In sharia law women have 1/2 the weight of men
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women have 1/2
the weight of men.
8 Reasons Why Islamic Law Endangers Women
Women in the West are viewed as being equal to men from both an ontological and juridical perspective. Now, that is not to say that women have never been unjustly discriminated against in the West. On the contrary, it is a sad truth of history that throughout the centuries women in Western societies were often discriminated against.
Indeed, suffrage was only granted to American women in 1920, with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which states that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” But for at least the past few decades in the West, the predominant idea is that men and women are equal, and that women are entitled to the same basic rights that men enjoy.
Nowadays there are many principles that are enshrined in Western law to protect the rights of women. For example, in the West, the testimony of a woman is universally held—including in courts—to have the same value as the testimony of a man. Domestic violence against wives in the West is strictly prohibited, though unfortunately it is still practiced by some husbands. Furthermore, divorce is just as easy for a wife as it is for a husband to file for.
In addition, there is no discrimination against women when it comes to inheritance. Women are not disenfranchised of their fair share of inheritance just because they happen to be women. In the West women can also, for the most part, dress in any way that they desire without great social repercussions—and certainly not any legal repercussions.
The practice of polygamy is strictly prohibited in Western countries. The codification of monogamy into law goes at least as far back as Greco-Roman times. As a matter of fact, polygamy is seen in the West not only as an immoral practice but also as a practice that disenfranchises women. Moreover, Western countries take a strict stance on sexual exploitation and prohibit men from marrying or having sexual relations with pre-pubescent girls. And it goes without saying that Western countries strictly prohibit their soldiers from taking female sex slaves in times of war.
In sum, Western countries today treat women overall as equal to men, and there is no question that Western women enjoy individual freedoms. Western countries are the best places for women to live, where they can ascend to the highest seats of power in the land (think of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, UK Prime Minister Theresa May, and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) through democratic processes, and where this is no theoretical obstacle to female leaders.
1. Under Sharia, Wives Can Be Beaten.
Whereas under Western laws women and men are equal, under Sharia women are not equal to men, but are considered inferior. Women are the object of many disparaging remarks in the earliest Islamic source texts, which form the basis for Sharia. For example, according to Q 4:34, husbands are allowed to beat their wives if they “fear disobedience” (which implies that actual disobedience need not occur for the beating to be justified):
Men are the managers of the affairs of women for that God has preferred in bounty one of them over another, and for that they have expended of their property. Righteous women are therefore obedient, guarding the secret for God’s guarding. And those you fear may be rebellious admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them. If they then obey you, look not for any way against them; God is All-high, All-great.
That wife-beating is permissible given (imagined or real) behavioral misconduct on the part of the wife is also found in Muḥammad’s so-called “Farewell Address” or “Last Sermon,” which has been preserved in Ibn Isḥāq’s Sīra, the oldest and most reliable biography of Muḥammad that we possess.[1]
2. Under Sharia, Females Enjoy Fewer Rights than Males.
According to Q 2:282, the testimony of a woman is worth only half that of a man’s:
And bring to witness two witnesses from among your men. And if there are not two men [available], then a man and two women from those whom you accept as witnesses – so that if one of the women errs, then the other can remind her.
According to Q 4:11 and Q 4:176, a woman may inherit only half as much as her male brother does. Furthermore, as Professor Samīr Khalīl Samīr, a native Arabic speaker with two doctorates and the former adviser to Pope Benedict XVI on Islam and the Middle East, explains, under Sharia “in a [religiously] mixed marriage [where the wife is non-Muslim], the wife legally loses the right to her husband’s inheritance if she does not convert to Islam.”[2]
3. Under Sharia, Marriage and Sexual Intercourse with Pre-Pubescent Girls is Permissible.
According to Q 65:4, sexual relations with females who have not yet had their menstrual cycle (i.e., pre-pubescent girls) are permissible. The verse is found in the sixty-fifth chapter of al-Talāq (Divorce), which begins by stating that “when you divorce women, divorce them when they have reached (the end of) their waiting period (ʿidda); a waiting period or ʿidda is a certain amount of time that a Muslim man is supposed to wait before marrying a divorced woman, so as to make sure that she is not pregnant from her previous husband.”[3] It is in this context that we are to read Q 65:4, which states the following:
(As for) those of your women who have no hope of (further) menstruation: if you are in doubt, their waiting period is three months, and (also for) those who have not (yet) menstruated” [emphasis added].
Sayyid Qutb, the late prominent theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood, explains in his renowned commentary on the Qur’ān (In the Shadow of the Qur’ān) that [Q 65:4] is referring to “women who are past the menopause and those who do not as yet have a menstrual cycle because they have not attained puberty or because of a malfunction in their system” [emphasis added].[4]
Thus, in the context of this Qur’ānic chapter on divorce, it seems that this verse is stating that Muslim men (or husbands) are to wait three months before divorcing pre-pubescent girls (for the reason of making sure that young and apparently borderline post-pubescent girls are not pregnant; cf. Q 2:228). This is not just some interpretation that modern Islamists like Sayyid Qutb came up with; rather, such an interpretation of Q 65:4 is mentioned at least as far back as al-Tabarī (839 – 923), one of our oldest and most important sources of early Islam.
Furthermore, the Andalusian Malikī jurisprudent and philosopher, Ibn Rushd (1126 – 1198), known to the West as “Averroes,” confirms the permissibility of having sexual relations with pre-pubescent girls in his legal handbook, Bidāyat al-Mujtahid wa Nihāyat al-Muqtaṣid (literally, “the beginning for him who interprets the sources independently and the end for him who wishes to limit himself”). In this work, and under the section entitled “the Waiting Period for Wives,” he states the following: “the divorced woman whose marriage stands consummated may or may not be one who menstruates. If she does not menstruate, she may be a minor or beyond the age of menstruation.[5]”
It should be noted here that one of the most renowned Muslim figures of all times is unequivocally implying that marriage and sexual relations with pre-pubescent girls in Islam are licit.
4. Under Sharia, Wives do not Share the Same Divorce Rights as Their Husbands.
Under Sharia, a husband can divorce his wife simply by stating, “you are divorced” three times in the presence of two adult mentally sound males, without even having to justify his decision, and he will retain custody of any children. In this connection, Professor Samir states that “the most absurd thing is that if the husband later repents of his decision [of divorce] and wants to ‘recover’ his wife [for the third time], she must first marry another man who in his turn will repudiate her (Q 2:229-30).”[6] By contrast, no such power is given to the wife.
5. Under Sharia, Female Rulers are Frowned Upon.
Sharia frowns upon female rulers. This originates from a ḥadīth in Sahih al-Bukhari, the most trusted Muslim aḥadīth , where Muhammad, upon hearing the news that the people of Persia had made the daughter of Khosrau their Queen, states: “Never will succeed such a nation as makes a woman their ruler.”[7] Indeed, this is one of the reasons that is often cited for why women cannot be caliphs.[8] Although this is what Sharia teaches in theory, the practicalities of life give rise to some exceptions. In the Muslim world you did occasionally have female rulers like Shajarat al-Durr (d. 1257) who ruled Egypt in Medieval times. In more recent times, Benazir Bhutto won the elections in Pakistan and became Prime Minister of that country for two non-consecutive terms (1988-90, and 1993-96). So did Shikha Hasina, who won elections three times and is currently the Prime Minister of Bangladesh.
6. Under Sharia, Wives Should be Subservient to their Husbands.
Under Sharia, a husband has absolute authority over his wife. As Professor Samir remarks: “A man can forbid his wife to go out from the home, even to go to the mosque, since in a ḥadīth Muḥammad tells a woman that her prayer has no value if it is done without her husband’s permission.”[9] This is confirmed by The Reliance of the Traveler, an authoritative fourteenth-century Shafiʿī legal manual written by Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misrī (1302 – 1367). The manual states that “a woman may not leave the city without her husband or a member of her unmarriageable kin….accompanying her, unless the journey is obligatory, like the hajj. It is unlawful for her to travel otherwise, and unlawful for her husband to allow her.”[10]
Furthermore, under Sharia, polygyny is allowed, for Q 4:3 explicitly permits Muslim men to marry “what seems good to you of the women: two, or three, or four.”[11] Because of this verse, till this day in many Muslim countries it is permissible for a man to marry more than one wife.
Regardless of whether this custom was deemed to be socially acceptable by the seventh-century standards of Arabia, today only the very rare wife would find it permissible for her husband to marry another woman, let alone two or three more, even if she keeps her status as first wife.
7. Under Sharia, Women are Deemed Lacking in Faith and Intelligence.
As students of Islam know very well, Sharia does not just draw from Qur’ānic verses for its oppressive view of women. For it also draws on the aḥadīth (the so-called sayings of Muḥammad). In one such hadīth from Sahīh Al-Bukhārī, the most authoritative Sunni collection of ahādīth, Muḥammad states that the majority of the dwellers of hellfire are women, that women curse frequently and are ungrateful to their husbands, and, famously, that women are “deficient in intelligence and religion.” The full hadīth is as follows:
Once Allah’s Messenger [i.e., Muḥammad] went out to the Muṣalla [place of prayer] (to offer the prayer) of `Id-al-Adha or Al-Fitr prayer. Then he passed by the women and said, “O women! Give alms, as I have seen that the majority of the dwellers of Hell-fire were you (women).” They asked, “Why is it so, O Allah’s Messenger?” He replied, “You curse frequently and are ungrateful to your husbands. I have not seen anyone more deficient in intelligence and religion than you. A cautious sensible man could be led astray by some of you.” The women asked, “O Allah’s Messenger! What is deficient in our intelligence and religion?” He said, “Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man?” They replied in the affirmative. He said, “This is the deficiency in her intelligence. Isn’t it true that a woman can neither pray nor fast during her menses?” The women replied in the affirmative. He said, “This is the deficiency in her religion [emphases added].”
Fundamentalist Muslims the world over insist on accepting this ḥadīth, which is virtually universally accepted as authentic or ṣahīh by even moderate Muslim scholars (who generally view just about everything in the collection of al-Bukahrī as authentic). Such aḥadīth have been a source of great injustice to women living in majority-Muslim countries.
8. Under Sharia, Raping Female Captives is Permissible.
What is particularly egregious in Sharia is that warriors are permitted to capture the women of “infidels” and use them for their sexual gratification. According to Q 4:3, Q 4:24, Q 23:5-6, Q 70:22-30, having female slaves, “those whom your right hand possess” (ما ملكت ايمانكم, transliterated as ma malikat aymānikum), is permissible.
Furthermore, interpreting ma malikat aymānikum as “female slaves” is not something that, pace Western-Muslim apologists, is only advanced by so-called Islamophobes. Our earliest tafsīr (Qur’ānic exegesis), the tafsīr of Muqātil Ibn Sulaymān, states that ma malikat aymānikum means walā’id (ولائد), which denotes female slaves.[12] This view has been held by many mufasirīn (exegetes) since medieval times, and A.J. Droge’s recent 2013 scholarly translation of the Qur’ān, which is, in my opinion, the best English translation around, explains the phrase “those whom your right hand possess” as straightforwardly referring to female slaves.
Having female slaves, Droge explains, is permissible even when the (Muslim) male is married.[13] Indeed, the Qur’ān contrasts female slaves with married women a few times, clearly demonstrating female slaves were not considered to be wives. There can be no doubt that in using the term ma malikat aymānikum, the Qur’ān is here referring to females who have been captured during war for the sexual gratification of their male captors. Indeed, reading Ibn Iṣhāq’s Sīrat Rasūl Allāh, we can discern that Muhammad himself took female concubines and permitted his warriors to do likewise as well.
Ibn Iṣhāq tells us that after Muhammad had 600 to 900 adult Jewish men of the tribe of Banu Qurayẓa beheaded and thrown into trenches for alleged treason, he “divided the property, wives, and children of b. Qurayẓa among the Muslims.” Ibn Iṣhāq further relates that “the apostle sent Saʿd b. Zayd al-Anṣār brother of ‘Abdu’l-Ashhal with some of the captive women of B. Qurayẓa to Najd and he sold them for horses and weapons [emphasis added].”[14]
Hence, according to Ibn Isḥāq, Muhammad enslaved women and sanctioned their being sold off (not much different from what ISIS militants are doing today with Yazidi women, no doubt modeling themselves after the Muhammad of the early Islamic sources). Furthermore, Ibn Iṣhāq tells us that “the apostle had chosen one of [the women of the tribe of B. Qurayẓa] for himself.”[15] In other words, Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, was himself taking female captives for his own sexual gratification.
We also read in the Sīra about what is ostensibly Muḥammad’s aggressive attack against the Jews of Khaybar (a Jewish-settled oasis about ninety-five miles north of Medina).[16] Ibn Iṣhāq reports on the authority of one ʿAbdullah b. Abū Najīḥ that on the day of the conquest of Khaybar, Muḥammad prohibited his fighters from having “carnal intercourse with pregnant women who were captured.”[17] The implicature of this prohibition is that carnal intercourse with non-pregnant women who were captured was permissible.
Furthermore, we read in Ibn Iṣhāq that “the women of Khaybar were distributed among the Muslims.”[18] That is, according to our earliest and best source on Muḥammad’s life, Muhammad sanctioned the sexual use of female slaves, or “those who you right hand possess,” to use Qur’ānic terminology.
In addition, when one reads the relatively early Islamic sources, one gleans that in the battle of Khaybar, Muḥammad himself had sexual intercourse with a captured woman, Ṣafiyyah bint Huyyay (Safiyyah, daughter of Huyyay), whose father Muḥammad had ordered killed, either the same night that he had her husband killed at Khaybar, or shortly thereafter on the way to Wādī al-Qurā (a “valley” which is located close to Khaybar).[19]
From Sahih al-Bukhari we learn that Suffiya, the “chief mistress of the tribes of Qurayza and An-Nadir” was originally considered by the Muslim victors as a slave woman or jārīya (جَارِيَةً), but that Muhammad manumitted her and subsequently “married” her (al-Ṭabarī tells us that this occurred after she accepted Islam).[20]
Ibn Isḥāq relates that when Muhammad first engaged in sexual relations with Ṣafiyyah (when he “married” her) in his tent (the same day or just a few days after killing her male folks), one Abū Ayyūb, Khālid b. Zayn,
passed the night girt with his sword, guarding the apostle [i.e., Muhammad] and going around the tent until the morning the apostle saw him there and asked him what he meant by his action. He replied, “I was afraid for you with this woman for you have killed her father, her husband, and her people, and till recently she was in unbelief, so I was afraid on your account.”[21]
The above excerpt makes it abundantly clear that the guard wanted to guard Muhammad because he perceived him to be forcefully having sex with someone who must have harbored deep resentment and hatred for him because of his slaughter of her kin, particularly her father and her husband.
Indeed, ʾAḥmad Ibn Yaḥyā al-Baladhūri (d. circa 892), one of earliest writers of Islamic history (particularly of the early Arab-Islamic conquests), relates that Ṣafiyya said the following:
Of all men the Prophet was the one I hated the most, for he had killed my husband, father and brother. But he kept saying “your father excited the Arabs to unite against me and he did this and that,” until the hatred [for Muhammad] was gone from me.[22]
So, if our earliest sources on Islam are to be trusted, Muhammad, after he conquered the oasis of Khaybar, claimed Ṣafiyya bint Huyyay as his sexual captive.[23] Indeed, if the earliest sources on Islam are to be trusted, then one must accept the commonsensical conclusion that Muhammad raped Ṣafiyya,[24] and allowed his followers to similarly rape women who were captured during battle.[25]
Typically Westernized Muslims, if they are even aware of the existence of such stories in the earliest and most reliable biography of Muhammad, will dismiss them as ahistorical, and as having nothing whatsoever to do with pure and unadulterated Islam. However, there is no non-ad hoc reason to believe that these unpleasant events are not historical, whilst at the same time affirming that records more consonant with Western sensibilities are.
Furthermore, bracketing the question of historicity, there is much less reason to believe that contemporary actions that are consonant with what is recounted in these stories are “unislamic”—for these stories come from sources that form the very heart and soul of Islam.[26] Certainly Islamists are not going to buy the idea that such stories are unislamic or ahistorical just because they are contrary to Western sensibilities.
The fact is that ISIS militants in Iraq and Syria, who are notorious for raping Yazidī women who they capture (sometimes shortly after killing their families and neighbors), are clearly acting within the interpretive parameters of traditional Islam and following the example of the Muhammad of the earliest Islamic sources.
In his legal handbook, Bidāyat al-Mujtahid wa Nihāyat al-Muqtaṣid,[27]the Malikī jurisprudent and philosopher Ibn Rushd confirms the permissibility of enslaving women after battle. In the section “Identification of the harm permitted to be inflicted upon the enemy,” Ibn Rushd states in no equivocal terms that Muhammad “enslaved women.”[28] Ostensibly the implication is that enslaving women after battle is justified, following the example of Muhammad.
There is no question that taking female captives in warfare is a practice that is sanctioned in the earliest Islamic sources; this practice or tradition is not just an innovation of groups like ISIS. And this is not just something that only so-called Islamophobic Westerners point out.
Indeed, Dr. Suʿad Ṣālih, former Dean of the Women’s College of Islamic and Arabic Studies at al-Azhar University in Egypt (the seat of Sunni learning), very explicitly and nonchalantly states that taking female slaves (milk al-yamīn) is Islamically permissible in a war against Muslim enemies. She gives an example involving Israelis, stating that were Israel to fall, it would be permissible to take Israeli women as captives and use them for sexual gratification in order to humiliate them.[29]
The irony that Dr. Suʿad Ṣālih, herself a woman, is sanctioning the sexual enslavement of female war captives, is completely lost on the former Azharī dean. But the irony is lost presumably because the former dean is utterly convinced that using female captives for sexual gratification is not something that is inhumane—after all, from her perspective, the flawless religion of Islam and the ideal for all mankind, Muhammad, sanction the practice.
Conclusion and a Possible Pathway for Reform.
Other examples of Islam’s inferior view of women can be cited. However, the above accounts are sufficient to conclude that under Sharia, “men are superior to women” (Q 2:228) and that “Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they [men] spend their wealth to maintain them [women]” (Q 34:4). Sharia then enjoins upon its adherents a profoundly un-egalitarian ethic, whereby women are deemed inferior to men.[30]
People who are endeared to the egalitarian-Western principles, particularly those who are Europeans, must fight the proliferation of Sharia ideas in their homeland. But in order to fight a fascistic and misogynistic ideology like Islamism, it is necessary for adherents of egalitarian-Western principles to first understand the motivations of Islamists.
And, make no mistake, the reasons that Islamists advance for just about everything they do, including their oppression of women, are based almost exclusively on their religious ideology. None of the sources cited above are exclusively political or social in nature—they are religious Islamic sources.
As was made explicit in the fifteenth issue of ISIS’s Dabiq magazine, ISIS members and their Islamist cohorts are not nihilists who just have an innate and brute desire to oppress non-Muslims. Their actions are “cold and calculated,” and they are acting out on what they believe, and what appear to be, relatively plausible interpretations of the Islamic source texts. Until this is exposed, challenged, and confronted by non-Muslim societies and reformist Muslims as well, there can be no victory against ISIS’ oppressive ideology.
Now, the job of Western leaders and those in the intelligence community is to educate themselves about the underlying religious motivations of Islamists (and not censor talk about Islam in willful blindness). Muslim reformers, on the other hand, are tasked with the more difficult job of reforming Islam,and rejecting interpretations or Islamic source texts that are at odds with contemporary Western and egalitarian values.
Muslim reformers need to focus on cultivating a peaceful and tolerant Islam, one that bestows a much higher place to women than traditional Islam, and one which is not a prisoner to the above- interpretations or source texts.
However, as mentioned above, Muslim reformers should not just dismiss problematic stories like that of Ṣafiyya as ahistorical or unislamic whilst simultaneously accepting other material in the same earliest sources as being historical and Islamic. This is unlikely to convince any Muslim with a proclivity to the less palatable interpretations of Islam, and certainly not those who are intimately familiar with the source texts.
These Muslims, especially the non-Western ones, will immediately indict the Muslim reformer as succumbing to Westernizing influences in his/her understanding of Islam. They will challenge the reformer to explain why what he/she happens to find unpalatable in the sources is ahistorical or unislamic, and why what he/she finds palatable is historical or Islamic. The reformer will very likely be unable to provide a satisfactory answer here.
So Muslim reformers need a way to reform Islam without playing fast and loose with the source texts, an endeavor which is bound to fail (the proof of this is that so far it has failed miserably). Now, the reformation of Islam is a burden that moderate Muslims must carry themselves—reform cannot be imposed from outside the Muslim umma, but must arise naturally and organically within it. In a word, it is for Muslims themselves to go about the very difficult task of reforming Islam.
That being said, I suggest that one promising pathway of reform, at least one that is much more promising than cherry-picking what to believe in the early sources, is the methodology that is advocated by Ahmad Ṣubḥī Manṣūr, an Egyptian graduate of al-Azhar. Manṣūr is a prominent Muslim reformist who is a former Azharī PhD graduate and Azharī professor.
His reformist agenda is very simple: Islam should be based on the Qur’ān alone. To this end, he has written a whole book entitled al-Qur’ān wa Kafa (“the Qur’ān is Sufficient”) wherein he defends the Qur’ān-only view, of which he is currently and incontrovertibly the number-one proponent.
Manṣūr believes that the extra-Qur’ānic Islamic sources, written as they were many generations after Muhammad’s death, are historically unreliable, and are a byproduct of a later sectarian milieu with concerns that were alien to the time of Muhammad and the Qur’ān.[31] Indeed, he describes much of the unpalatable material found in the ahādīth as “garbage.”
An upshot of his view is that many of the unpalatable teachings in mainstream Islam are not found in the Qur’ān, but in the extra-Qur’ānic sources, and so will be eliminated from his version of Islam. Examples of unpalatable doctrines or events that are not found in the Qur’ān but are present in the extra-Qur’ānic sources are as follows: the view that women make up most of hellfire and are lacking in faith and intelligence; the view that apostates should be killed; the stories that Muhammad enslaved women and had (ostensibly non-consensual) sexual relations with some female captives; the view that Muhammad wanted Jews and Christians expelled from the Arabian peninsula; the view that people should be fought until they believe in Allah and Muhammad’s prophethood, etc.