Islam and Women
Dr.
Younus Shaikh
Dr. Younus Shaikh, Pakistani Rationalist and
founder President of the Rationalist organization of Pakistan, "The
Enlightenment", who was once sentenced to death for blasphemy in
Pakistan, writes on Islam and Women.
I
Before
the advent of Islam, the pagan Arab women generally enjoyed a
respectable status in society; many of them including Khadija - the first
wife of the prophet of Islam, had the right to engage in business and
choose or dismiss their husbands in a matrilineal fashion; they took part
in most activities of war and peace including public worship. In female
oriented Arab paganism, goddesses had special status; in Mecca, the female
goddess Al-Uzza, in Taif the goddess Al-Lat and in Medina the goddess
Manat were the most popular deities, and their statues were most revered
while the statue of the stern Allah was almost neglected.
Arab pagan poetry was mostly concerned with the
beauty and grace of their women, and the glory of their tribal values in
peace and war. And it was only in one predator tribe of Mecca that the
evil custom of burying alive of the daughters prevailed. It was highly
unusual for a man of pre-Islamic Arab society to have more than one wife
in his house; and it is quite certain that polygamy was introduced and
encouraged by the prophet after the revelation of Islam. Women were to
produce as many Muslims as possible. This ultimately resulted in the
degradation in the status of the married woman in the Islamic society.
Whereas the pre-Islamic Arab custom allowed many looser forms of marriage
on the matrilineal and matri-local tradition that gave the woman freedom
and liberty as full human being, however the artificial rules of Islamic
nikah reduced marriage to mere sexual and social slavery.
The prophet of Islam, before prophethood, opposed the
burying alive of the newborn daughters; he was eager to work for a woman
and gladly married a divorced woman. The early Islam continued with most
of the pre-Islam tribal traditions; there were no hijabs or veils for
women of Madina; and at a later date only the nine wives of prophets were
restricted in their social intercourse as their home was constantly full
of visitors. However the prophet's women sex-slaves were not restricted in
any such manners.
Indeed, the semi-transparent half-face- veil (hijab)
was actually a very old custom originating in the Assyrian times, a status
symbol and a mark of social distinction for the free women. The
pre-Islamic pagan Arab woman of the cities often wore the fashionable
semi-transparent half-face veil but the tribal women never did.
Later, Islam added measures for "the
preservation of modesty for women" -like casting down their eyes in
public, concealing their breasts and jewellery and the likes. However,
these restrictions were later extended by the followers of the prophet far
beyond his original intentions as expressed in Koran, and remained more or
less a permanent fixture of Muslim life thereafter.
Later on, however, the insecurity of early Islam
gradually added to the exclusion of women, and 100 years later, by the
reign of the Abbasid Caliph Haroon ur Rashid, women became merely sexual
toys and breeding machines; and as married women they were merely maid
servants- mere man's social appendages. Moreover, as female sex-slaves,
women were freely bought and sold in open markets of all Islamic
countries, and loaned, rented or bestowed as gifts to friends. The prophet
himself bestowed women sex-slaves to his favourites. There was no limit to
the number of slaves one could own; one of the companions of prophet
Hazrat Zubair Ibn ul Arvan, for example, had 1000 men-slaves and 1000
women sex-slaves. Islam took the woman as the land tilled by the man where
he spilled his seeds.
The prophet himself took part or guided nearly 100
wars or raids or attacks for plunder. After him, his followers continued
the offence. The fierce Islamic tribal Bedouins with centuries long
experience of ruthless and cruel tribal warfare proved to be the
worthwhile shock troops of Islam. After Iraq, Syria fell to the Islamic
Empire in 634 CE. Despite surrenders, great massacres took place at many
places; thousands of men were slaughtered and women and children sold into
slavery; monasteries were ransacked, monks and villagers were slain and
nuns were raped. After the conquest of Egypt, many of its towns were put
to sword and their entire population wiped out. Great massacres also
occurred in Cyprus and North Africa. The Roman province of Iraq, the
Syrian province of Iran, and the conquered Iran brought hundreds of
thousands of men-slaves, women sex-slaves, and the vast fertile lands of
these once mighty and civilized countries where the women had been held in
high respect e.g. the Manichaecian Iraq, the Pharonic Egypt and North
African Civilizations.
As in Egypt and Iran, wherever the conquering Islamic
Bedouins armies went, they destroyed the local civilization's cultures,
imposed their Islamic tribal medievalism recklessly murdering men and
degrading women to perpetual sexual slavery. In short, the Islamic tribal
Bedouins and barbarians did the same to the surrounding higher
civilizations what the Roman barbarians did to the highly civilized
ancient Greeks. Meanwhile the Islamic Bedouins continued to raid and
abduct the European women for Islamic slave markets during all these
Islamic centuries. The conquest of Syria forced the conversion of
thousands of Christian priests to Islam, who changed their religion but
not their profession: they became the stern anti-feminine Islamic mullahs
and not only continued their religious magic and rituals but also
continued the essentially Christian medievalism under Islam.
In short, as a result of these conquests,
destructions and imposition of Islamic tribal medievalism, societies under
the Islamic Empire went further than any other in their total exclusion of
women from political power and social influence. Islamic legislation went
far beyond anything the prophet had originally dreamed of in his tribal
religiosity in cheating women of their rightful place in society and in
matters of inheritance. Where originally the Koran gave women the right of
inheritance, the Islamic mullah invented the legalized institution of Waqf-
the religious foundation, to exclude the daughters and their descendents
from inheritance. Though the Koran does give the right of inheritance to
women, she continued to be a minor; usually uneducated needing a guardian
in father, husband or the son. Indeed, the status of women in Islam is
theoretically exalted but utterly deplorable in practice.
Multiplying number of harems (residing place for the
female sex-slaves), finally institutionalised under Caliph Al-Walid II,
emphasized the inevitable degradation of womanhood under Islam. Haroon ur
Rashid, the Islamic Caliph (ruler) had 2000 female sex-slaves, Caliph
Mutwakkal had 4000 female sex-slaves; and every mullah, official or
soldier of Islamic state had some men-slaves and women sex-slaves
belonging to the conquered civilization nations. Not being allowed to
learn, experience or think for herself, it is no wonder that there are
hardly very few outstanding women in 1600 years of Islamic history, and
those who by chance or by the force of the ancient pre-Islamic customs
came into light or in the corridors of power were sooner or later
eliminated on the orders of some pious and religious Islamic mullah..
Indeed, Islam's violent anti-feminism have been as nefarious as
Christianity's burning of hundreds of thousands European women as witches
in 15th, 16th and 17th century. The female hating instruments of the
Islamic Empire, the mullahs and the Caliphs, continued to promote
degradation of women under the formal and sordid Islamic legal code of
Shariah, the final seal on the complete subjection of the female element..
The modern history of Islam is merely the continuation of the Islamic
tribal medievalism, only the technology , phraseology and the façade is
modern.
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