| Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice The Complete Layman’s Guide to the Koran Chapter 12 God's Will Women and The Koran III Allah made women into a commodity that could be bartered and bargained for, befitting a god that selected a merchant as His Messenger. He also encouraged the accumulation of wealth in the pursuit of that commodity and made women beholden to the men who spent part of their wealth on their acquisition and for the continued provision of their basic necessities of life. Women as a Field to Be Ploughed How were women expected to repay the generous men who put food on their table, a roof over their heads and protected them from other men? Sex comes to mind. Beholden women will not necessarily see providing sex as payment for their room and board as the appropriate thing to do. Anyone who has ever paid a restaurant bill in the hope that sex will follow will understand this. For Allah, this ungrateful attitude was unacceptable. Not only that, a man might decide to take what he felt was his due, what he thought he had bought and paid for, and be punished for rape under pre-Islamic laws and traditions. To perhaps avoid a man being accused of raping his wife if she declined his request for intimacy, God’s Messenger received a revelation from Allah making it impossible for a woman (one has to assume a married woman) to be raped. For to deny the ploughman, in the following verse, would be going against Allah's Will, not something you do without risking spending eternity on fire in a vengeful god's Hell. 2:223 Your women are a tillage for you. So get to your tillage whenever you like. Do good for yourselves, fear Allah and know that you shall meet Him. And give good news to the believers. It was good for you but was it good for her? Women as a field to be ploughed!!! What if the field is busy making dinner? Ali reported God's messenger as saying, "When a man calls his wife to satisfy his desire she must go to him even if she is occupied at the oven." At-Tirmidhi What if the field doesn’t want to be ploughed? What if the field has a headache? For the answer to this question, we must return to an already quoted verse, paying particular attention to when a wife is deserving of a beating. 4:34 … And those of them that you fear might rebel, admonish them and abandon them in their beds and beat them. Should they obey you, do not seek a way of harming them; for Allah is Sublime and Great! If a beating doesn’t get her to change her mind and consent to sexual intercourse, then Allah will send an angel to try to convince her. At least, that is the Prophet Muhammad’s explanation. “if a husband invites his wife to have intimate relations with him, but the wife rejects him and he becomes angry all night long – for this his wife will be cursed by an angel until morning.”[46] Being cursed by an angel (almost the equivalent of being cursed by Allah) is not a trivial matter, as you may now appreciate. Muslim scholars and learned clerics have long struggled with how much of a beating a wife should be forced to endure and whether the Koran allows for the use of implements in the beating of one’s spouse. According to God’s Messenger, the beating should not be severe and yes, implements are allowed but should not be bigger than a toothbrush. The Prophet Muhammad was said to be brushing his teeth when he answered this question. The toothbrush in question was probably some kind of reed, therefore a small whip would probably be allowed. Leather merchants in Kabul did a brisk business in near meter long studded leather straps when the Taliban (Students of the Koran) were in power. As madrassa (Islamic schools) students, having spent most of their lives memorizing the Koran to the exclusion of any other type of learning, they may be excused for not being aware of the Prophet’s advice on the size of the implement used to beat your wife. Women of the Book and Slave-Girls Muslim women are not allowed to marry outside the faith but Muslim men are allowed to do so, as long as they marry Women of the Book – Jews, Christians and members of a religious sect called Sabians. 5:5 This day the good things have been made lawful to you; the food of the People of the Book is lawful to you, and your food is lawful to them; and so are the believing women who are chaste, and the chaste women of those who were given the Book before you, provided you give them their dowries and take them in marriage, not in fornication or as mistresses. If any one denies the faith, his work shall be of no avail to him, and in the Hereafter he will rank with the losers. As you can appreciate, this last revelation expanded many-folds the available stock of virgins that a believing man could choose from. And if this still was not enough to satisfy your sexual appetite or discriminating taste, or you could not afford a believing woman you could always take wives from among your believing slave-girls. 4:25 Whoever of you cannot afford to marry a free, believing woman, let him choose from whatever your right hands possess (captives of war or slave-girls) of believing girls. Allah knows best your faith; you come one from the other. So marry them with their parents’ leave and give them their dowry honourably, as chaste women, neither committing adultery nor taking lovers … Allah again ends this last revelation with a reference to pain, in this verse what a slave-girl can expect if she cheats on her husband with another man. No pleasure without pain, but, in this instance, the pain must be proportional to the status of the sinner. 4:25 … If they are legally married and commit adultery, their punishment shall be half that of a free women. Such is the law for those of you who fear committing sin; but to abstain is better for you. Allah is All-Forgiving and Merciful! The why and the wherefore of all these rules about the women and girls a man can marry; it’s a question of lust and His Mercy. 4:26 Allah wants to explain to you [His laws] and to guide you along the paths of those who preceded you, and to be Merciful to you. Allah is All-Knowing, and Wise! 4:27 Allah also wants to be Merciful to you, but those who follow their lust want you to deviate greatly from the right course. The preceding revelation some must have found somewhat amusing, coming from a man with a penchant for beautiful girls as young as nine years old e.g. Aisha, with fourteen official wives, one of which was previously married to his adopted son Zayd but who he just had to have after seeing her almost naked, and an undisclosed number of concubines and slaves girls. 4:28 Allah wishes to lighten your burden; for man was created weak. --------------- [46] “With reference to this hadith, the majority of Islamic teachers say that it is sahih (proper, correct and valid) … Bukhari [famous Sunni Islamic scholar and collector of hadiths] places this hadith in al-Jami al-Shahih in chapter 86, hadith number 5193. But within the Bukhari narrative, he does not express the sentence ‘the husband becomes angry all night long’. While in other hadith narratives this sentence is considered the most important clause.” Rahima Online, Centre for Education on Islam and Women’s Rights Issues.
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