Women and Islam

This post began with a link on Facebook to www.avaaz.org, to the petition called Horror in Paradise,  about a 15-year-old girl in the Maldives who was reportedly raped repeatedly by her father, who also murdered the baby she bore.  She has now been sentenced to 100 lashes, for having "sex outside marriage."  I don't sign every petition that comes by, because signing petitions invariably leads to more spam and more requests for funds.  I decided I would sign this one.

But the petition didn't have the entire story. An article in the International Business Times explains that the girl was not sentenced to 100 lashes because her father raped her; her father is still awaiting trial on charges of rape and infanticide.  She was sentenced because of another act of consensual premarital sex which she is said to have admitted to.  Also, the sentence won't be imposed until she turns 18, unless she chooses otherwise.  Finally, the Maldives President's office is already arguing with the court about the sentence.  So we can all back off on the horror, except insofar as 100 lashes, in the 21st century, is an absurd punishment for anything.  And bear in mind that sex with a 15-year-old is a crime in every western country I can think of - but the girl is almost never prosecuted.

I began wondering what Sharia law actually does say about rape, and relations between men and women.  Is it really true that Sharia law requires 4 male witnesses to prove rape?  Is a woman's testimony really only worth half a man's in Sharia courts? What about marital rape? I don't claim to understand all of Islamic law based on a few web articles, but I was curious to see what a quick survey would find.

I found 3 web sites with articles on rape and Islam which I thought would give a broad perspective:

• ReligionofPeace, which claims to give "the politically incorrect truth about Islam, one really messed up religion"
•  MuslimAccess, written by Muslims for Muslims
• BismikaAllahuma.org, Muslim responses to anti-Islam polemics

ReligionofPeace is clearly anti-Muslim, but their links to Qur'an citations were very useful.  The most detailed explanations of how Muslims think about the law were on MuslimAccess.  The article about rape and incest begins with an extended discussion of Islam's emphasis on the value of all human life, and the various ways this is addressed.  Islam prohibits harm, prohibits cruelty, and states that "a woman has to be respected and protected under all circumstances."  Islam prohibits rape (of course!).  The site lists numerous examples of women complaining of rape to the Prophet, and to judges in the time after the Prophet, whose rapists were punished and the women were not. 

ReligionofPeace says flatly, "Under Islamic law, rape can only be proven if the rapist confesses or if there are four male witnesses."  If you actually look at the citations to the Qur'an they give, though, the 4 male witnesses are required to prove adultery:

Qur'an (24:4) - "And those who accuse free women then do not bring four witnesses (to adultery), flog them..."  

Qur'an (24:13) - "Why did they not bring four witnesses of it? But as they have not brought witnesses they are liars before Allah."

ReligionofPeace admits this but insists "it is a part of the theological underpinning of the Sharia rule."  MuslimAccess is very clear that rape and adultery are different crimes under Sharia.  The crime of rape (hiraba) is considered on a par with highway robbery and assault: 

In ‘Fiqh-us-Sunnah’, hiraba is described as: ‘a single person or group of people causing public disruption, killing, forcibly taking property or money, attacking or raping women (hatk al ‘arad), killing cattle, or disrupting agriculture.’

BismikaAllahuma also lists numerous historical examples of rape victims who were not punished, although their rapists were.  The only case listed on BismikaAllahuma where a raped woman was punished was one where "the girl [was stoned to death] because she did not cry out for help though she was in the city."  She was therefore presumed to have consented - and the penalty for adultery was death.

I'm inclined to conclude that in Islamic law, a rape victim should be treated as a victim and not punished, and that the requirement for 4 male witnesses applies to proving consensual adultery, not rape.  There's still a deep chasm between this and modern Western law, where adultery is considered the business of the parties involved.

So, what about marital rape?  The Qur'an contains the following suggestive quote, which two different sites used as examples of two different opinions:

Sûrah al Baqarah 2.223
'Your wives are your tilth; go then unto your tilth as you may desire, but first provide something for your souls*, and remain conscious of God, and know that your are destined to meet Him...'

The ReligionofPeace site assumes this means there is no such concept as rape in marriage in Islam.

The MuslimAccess site says, "The Qur'an is very clear that the basis of a marital relationship is love and affection between the spouses, not power or control. Rape is unacceptable in such a relationship." To the quote above it adds a footnote, "* Note in Muhammad Asad's translation: 'a spiritual relationship between man and woman is postulated as the indispensable basis of sexual relations.'"  It also gives several examples of Islamic scholarship suggesting a much more equal relationship between men and women than some modern critics suggest, or than we see today in some of the more conservative Muslim countries. 

As for the value of a woman's testimony in court, here is the exact text relating to women's testimony in court, from 002.282 (Yu Sufali), in the context of  "transactions involving future obligations in a fixed period of time":

If they [sic] party liable is mentally deficient, or weak, or unable Himself to dictate, Let his guardian dictate faithfully, and get two witnesses, out of your own men, and if there are not two men, then a man and two women, such as ye choose, for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her.

There is no suggestion that the man might need to be reminded if he errs.



So, how explain the way women are treated under Sharia law in some Muslim countries, given that the examples of Islamic law turned up by my search seem more, well, reasonable than I expected?  I believe the explanations are as much cultural as religious.  The cultures in which women seem to especially badly treated are strongly patriarchal, and regard women as property, not citizens:  Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia.  I didn't know enough about the Maldives to include them in that list until now; and after reading the IBT article, I'm not sure I should include them. The Qur'an statement that "your wives are your tilth" seems to support this attitude.


So we have a religion which forbids rape (and murder, and all the other things everybody forbids), and which says it regards women as very important and to be protected and cherished; and the modern advocates forbid women from going out in public without a male family member as escort, refuse to let them go out at all, refuse them education, cause them to wear full-coverage veils, murder them for sometimes incomprehensible failures of "honor" - you've seen the news stories. In fact, from some other stories I've read about the Prophet Mohammed, he sounds like a more rational man than some of his modern followers.

I think the problem with Islam is the same as the problem with Christianity - it isn't necessarily the religion itself.  It's the people who practice it, and the way they've convinced themselves that only their interpretation of the faith is correct, and everyone who disagrees with them is a hopeless heretic.  It's also, frankly, the Pareto principle, also called the 80/20 rule:   80% of the trouble in the world is caused by 20% of the people.  The squeaky wheels get the news reports, and the people who make the news can be pretty scary.  Consider what your opinion of Christians would be if the only Christian you ever heard or read about was Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, or that guy in Florida (I refuse to look up his name) who amused himself by burning Qurans.  I try to remind myself that for every frothing jihadi in the news, there are at least 4 other Muslims going quietly about their lives, being nice to their wives and daughters, and trying to pay the rent.

For Shame, Mr. Robertson

Pat Robertson has a history of blaming the victims; as I recall, he said that the 9/11 attacks were caused by "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians" - not to mention the ACLU and People for the American Way. Funny, I thought it was because Osama bin Laden was pissed about American troops in Saudi Arabia.

Today, though, he chooses to blame the recent disastrous earthquake in Haiti on a "pact with the devil" that the Haitians made two hundred years ago, to get out from under "the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever." This, he says, is why Haiti has always been poor, and why it has just been devastated by a 7.0 earthquake. The Devil did it.

As a historian and a scientist (amateur but quite serious in both), I hardly know where to start. Let's start with the history. Robertson has the wrong damn Napoleon; he has no idea what the history even is. Napoleon III ascended the throne of France in December 1852, 49 years after Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti a free republic (Jan. 1, 1804). The "Napoleon" in charge at the time of Haitian independence was Napoleon III's uncle, the original and only "Napoleon."

Now the science. Haiti is located at the junction of two tectonic plates, the North American plate and the Caribbean plate. There isn't as much action there as there is along the West Coast, because the Caribbean plate is relatively small compared to the North American plate; but it's a strike-slip fault, just like the San Andreas Fault. It hadn't had any serious movement since the 18th century, but we understand why this happened, and the Devil had nothing to do with it. Haiti was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But Pat Robertson chooses to inform the world, during a broadcast asking for disaster relief, that the Haitians sold their souls to the devil in exchange for freedom from the French. They need to have "a great turning to God," he says. Somewhere in the afterlife, if there is an afterlife, I hope he meets the spirits of the men who bought Haitian independence with their blood. I'd like to hear what Toussaint L'Ouverture has to say to this.

In the meantime, I guess we have to put up with him; he owns his own television network, so we can't shut him up. But I want everyone who calls himself a Christian to look at Haiti, listen to Pat Robertson on the subject, and ask seriously: is this the man I want speaking for me? And if it isn't, why haven't we heard from you, reproaching him?

Islam in Oakland

It doesn't surprise me to see Muslim women in Oakland; I see the standard wrapped headscarf all the time.  It did startle me, the other day, to see a woman walking along Telegraph Avenue wearing the full niqaab.  This isn't the full-coverage Afghan burqa, but you've probably seen photos of Saudi women wearing something similar - full black, head to toe, except for a narrow slit over her eyes.  She was pushing a double stroller and accompanied by a small boy, about 4 or 5 years old.  Since I was driving a car, I didn't get a photo, but I did think about taking one.

On one level, it's her religion, and I defend her right to practice it.  But on another level, the niqaab really gets to me.  Islam as a religion imposes a great deal of physical modesty - men and women are both expected to keep themselves covered except in the presence of spouses.  But you'll never see a Muslim man who covers his entire body except for his eyes; only women are expected to do that.

I don't know enough about Islam to evaluate the differences among the various requirements to cover the hair, or more; and I've read interviews in which Muslim women explain that covering themselves makes them comfortable, and if so, more power to them.  But it bothers me.  It disturbs me in a way I can't quite define, that has to do with personal empowerment, and equality, and the absence of choice.

It also disturbs me in a way I can define:  concealment of identity and purpose.  I don't really know whether that was a woman pushing that stroller.  It was a human being wearing an all-enveloping black robe that revealed only the eyes.  (I don't recall whether I could see the hands or not.)  I assumed it was a woman because men don't wear the niqaab.  But there've been cases in Afghanistan when male suicide bombers disguised themselves in burqas to get past checkpoints.