainly, Arab Islamic culture is not unique in having sex crazed men seeking ever more, and younger, women; if anything that's a global trend. What is unique is the degree to which it is entrenched, institutionalized, encouraged and even justified by the Koran.
It is known that
Mohammad had four wives and widely accepted that he married he favorite wife,
Aisha, at the age of six but held off
consummating until she was
nine. In
Sura 2:223 (the Cow)
Mohammad tells husbands that their wife is their "
tilth" or field, to be entered and "plowed" as they please.
Sura 65:4 (Divorce) outlines the
procedures for divorcing your wife, with special instructions
in case she has not yet reached puberty. There seems to be a doctrine that a
Muslim man can do anything
Mohammad did, hence why most
Muslim countries allow up to four wives and taking young girls to wife is allowed and even encouraged, but you are not to
consummate until "later" (wink) when they are grown up, like twelve. In addition, several verses refer to women as property. The degree to which the Koran dehumanizes women is
truly appalling. Verses like 4:11 and 2:282 plainly say that a woman is worth half a man. 4:11 is where inheritance rules are laid down and women can only inherit half as much as a man. In 2:282 rules for witnesses are explained and also explained is that it takes two women to equal the mental faculties of a man.
Not wanting all of its misogynist credentials to come from sexual exploitation,
Islam also threw in spousal abuse. Highlights from those six clips include in the second to last one at about 1:30 the cleric praying for spousal abuse, other
juicy tidbits include viewing it as "
therapeutic", not more than ten times, no causing bleeding, only a small stick, not in the face, not
in front of children etc. Now the obvious counter-argument is that I found the six worst clerics and posted them, ignoring all of the moderates. To speak to that, I would like someone to come up with "moderate" clerics speaking differently on the issue. I actually kind think those were the moderates, given that they were advocating limits on wife beating not backed up by the Koran.
Sura 4:34 (Women), a major verse on wife beating, has six main translations, five of the six say beat or scourge and the sixth dubiously inserts words to change the meaning to "beat them (lightly)"
While you can find strange
inconsistencies in the lives of early leaders of other faiths, (Joseph Smith and Brigham Young's multiple wives come to mind) where this becomes salient is when trying to examine the status of women in Islam today. I can't
conclusively prove the Koran is the cause of Muslim women's sad state today I think it's a good window. It could be a chicken and egg case, cultural attitudes bleeding over into the texts. What is clear is that the attitudes and practices in the Koran are a big part of the culture.
Now where this starts to get really interesting is when we take into account Islam's condemnation of the West as being decadent and morally corrupt. I agree, we are, For crying out loud, we defend the proliferation of
Pornography in the West. Not only is
pornography incredibly morally repugnant but its' highly
caustic and destructive effect on society is almost impossible to overstate. I won't go into the whole terrorism vs. taking a moral stand in seeking change, we all have our
preferred methods of changing the world for the better. In the West we have our fair share of sexual
predators, the difference is we don't use scripture to
legally protect it.
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