Author: Dr. Younus Shaikh
Publication:
Date:
URL:
Dr. Younus Shaikh, Pakistani Rationalist
and founder President of the Rationalist organization of Pakistan,
"The Enlightenment", who was once sentenced to death for blasphemy
in Pakistan, writes on Islam and Women.
I
Before the advent of Islam,
the pagan Arab women generally enjoyed a respectable status in society;
many of them including Khadija - the first wife of the prophet of
Islam, had the right to engage in business and choose or dismiss
their husbands in a matrilineal fashion; they took part in most activities
of war and peace including public worship. In female oriented Arab
paganism, goddesses had special status; in Mecca, the female goddess
Al-Uzza, in Taif the goddess Al-Lat and in Medina the goddess Manat
were the most popular deities, and their statues were most revered
while the statue of the stern Allah was almost neglected.
Arab pagan poetry was mostly concerned
with the beauty and grace of their women, and the glory of their
tribal values in peace and war. And it was only in one predator tribe
of Mecca that the evil custom of burying alive of the daughters prevailed.
It was highly unusual for a man of pre-Islamic Arab society to have
more than one wife in his house; and it is quite certain that polygamy
was introduced and encouraged by the prophet after the revelation
of Islam. Women were to produce as many Muslims as possible. This
ultimately resulted in the degradation in the status of the married
woman in the Islamic society. Whereas the pre-Islamic Arab custom
allowed many looser forms of marriage on the matrilineal and matri-local
tradition that gave the woman freedom and liberty as full human being,
however the artificial rules of Islamic nikah reduced marriage to
mere sexual and social slavery.
The prophet of Islam, before prophethood,
opposed the burying alive of the newborn daughters; he was eager
to work for a woman and gladly married a divorced woman. The early
Islam continued with most of the pre-Islam tribal traditions; there
were no hijabs or veils for women of Madina; and at a later date
only the nine wives of prophets were restricted in their social intercourse
as their home was constantly full of visitors. However the prophet's
women sex-slaves were not restricted in any such manners.
Indeed, the semi-transparent half-face-
veil (hijab) was actually a very old custom originating in the Assyrian
times, a status symbol and a mark of social distinction for the free
women. The pre-Islamic pagan Arab woman of the cities often wore
the fashionable semi-transparent half-face veil but the tribal women
never did.
Later, Islam added measures for
"the preservation of modesty for women" -like casting down their
eyes in public, concealing their breasts and jewellery and the likes.
However, these restrictions were later extended by the followers
of the prophet far beyond his original intentions as expressed in
Koran, and remained more or less a permanent fixture of Muslim life
thereafter.
Later on, however, the insecurity
of early Islam gradually added to the exclusion of women, and 100
years later, by the reign of the Abbasid Caliph Haroon ur Rashid,
women became merely sexual toys and breeding machines; and as married
women they were merely maid servants- mere man's social appendages.
Moreover, as female sex-slaves, women were freely bought and sold
in open markets of all Islamic countries, and loaned, rented or bestowed
as gifts to friends. The prophet himself bestowed women sex-slaves
to his favourites. There was no limit to the number of slaves one
could own; one of the companions of prophet Hazrat Zubair Ibn ul
Arvan, for example, had 1000 men-slaves and 1000 women sex-slaves.
Islam took the woman as the land tilled by the man where he spilled
his seeds.
The prophet himself took part or
guided nearly 100 wars or raids or attacks for plunder. After him,
his followers continued the offence. The fierce Islamic tribal Bedouins
with centuries long experience of ruthless and cruel tribal warfare
proved to be the worthwhile shock troops of Islam. After Iraq, Syria
fell to the Islamic Empire in 634 CE. Despite surrenders, great massacres
took place at many places; thousands of men were slaughtered and
women and children sold into slavery; monasteries were ransacked,
monks and villagers were slain and nuns were raped. After the conquest
of Egypt, many of its towns were put to sword and their entire population
wiped out. Great massacres also occurred in Cyprus and North Africa.
The Roman province of Iraq, the Syrian province of Iran, and the
conquered Iran brought hundreds of thousands of men-slaves, women
sex-slaves, and the vast fertile lands of these once mighty and civilized
countries where the women had been held in high respect e.g. the
Manichaecian Iraq, the Pharonic Egypt and North African Civilizations.
As in Egypt and Iran, wherever the
conquering Islamic Bedouins armies went, they destroyed the local
civilization's cultures, imposed their Islamic tribal medievalism
recklessly murdering men and degrading women to perpetual sexual
slavery. In short, the Islamic tribal Bedouins and barbarians did
the same to the surrounding higher civilizations what the Roman barbarians
did to the highly civilized ancient Greeks. Meanwhile the Islamic
Bedouins continued to raid and abduct the European women for Islamic
slave markets during all these Islamic centuries. The conquest of
Syria forced the conversion of thousands of Christian priests to
Islam, who changed their religion but not their profession: they became
the stern anti-feminine Islamic mullahs and not only continued their
religious magic and rituals but also continued the essentially Christian
medievalism under Islam.
In short, as a result of these conquests,
destructions and imposition of Islamic tribal medievalism, societies
under the Islamic Empire went further than any other in their total
exclusion of women from political power and social influence. Islamic
legislation went far beyond anything the prophet had originally dreamed
of in his tribal religiosity in cheating women of their rightful
place in society and in matters of inheritance. Where originally
the Koran gave women the right of inheritance, the Islamic mullah
invented the legalized institution of Waqf- the religious foundation,
to exclude the daughters and their descendents from inheritance.
Though the Koran does give the right of inheritance to women, she
continued to be a minor; usually uneducated needing a guardian in
father, husband or the son. Indeed, the status of women in Islam
is theoretically exalted but utterly deplorable in practice.
Multiplying number of harems (residing
place for the female sex-slaves), finally institutionalised under
Caliph Al-Walid II, emphasized the inevitable degradation of womanhood
under Islam. Haroon ur Rashid, the Islamic Caliph (ruler) had 2000
female sex-slaves, Caliph Mutwakkal had 4000 female sex-slaves; and
every mullah, official or soldier of Islamic state had some men-slaves
and women sex-slaves belonging to the conquered civilization nations.
Not being allowed to learn, experience or think for herself, it is
no wonder that there are hardly very few outstanding women in 1600
years of Islamic history, and those who by chance or by the force
of the ancient pre-Islamic customs came into light or in the corridors
of power were sooner or later eliminated on the orders of some pious
and religious Islamic mullah.. Indeed, Islam's violent anti-feminism
have been as nefarious as Christianity's burning of hundreds of thousands
European women as witches in 15th, 16th and 17th century. The female
hating instruments of the Islamic Empire, the mullahs and the Caliphs,
continued to promote degradation of women under the formal and sordid
Islamic legal code of Shariah, the final seal on the complete subjection
of the female element.. The modern history of Islam is merely the
continuation of the Islamic tribal medievalism, only the technology
, phraseology and the façade is modern.
II
"Indian sub-continent suffered the
humiliation and destruction under Islam, as did Africa. The Islamic
General Mohammad Bin Qasim decimated great Buddhist and Hindu civilizations.
Acting on the orders of a representative of the Islamic Caliph, Governor
Hijaj Bin Yousaf (who was a deadly enemy of the Hazrat Ali and Hazrat
Hussein's family-some of whom have taken refuge under the Buddhist
monarch Raja Dahir in Sindh), Mohammad Bin Qasim conquered the kingdom
in 712 CE. His Islamic plunderers and looters demolished temples,
shattered sculptures, plundered palaces and killed thousands. It
took his Islamic army three days to slaughter the inhabitants of
Debal, their women and children were taken into slavery. Later on
he pardoned many prisoners and tried to establish a just rule of
law which enraged the very Islamic and murderous Governor Hijaj Bin
Yousaf; therefore Qasim again reverted to the Islamic barbarity and
massacred between 6-16 thousands in Brahiminabad, their women and
children were sent to Arab Islamic slave markets.
This was the beginning of the destruction
of the classical ancient Indian civilization, and start of the medieval
age of Islamic darkness in India. The 11th century witnessed another
Islamic murderer and plunderer, Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi an agent of
Islamic Caliph, who utterly ruined the great Indian civilization
and looted and plundered most of its wealth. Fifty thousand Hindus
were massacred in just one of his attacks at Somnath; he invaded
India more than 17 times. Thousands of Hindu men and women were sent
to the Islamic Afghani slave markets. The highly cultured and civilized
daughters of the noble Hindu families were sold to the illiterate,
un-cultured and barbaric Afghanis for equivalent of just one Frank
(Pound/Dollar) each. After every Afghani Muslim had four wives each,
there were lots of surplus women left; to that the evil Islamic mullahs
responded with an ingenious translation of Koranic verses proving
that Allah allowed each Muslim to marry 18 women at a time along
with an unlimited number of women as concubines. Soon the new military
instruments of the Islamic Caliph, the Turks and the Moguls followed,
decimated captured Delhi and turned whole of India into a grand open-air
slave camp. Sultan Firoze Shah Tughlaq- an Islamic Turk ruler had
100,000 men-slaves and thousands of female sex-slaves in his harem;
the pious Islamic Mongol (Mogul) Emperor Shahjehan had 15,000 female
sex-slaves and concubines for his personal harem. Indeed, the Islamic
Turk invaders and rulers did the same in India as they did in Armenia-the
whole races of peoples were exterminated. (However, credit must be
given here to the agnostic and secular-minded, humanist Mogul Emperor
Akbar the Great who refused the title of "the King of Muslims" and
preferred to be called "the shadow of God"- for his God, he declared
(in accordance with the mind and language of his age), is the beneficial
deity and protector of all-Hindus, Muslims and other races of humans and
creatures alike. He gave up his faith in Islam and tried his genius in
creating a pluralistic religion comprising traditions of all the
prevalent religions and ideologies of India. He even invited the
Christian Jesuits priests from Goa to his ideology-discussion-palace but
could not swallow their childish Jesus-son-of-God myth).
The medieval Islamic Empire of the
Turkish Osmania Caliphate disappeared after Axis defeat in the World
War I and with the rise of the Turkish secular hero Mustafa Kemal
Pasha. However, it soon metamorphosed into the modern Saudi Islamic
spiritual Empire. It is noteworthy that while the very Christian
Holy Roman British Empire of the West required standing armies to
control the bodies of men in all its colonies, the theocratic Saudi
Islamic spiritual Empire of the East depended on the standing army
of clerics-Mullahs and Imams-stationed in mosques to control the
minds of men-the social, cultural spiritual and psychological control.
It is true that Islam dismantled the old Arab tribal loyalties and
some of its taboos and traditions; however it created a new tribe
in the name of Islam with prophet himself as its chieftain and his
family and tribe-Hashmis and Quresh acquiring an elevated and sacred
status- a replacement of old medieval tribe with a new theocratic
tribe. However, it essentially continued many of the ancient pagan
rituals of worship as well as many of its old taboos and traditions.
The tribal blood loyalties were replaced with the new tribal religious
loyalties. At intellectual level Islam is merely the continuation
of the medieval Jahiliya (Ignorance) in the holy garb of Islam- the
Islamic Jahilia (the Islamic Medieval Ignorance). Modern Islam is,
indeed, merely a continuation of that medieval tribal ignorance and
mental backwardness.
Since the advent of the Saudi oil,
petrodollars started to support the Islamic extremist movements all
over the world and continue to do so. The Saudi petrodollars have
created thousands of Islamic centres for social and political control
and propaganda- the mosques-all over the world; 1000 mosques were
built in the USA only in just last few years. Islamic brainwashing
and political propaganda continues in these mosques and madrassas-the
religious schools, as well as through the Islamic newspapers, magazines,
radios and televisions. All kind of extremist Islamic terrorism and
fundamentalism emanates and flows from the " Kernel of Evil- the
Epicentre of the ugly Islamism-the Saudis". For Allah of the Saudis
makes submission to Islam obligatory for all humans. Those who refuse
their submission to Allah or differ from the Saudi version of Islam
are called the Satan's party, and must be eliminated by Saudis or
their paid and brainwashed zombies-the Muslims- called the Allah's
party. Saudi Arabia is in fact the worst example of Islamic medievalism,
and mental, social backwardness. Slavery was legal in Saudi until
1960s when it was officially abolished on the personal request of
the non-Muslim US President J F Kennedy! However, it continues in new
names: the foreign female domestic servants-the private property of the
Islamic Bedouin barbarians. Saudi petrodollars continue to support the
extremist and fundamentalist mullahs, and continue to lure the Islamic
states into the barbarity of the Islamic medieval Shariah laws, and the
Saudis continue to spread Islamic mullah terrorism and Islamic theocratic
totalitarianism all over the world."
Iran basically an Islamic spiritual
colony, is the godfather of the Shiite Islamic terrorism,( Saudi
Sunnis are an Islamic sect like the Christian Catholics while Shiites
are like the Protestant Christians). This Allah's government in Iran
is the most evil religious state today. Torture, murder and Islamic
absolutism- an Islamic version of Hitler's Nazism, Stalin's Communism
and Mussolini's Fascism combined. There were 5,195 political and
religious executions only in 1983 alone! Few years ago a bill was
presented in Iranian Parliament asking that in according with the
tradition of Islamic prophet, marriage should be allowed with 9 years
old girl child! Human rights are definitely not allowed to exist
in the Islamic Iran, where according to the English language Radio Iran,
the Holy Spirit of imam Khomeni hovers over Iran all the times. Women
have been hanged on suspicion of sexual crimes. Even proved virgins have
been sent to gallows, however, they are hanged only after being raped,
as Iranian Islam does not allow hanging of virgins. Iran had used its
oil money in the interest of Islamic revolutions all over the world, and
continues to do so.
Algeria, known for its Islamic civil
war continues with its Islamic horrors. Islamic absolutism and totalitarianism
is imposed with guns and slaughters in the interest of religion of
Islam. Men are usually killed for their religio-political crimes
while women are killed just for the crime of being a woman in an
Islamic country. Thousands were islamically raped and more than 500
were killed only in 1993. Women have been killed for not wearing
hijab (veil) or refusing to do so when imposed, for refusing to engage
in Iranian-style temporary marriage, for being married to foreign
men, and for working and living alone. The victims have been as young
as 9 years and as old as 69 years. Women are often raped and tortured
before being slaughtered. Thousands find themselves imprisoned in
Islamic camps for no legitimate reasons. It is worth mentioning that
women had a respectable status in society before the conquest of
Algeria by Islam.
Egyptians, heir to the great Pharonic
and Alexandrian civilizations continue to suffer the chronic evil
of Islam. Known for the miseries of hijab and female genital mutilation,
Egypt is also a centre of child prostitution for the wealthy Saudi
Islamic Bedouins. In Egypt, four out of five women are forced to
wear some kind of hijab. Female genital mutilation is very common;
up to 73% in Cairo and 95% in rural areas. In 1995 a shaikh (religious
dignity) of Al-Azhar University Cairo issued a fatwa (the religious
decree or bill), which reportedly announced the procedure pf Female
Genital Mutilation as "laudable practice that does honour to women";
and stating that it was, a religious duty as important as praying
to Allah.
Sudan had a long history of Islamic
conquest and repression. Islamic totalitarianism and barbarity continues
to this day. Recently, Sudan was brutalized by the Saudi-backed Gen.Numeri's
Islamic fascism. In 1992 a religious decree-fatwa-was issued that
gave justification to the military onslaught against the non-Muslims.
Islamic barbarism and genocide continues in Darfur to this day.
Indonesian Islamic army mass-murdered
200,000 East Timurian non-Muslims before East Timur got its independent.
The country is known for its extreme religiosity, corruption, ethno-religious
problems and Islamic extremism.
Pakistan, an experimental laboratory
of Islam, had turned into a horror. Notwithstanding the hundreds
of thousands of rapes, abductions and murders under the watchful
eyes of the very Christian administration of the Holy Roman British
Empire at the time of religious division of the Indian sub-continent
in 1947 by the Christian British Empire, when half a million people
were forced to migrate, Pakistan has never made any certain move
towards civilization. Pakistan is a centre of Islamic fundamentalism,
extremism and terrorism. Pakistan's very Islamic army invaded her
province of East Pakistan in 1971, killing hundreds of thousands
of Bengali Muslims and non-Muslims and raping half a million women
ranging 9-69 years in age, in its attempt to create a half breed
Pak-Bengal race which would be loyal to Islam and Pakistan. In 1974
Pakistan army invaded its province of Baluchistan resulting in similar
calamities. In 1980 Islamist General Zia ul Haq introduced further
islamization under the Saudi pressure for introduction of the medieval
and tribal Islamic Shariah.. Along with the compulsory public prayers,
there were brutal Islamic laws for the very natural sexual acts and for
the presumed blasphemy: the repressive Hudood Ordinance and the infamous
Blasphemy laws. Thousands of innocent women continue to suffer under
these and other Islamic fascist laws for mere allegations. Raped women
had been sent to gallows for the crime of being raped. (Islamic Shariah
is the only system of law, which punishes the victims: Fatemollah).
Pakistani state has proved to be a willing and sinister instrument of
the evil Islamic mullah fascism and terrorism. Pakistan created the
hated Afghan Taliban and many other such organizations in Afghanistan.
Similar organizations continue to flourish in Pakistan and try to create
a totalitarian and fascist Islamic state. Despite all tall claims of
fight against Islamic terrorism, the evil continues to flourish.
Pakistan is undoubtedly a major source of supply for the Iraqi terrorism.
Illicit drug trade continues with the blessings of the Islamic mullahs
and the ISI (the Islamic Military Intelligence). There are Islamic
prostitution centres in every Islamic city of the Islamic Pakistan
where abducted and non-Muslim women are forced to suffer. The secular,
liberal and rationalist intellectuals continue to suffer in Pakistan
like the victims of the infamous Christian inquisition of medieval
Europe. While the Christian churches burnt the heretics, Islamic
mullahs get them indicted for Blasphemy.
Eternal vigilance is the price of
civilization.
III
While fundamentalism, superstition,
ignorance, lack of human rights, female genital mutilations, forced
seclusion of women within their houses and in their hijabs; religious
extremism, fundamentalism, suicide-bombing and Islamic terrorism
continue to be the hallmarks of the Muslim states and societies under
the influence of the Saudi Islamic Spiritual Empire of the petro-dollars
or Iranian Shiite area of influence under its Shiite oil-money; it
is high time for the civilized world to wake-up from the stupor of
multi-culturism and blind tolerance of the organized intolerance;
for the disease is spilling herein already. Many of the acts of the
Islamic states and societies, organizations and individuals are barbaric
and medieval; the beheading of the innocent hostages, death penalties
and murders for religious reasons; chopping of hands and feet; stoning
to death of women for getting raped or on accusation of natural sexual
intercourse; honor-killing on mere suspicion, suicide-bombings and
acts of terrorism; these are indicative of a deep-seated disease.
Murder on the name of a merciful Allah is mere hypocrisy.
The rise of Saudi-sponsored extremist
Islam is a danger to civilization everywhere. All extremist Muslims
are potential terrorists and Allah's soldiers. There should be no
tolerance for this religiously organized intolerance against liberalism,
human rights and women's equal status and other manifestations of
our civilization. Muslims in civilized and democratic societies should
be required to take the oath of loyalty to the state and democracy.
Political right to vote to those whose political loyalties are located
in some far off desert is not only harmful but also suicidal for
the state as well as for the very ideology and system of democracy.
Political right to vote for those who wish to destroy the very system
of democracy? Think again, Ladies and gentlemen.
There is no place for optimism for
a liberal Islam. Nearly all Islamic states and states have failed
to appreciate the basic human rights of their people, their women
and their minorities. Saudis and Emirates are the worst offenders;
and are the financial godfathers of fundamentalism, extremism and
Islamic backwardness everywhere.. Nearly every Islamic country is
dangerous not only for itself but for the world as a whole. Pakistan,
for example, after supplying Iran and with Korea with nuke-secrets
continues to offer the dangerous technology; Vietnam and Brazil are
the new customers. The nuke-terrorist Dr. Abdul Qadir Kahn is safe,
well protected and facilitated by the State of Pakistan, with full
impunity, of course.
You civilized people! Yesterday
you refused to acknowledge the dangers inherent in the rise of the
Christian Nazi and Communist ideologies. Yesterday you supported
Islamic Taliban even when they trampled rights of their women under
their feet. Your refusal to confront militant Islam today may cost
us more dearly than our individual lives-our cherished achievement
-our civilization. Beliefs have consequences-the centrality of Islam
to mental, social, intellectual and cultural backwardness; organized
offences against women and minorities; fundamentalism, extremism
and modern terrorism are impossible to deny. "Religions of peace
and tolerance" are mere empty words.
Islam is an organized crime against
humanity!
