| Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice The Complete Layman’s Guide to the Koran Chapter 25 Women and What It Means To Be Civilized The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilization. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between rationality and barbarity. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on one hand and the violation of these rights on the other. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings … Wafa Sultan, outspoken Syrian-American woman during a debate broadcast on Al-jazeera. Males are using women’s ignorance of the Koran against them. This has to change starting with women because it is believing women who transmit this misogynous male interpretation of the Koran from generation to generation. Asma Lamrabet, hematologist, author and Muslim activist during an interview on Radio-Canada (my translation). If women are being treated less then equitably in societies and households around the world which accept the Koran as God’s words and the Prophet as their guide, which of the two sexes is most responsible for the propagation of values that, according to Wafa Sultan, reduce women to the equivalent of a beast of burden? Perhaps, not surprisingly, it is women, with women like Wafa Sultan and Asma Lamrabet being the exception. The biggest obstacle for Muslim women to bettering their lot in life has not been men but other women. It is mostly opposition from their own sex that has made the struggle for equality with Muslim men so difficult. This opposition takes two forms. In the West it is Muslim women who act as apologists for Allah and His Messenger's low opinion of their sex. In societies dominated by the Koran, it is the mothers. It is mainly mothers who are tasked with the responsibility of ensuring that Muslim women remain inferior and are accepting of this inferior status that makes them completely dependent on the men who “own” them; men to whom the Koran grants dictatorial powers over every facet of their lives including their sex life. In traditional Islamic societies it is the mother who is responsible for the upbringing of sons until they reach the age of seven or so, and daughters until they have reached puberty. As explained by Bernard Lewis in his book What Went Wrong, published just after the attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York; “… it is these downtrodden, mainly illiterate mothers that are entrusted with the crucial early years of the upbringing of the other half.” The traditions of Islam that condemn believing women to a subservient mostly miserable existence – apart from the clerics and teachers who drill the content of the Koran into a child’s mind – are largely sustained and transmitted, from generation to generation, by other women. Not only are mothers largely responsible for Muslim men’s superior, condescending attitude towards women, they are also responsible for raising their daughters into accepting their inferior almost slave-like status as being the natural order of things. Like other neat little god-made constructs of Islam, it is to be admired if only for the ingenuous way Allah and His Messenger manoeuvre Muslim women into being an enemy of their sex. Women of Islam While the poor, “downtrodden, mainly illiterate mothers” found in societies where the Koran rules may be excused for their role in ensuring that their daughters will always be inferior to men, what is the excuse of Muslim women in the West who know better, or who should know better? Whether they do so out of conviction, or have been pressed into service by their father, husband or brother, it is women in the West in general, and in Canada in particular, who have become spokespersons for the voice and face of so-called moderate, modern Islam. A modern view that still maintains that the Koran is the literal Word of God, and that Allah’s and His Messenger’s questionable views on everything from women to murdering those who would leave the faith, are beyond reproach. The latest manifestation of this self-defeating phenomenon in Canada was during the so-called “cartoon protest.” It was mainly Muslim women, acting as spokespersons for the Canadian Islamic community, who appeared on television, with stern Muslim men looking on, and demanded that those who dared to publish mostly innocent caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad be prosecuted. It is women such as these who perpetuate the myth of the Prophet’s infallibility; conferring god-like immunity from criticism to God’s Messenger, something the Prophet would probably have considered madness, and typical of females. 17:93 … Say: “Glory be to my Lord; am I anything other than a human Messenger?” 22:49 Say: “O people (the Meccans), I am only a plain warner to you.” This newfound public role for Muslim women in the West is in sharp contrast to the other public affirmation of Koranic values; the now regular television broadcast. You will not find many women here. Only in extraordinary circumstances are women allowed to preach to the faithful, for example, the audience is exclusively female and a male cannot be found. Muslim women in the West who simply parrot Allah’s and His Messenger's male-centered, misogynous point of view, have abrogated their responsibility to elevate the debate in favour of equality for their sex. They are selling out their sisters in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Somalia … by promoting in a society that considers them equal, a prejudiced view of women that, if widely accepted, would reduce their status to that of their sisters living in obscurity in male-dominated societies where the Koran is supreme. It is also believing women who are largely responsible, not only for the intellectual but physical mutilation of their daughters. The intellectual mutilation begins with the force-feeding of the Koran and Allah's prejudiced opinion that males are superior and more valuable then females. This cerebral mutilation is done mainly to please their god, the physical mutilation out of fear of displeasing the men in their family, their clan or their tribe, who, like Allah and His Messenger are obsessed with virgins. It is mainly the mother’s responsibility to ensure that her daughters remain virgins until their father can arrange an advantageous marriage to a cousin or another relative. For a daughter to lose her virginity before marriage is to bring disgrace and dishonour to the entire family. The fear of disgracing their families drives many mothers in traditional Islamic societies, mainly in Africa where the practice originated, to have their daughters undergo a procedure called female circumcision. Unlike male circumcision, female circumcision is much more brutal and is not done out of mostly hygienic considerations as it is for males. As explained by Ayaan Hirsi Ali whose grand-mother arranged for her to suffer the procedure. …Islam demands that your enter marriage as a virgin. The virgin dogma is safeguarded by locking girls up in their homes and sewing their outer labia together. Female circumcision serves two purposes; the clitoris is removed in order to reduce the woman’s sexuality, and the labia are sewn up in order to guarantee her virginity. Hirsi Ali, The Caged Virgin, p.76. Women of Sumer The Epic of Gilgamesh pre-dates the Hebrew Bible by at least two-thousand years; the Koran by an additional one-thousand-five-hundred years – more or less. It was carved into clay tablets at the dawn of Western written history in ancient Sumeria (Sumer). In it you will find a story about the great flood and the Garden of Eden. How would Islam, which contains variations of the same stories as can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh and later in the Bible reconcile the two? The Koran contains references to twenty five prophets who came before the Prophet Muhammad, and it is clear that there are many more. In one Tradition of the Prophet, more than 124,000 prophets were sent by Allah before He got fed up with His Message being badly transmitted or misunderstood and decided to send His last and greatest Messenger, the Prophet Muhammad Believers would maintain that the author of Gilgamesh was probably a prophet who was misquoted or who misunderstood Allah’s Message. For instance, that the author of the epic could possibly write that it was a woman who gave birth to humanity, not a man. Or that it is a woman, as described in the following excerpt (from a translation by Stephanie Dalley), from that heroic poem, to whom we are indebted for the wisdom with which she endowed man and which allowed civilization to blossom. Shambat loosened her undergarments, opened her legs and he took in her attractions. She did not pull away. She took wind of him. Spread open her garments and he lay upon her. She did for him, the primitive man, as women do. His love-making he lavished upon her. For six days and seven nights Enkidu was aroused and poured himself into Shambat. When he was sated with her charms, He set his face towards the open country of his cattle. The gazelles saw Enkidu and scattered. The cattle of open country kept away from his body. For Enkidu had become smooth; his body was too clean. His legs, which used to keep pace with his cattle, were at a standstill. Enkidu had been diminished, he could not run as before. Yet he had acquired judgement, had become wiser. For the Sumerians it was the goddess Aruru, the mother goddess, who created Enkidu from clay. The Bible and the Koran would give that role to a man. For the Sumerians, women were a civilizing influence. For the illiterate desert tribesmen who would usurp her role in the creation accounts, she became the seductress, the harlot who caused mankind to be expelled from Paradise. For the men and women of Sumer, their cities were Paradise. For the people of Sumer it was also women as lifegivers, homemakers and lovers who made this sedentary, civilized lifestyle possible, desirable and enjoyable. For the tribesmen of the desert, trapped and fighting for survival beneath a monotonous, unchanging blue sky and a blaring scorching sun on a sea of dust and sand, the cities of Sumer would also have been seen as Paradise. Allah’s description of Paradise, as an oasis with buildings and women as pleasure providers, almost fits the description of Sumerian cities and their female inhabitants, with the exception that in Sumer, women were not second-class citizens. Why would desert tribesmen, who would adapt, if not pervert many of the events described in the Epic of Gilgamesh, including the story of the meeting between Shambat and Enkidu blame women for mankind’s exile from Paradise? The seduction of Enkidu by Shambat was seen as a good thing by the people of Sumer; a wild, roving man is civilized by being intimate with a woman. For the people of Sumer being “civilized” meant acquiring wisdom; becoming capable of exercising judgement, of assessing situations or circumstances shrewdly and logically and drawing your own reasonable conclusions. For the illiterate, fatalistic tribesmen of the deserts of the Middle East whose very existence was constantly being tested by elements over which they had no control, which they believed was God’s way of trying their faith, this had to appear like blasphemy. Paradise was to be denied mankind because a woman was foolish enough to endow a man with god-like qualities. For their jealous, vengeful god this had to be unacceptable. The Koran with its meticulous instructions as to what a believer may or may not do; what a believer may think or say, was perhaps the primitive tribesman’s way of using the invention of writing to establish eternal, unchanging limits on mankind’s imagination and freewill in the hope of convincing God to let men back into Sumer, back into Paradise. Allah, in the following verses from chapter 96, The Clot which explain, among other things, how the Prophet Muhammad was first told to read the Koran, would seem to support the primitive tribesman’s understanding of why God taught mankind how to write: 96:1 Read, in the Name of your Lord, Who created; 96:2 He created man from a clot. 96:3 Read by your Most Generous Lord, 96:4 Who taught by the pen. It was the Sumerians who more than five millennia ago, first carved the written word on clay tablets. According to Thomas Cahill, the period before the invention of writing saw an “explosion of technological creativity on a scale that would not be matched until the nineteenth and twentieth century of our era.” Writing may have been a result of mankind’s need to record this leap which memory could no longer be counted on to chronicle or manage. Civilization could not progress any further without the means of recording civilization’s accomplishments for future generations to build on. The society that invented writing worshipped many goddesses. The greatest goddess of all, Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, was worshipped by the people of the city of Uruk, perhaps the earliest settlement to deserve the name of city. It was in this ancient Mesopotamian city, on the shore of the Euphrates River that the first words written five thousand years ago on clay tablets were found. If it was not a woman who imagined those first words, then it was her civilizing influence which allowed the written word to be imagined in the first place. Civilization in the Balance Women have been deciding the fate of civilizations since the dawn of written history and probably long before that, and they will continue to be largely responsible for the fate of humanity. The women of Sumer rocked the cradle of Western Civilization and nurtured it through its formative years until the Greeks and Romans of antiquity came along and put into words and deeds what it meant to be western and civilized. For the Greeks of antiquity, in particular, to be civilized meant subscribing to democratic ideals; appreciating that liberty is humanity’s most precious possession; accepting that ethics and morality can come from within and that the search for the truth is a never ending quest and a noble calling in and of itself. Following in the footsteps of the Greeks and Romans came the philosophical movement of the 18th century, the Enlightenment, that emphasized the use of reason to question accepted doctrines and traditions; and before that, the Renaissance which marked the end of the Catholic Church’s dominance in Europe allowing for a flowering of the arts and sciences. Today, competing with these ideas of what it means to be civilized is a child-like view of the world that begins and ends with the Koran. The Koran is not so much a philosophy as a set of rules, formulated by a child-like-mind; rules which embody a child’s certainty in having absolute knowledge of the world around him and a child’s intolerance of others who won’t play the game by his rules. To accept this child-like-view of the world is to deny Western Civilization and its accomplishments. This child-like view of the universe saw writing as a way of putting a limit on what people can imagine. This child-like view now competes with the grown-up view of the people of Sumer who invented writing as a means to expand the capabilities of the human mind not to limit them; who invented writing so as to allow future generations to build on, to go beyond, to question what their ancestors had imagined. The women of Sumer gave birth to Western Civilization. The women of Islam, who are a child’s first acquaintance with the Koran and the narrow limits it places on the imagination, may bring it to an end. The Koran, taken literally kills the imagination allowing insanity to settle in. Will these mainly “illiterate and downtrodden mothers” that are entrusted with the crucial early years of a child’s upbringing, invisible to the outside world courtesy of a prudish, insecure, misogynous God, and His equally disadvantaged Messenger, even be aware of what they have done.
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