April 04, 2008
Women in Islam: Suffering the Barbary of an Ideology - Frank Salvato
News spread quickly that anti-Islamofascism activist Dr. Wafa Sultan has gone into hiding, along with her family. They are in hiding because of her participation in a recent debate on Al-Jazeera in which she challenged Egyptian Islamist Talat Rheim over Dutch cartoons of Mohammed and the ideology of Islam in general. For her truthful criticisms of Islam Dr. Sultan earned a fatwa, a “religiously” decried death sentence, from an Islamic scholar. That she criticizes Islam is enough justification in the eyes of the radical Islamist to kill her. That she is a woman infuses into the fatwa an unbridled viciousness and a need for expediency.
In the al-Jazeera interview, Dr. Sultan proclaimed:
“…any belief that chops off the heads of its critics is doomed to turn into terrorism and tyranny. This has been the condition of Islam, from its inception to this day. Islam has sentenced [its critics] to prison, and whoever crosses the threshold of that prison meets his death… If you want to change the course of events, you must re-examine your terrorist teachings, you must recognize and respect the right of the other to live, you must teach your children love, peace, coexistence and productive work. When you do that, the world will respect you…”
Not long after Dr. Sultan’s remarks, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of Islam’s most respected scholars, presented his religious edict and denounced Dr. Sultan, calling for her death. Qaradawi, it should be noted, has also declared the killing of American soldiers in Iraq and suicide bombings against Israel as a religious obligation for all Muslims. Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, describes Qaradawi as, “one of the world’s pre-eminent Islamofascists.”
To date, Dr. Sultan and her family are living clandestinely, in a world of anxiety and inconvenience. She can’t work; her family cannot have contact with their friends; and they are all constantly looking over their shoulders for the jihadi threat. That we would ever know sacrifice as this brave woman does.
Incredulously, but for her notoriety, the dangers and treatment of Dr. Sultan would be unremarkable in fundamentalist Islamic culture.
A traditional Islamic saying is that, “A woman’s heaven is beneath her husband’s feet.” In the Islamic culture, to show someone the bottom of ones shoes, to figuratively place them beneath ones feet, is an insult of the highest order.
The fact of the matter is that women in the fundamentalist Islamic world are relegated to the status of possessions. They are subjected to incredibly harsh and degrading cultural edicts where transgressions are punished – justified under Sharia Law – by whippings, beatings, stoning and death.
The penalty of death is imposed quite frequently on women in the fundamentalist Islamic culture. Offenses that warrant a death sentence under Sharia Law range from un-Islamic dress to being in the presence of an unrelated male.
The revered Islamic scholar, Abu Hamed Mohammad al-Ghazzali, who has been called ‘the greatest Muslim after Muhammad,’ writes that the role of a Muslim woman is to:
“…stay at home and get on with her sewing. She should not go out often, she must not be well-informed, nor must she be communicative with her neighbors. She should only visit them when absolutely necessary; she should take care of her husband…and seek to satisfy him in everything…Her sole worry should be her virtue…She should be clean and ready to satisfy her husband’s sexual needs at any moment.”
This totalitarian screed, we will soon learn, would be the least of a woman’s concerns where life in fundamentalist Islamic culture is concerned. In fact, the litany of transgressions against female humanity at the hand of fundamentalist Islam is countless.
▪ The testimony of a woman in courts of law that use Sharia as their basis for justice recognizes the testimony of women as only half that of a man. This presents an almost impossible scenario for equity and fairness in matters of marriage termination. In fact, in countries that practice strict Sharia Law – such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Egypt – all a man has to do is recite the verse “I divorce you” three times and under Sharia Law he is divorced.
▪ A husband has the right to beat his wife for perceived disobedience or misconduct. According to Islamic law, a husband may strike, a husband may beat his wife for any one of the following four reasons:
- If she does not attempt to make herself beautiful for him
- If she refuses to meet his sexual demands
- If she leaves the house without his permission or a “legitimate reason”
- Or if she neglects her religious duties
Any of these are also sufficient grounds for divorce.
The president of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University described the proper method of wife-beating in a television interview: “It’s not really beating,” Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tayyeb explained, “It’s more like punching.”
▪ Girls as young as nine years old are routinely sold into marriage, often to men many decades their senior. A father receives a monetary dowry in return. These young girls, prepubescent children, are treated as slaves during the day and as unwilling sexual conquests at night.
▪ Women are routinely subjected to the Islamic cultural malady known as honor killing, where a woman may be killed at the hand of a male relative for even the intimation of dishonor. These honor killings take place with no consequence for the murderer, no justice for the murdered.
▪ A disrespectful – or perhaps even an unlucky – wife can be sequesters into what are known as “wife rooms.” These are rooms within the family home in which women are confined with no food or water for a length of time determined completely by the level of tyranny possessed by her captor husband. In many cases, these rooms serve as chambers of horror where women wait between severe beatings from their husbands, their captors, to die. Many do.
Interestingly, delinquently, appallingly, women’s groups around the world, especially the progressive, pro-feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women, pay little more than lip-service to an issue that should illicit outrage of the highest order.
Columnist Jeff Jacoby, in a December 2007 article for the Boston Globe titled, The Islamist War on Muslim Women, lists an enumeration of outrages perpetrated against women at the hand of fundamentalist Islam:
In Pakistan, a tribal council ordered a woman to be gang-raped as punishment for her brother’s supposed liaison with a woman from another tribe.
In San Francisco, a young Muslim woman was shot dead after she uncovered her hair and put on makeup in order to be a maid of honor at a friend’s wedding. Read the rest of this entry »
