by Amir Taheri
The Western democracies have done little to help Muslim women in their struggle for freedom and equality. Leading Western ladies—including former Irish president Mary Robinson and Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the late French president François Mitterrand—have frequently visited Tehran and other Islamic capitals wearing the evil neo-hijab. The list of topics that the European Union has raised in its twenty-five-year “critical dialogue” with the Khomeinist regime has twenty-two items. not one is concerned with the Islamist gender apartheid. Some European and American leftists have even praised the fascist neo-hijab in the name of “cultural diversity” or “anti-imperialism.”
10
The Prophet and Women
The Khomeinists’ fear and hatred of women is not limited to a misreading of certain passages of the Koran. During the past fourteen centuries, an abundant anti-woman literature has been produced by a succession of mullahs and others who make their living by juggling with Koranic precepts. This literature is based on just two hadiths, both of questionable authenticity.
The first was related by one Abu-Bakarah, a wealthy businessman of Basrah in the seventh century, and is quoted by Bokhari in his Sahih. The hadith is brief: “Abu-Bakarah says: I heard the Prophet say that a people who bequeath their affairs to a woman shall not prosper!” These few words have been and are still being used as an excuse for claiming that women must be excluded from politics and government.
Let us examine the background of the hadith: When did the Prophet utter these words and in what context? According to Abu-Bakarah, the source of the hadith, the Prophet expressed the opinion when he heard that Princess Azarmidokht, a daughter of the Sassanid Emperor Khosrow Parviz, had taken the crown as empress of Persia. The hadith, if true, relates nothing but a comment made by the Prophet on an event in a foreign country that was suffering from internecine feuds and political turmoil at the time. Had the Prophet wanted to exclude women from politics and public life in general, he could have said so clearly and distinctly. And had God wanted the same, his divine wish would have been expressed in the Koran itself. The Koran treats of issues such as settling disputes over the ownership of camels, for example, but at no point does it disqualify women from holding public office.
Moreover, there is good reason for believing that Abu-Bakarah’s hadith is made of whole cloth. Abu-Bakarah came up with his hadith twenty-five years after the date at which he claimed to have heard it. Do you remember what you had for lunch yesterday? Abu-Bakarah, like most people in his time, was illiterate and did not keep a diary. He had been a slave freed by the Prophet and had become extremely prosperous under Islam. But at the time he came up with this hadith, his fortune was seriously threatened in Basrah. It was after the famous Battle of the Camel between the partisans of Ali, the fourth caliph, and an army of rebels led by Ayesha, the widow of the Prophet. Ayesha’s forces had suffered a serious defeat in which they lost thirteen thousand men and Basrah had been captured by Ali’s forces. It was an excellent time for Abu-Bakarah, who had originally sided with Ayesha, to protect his fortune by switching to the winning side. The hadith he presented became his insurance policy. His fortune remained intact.
The same Abu-Bakarah, however, had a history of untruthfulness. Under Caliph Omar, he had been sentenced to be whipped in public for giving false testimony.
The fact that Ayesha was a woman was in no way considered a reason for disqualifying her from leadership either of the army or of a future government. Even Ali himself never used gender as part of his propaganda against the Prophet’s rebellious widow. Ayesha’s army included many generals who had fought under the Prophet, men like Talhah and Zubayr. They had never heard the Prophet say that women should not assume leadership. Even such a highly respected man as Abu-Mussa Ash’ari, the governor of Kufah who had been appointed by Ali himself, refused to join the caliph in the civil war.
Abu-Bakarah’s hadith is clearly described as a falsehood by Tabari (838-923 A.D.), the greatest historian of Islam and a leading authority on the Muslim system. That Abu-Bakarah was a shameless fabricator can be established when one examines his subsequent inventions. After Ali’s assassination and the establishment of Muawyyah as caliph, the same Abu-Bakarah came up with another timely hadith: “I heard the Prophet say that his grandson Hassan would be a man of reconciliation!” This was, of course, a device to persuade Hassan, Ali’s eldest son, not to contest Muawyyah’s legitimacy as caliph. The reconciliation was quickly arranged and the Umayyid dynasty consolidated its position. Abu-Bakarah was rewarded with a number of highly profitable government contracts.
The hadith invented about women in 656 (year 36 of the Hegira) has been “strengthened” by another anti-woman hadith from Abu-Hureirah, the source of thousands of hadiths. Abu-Hureirah says: “I heard the Prophet say that if three things appear between a man who prays and the qiblah [the direction of Mecca], the prayers will be null: women, donkeys, and dogs.”
This insulting little piece of male chauvinism would not have merited any attention had it not formed the foundation for hundreds of supposedly learned treatises against women. Imam Muhammad Ghazzali, Ibn Jowzi, and many others have used this hadith of Abu-Hureirah as the basis for their anti-woman teachings. On that basis, they have pronounced women to be unclean, less than human, and even the incarnation of satanic energy on earth. The literature of Islam is full of lengthy papers on whether or not women have souls!
Once again, however, we are faced with a despicable fabrication by a disreputable character. A Yemeni slave called Abd al-Shams (meaning “slave of the sun”) was freed by the Prophet and given the nickname Abu-Hureirah (“father of Hureirah”) because he often had with him a kitten named Hureirah (“Little Silken One”). He disliked the name and often asked the Prophet to give him a new one. Although Abu-Hureirah was in the Prophet’s service as domestic help for less than three years, he later became the source of no fewer than 53,000 hadiths concerning Muhammad—an average of 49 each day! Could anyone take such a man seriously? Unfortunately, many Islamist scholars have done so for centuries and still do so today. Many of Khomeini’s positions on a range of social, economic, and ethical issues are based on hadiths made up by Abu-Hureirah. One Arab Islamist, Abdul-Mun’em Saleh al-Ala’i, has written a whole book in defense of Abu-Hureirah. In this book, published in 1983, al-Ala’i claims that “imperialists and Zionists” try to cast doubt on Abu-Hureirah’s veracity in order to weaken Islam! How could Muhammad equate women with donkeys and dogs?
In rebutting the basic anti-woman arguments of the fundamentalists, we do not intend to portray Islam as a religion that is especially generous towards women, or to claim that the inferior status of women in Islam is the result of misinterpretation. Islam certainly treats women as inferior, but not in ways that Islamists want us to believe. Those who refuse to acknowledge that one root of women’s inequality in Islamic societies could be traced to the Koran itself render no service to Muslims. On the other hand, those who blame Islam exclusively for the existing inequalities are also wrong. Women suffer from inequality in virtually all cultures and all religions of the world. Even the Western democracies with their undoubted achievements in the legal domain still treat women as less than equal. But we must oppose the misuse of Islam as a means of perpetuating and even deepening the injustice done to women.
Some Muslim writers have tried to exculpate Islam by blaming foreign influences for the deterioration in the status of women. Muhammad-Jamal Jayhun blames the Persians, arguing that Muslim women were treated as full equals until the Abbasid Caliphate was Persianized and adopted old Persian traditions. Another writer, Mrs. Aqlal Khalifah, blames the Ottomans, even claiming that Ottoman Turks introduced polygamy to Arab countries they conquered! She forgets explicit Koranic rules about taking up to four wives and a virtually limitless number of concubines. Yet another writer, Mrs. Ghada al-Kharsah, detects a Zoroastrian conspiracy and blames the Barmakid family for having destroyed the equal position of women in Islam.1
Th
e truth, however, is that Islam, like other monotheistic faiths, does not treat women as fully equal to men. But it is also true that most modern Islamists, including the Khomeinists, are even more anti-woman than Islam as initially presented by Muhammad and his immediate successors. For example, the rule of stoning women to death on a charge of adultery does not exist in the Koran or the sayings of the Prophet. It is one of the many pre-Islamic Arab rules that Muhammad cast aside. Under Muhammad’s rules, adultery is virtually impossible to prove.2 Even if proven, it is punishable only by the public caning of both partners. Modern-day Islamists, Khomeini among them, have revived the pre-Islamic Arab rule and claimed it as an integral part of Islam’s “divine immutable code.” The same is true of many other so-called “divine laws” of the Islamic Shariah that could be traced back to pre-Islamic times and were revived and canonized for reasons of expediency many centuries later. Over the past three decades, at least 120 women have been stoned to death in the Islamic Republic on a charge of adultery, often on the basis of hearsay. In other cases, women who have suffered rape have been sentenced to death or sent to prison for supposedly provoking men to manifest their basest instincts.
Wherever possible, the Khomeinist regime has driven women out of the public sphere. Women are no longer allowed to work as judges or serve in senior diplomatic and political positions. A generation ago, female music stars filled the Iranian artistic sky, with such divas as Delkash, Marzieh, Gugush, Mahasti, and Haideh achieving cult status. Today, not a single female singer is allowed to perform outside private homes. Film scripts are written, or censored, to minimize the role of women. Even foreign films are edited to exclude women as far as possible. Women’s sports have been ghettoized in a few facilities reserved for the “feeble ones” on the fringes of the cities, complete with high walls to make sure that women are neither seen nor heard.
It is not surprising, therefore, that women have been in the vanguard of the struggle for freedom and democracy in Iran. Tens of thousands of women have been sent to prison over the past three decades and at least 120 have been executed on a charge of “waging war on Allah.”
11
The Eternal Conspirator
If women have been vilified because of their gender, Jews have been the object of Islamist hatred and violence because of their faith. This hatred dates back to the days of Muhammad’s rule in Yathrib, the cosmopolitan city to which Muhammad fled when he was informed of a plot to kill him in Mecca. The date of that flight, the Hegira, marks the start of the Islamic lunar calendar. Muhammad’s choice to settle in Yathrib was not a spontaneous decision; it had been carefully prepared and negotiated over several months. One inducement was the prospect of protection by two friendly tribes who lived around the city. Another was the certainty that the Jews who formed the city’s largest community at the time would not resent the addition of a new religious community to their multi-faith hometown. Since Jews did not wish to convert others, they represented no threat to new converts to Islam.
Muhammad’s initial friendly ties to the Jews of Yathrib helped his enemies in Mecca spread rumors that portrayed him as a Judeophile who wished to build up his adopted hometown as a commercial rival to his native city, thus realizing one of the oldest dreams of Arabia’s Jews. Muhammad had made himself interesting to Jews by linking his religion to Abraham and not pretending that it was a new faith. The fact that almost 90 percent of the Koran is built around Jewish tales, with Jewish prophets in leading roles, must have further reassured the Jews of Yathrib. In the Koran, Moses is mentioned by name over ninety times, while Muhammad is named only once. Joseph is called the “Seal of the Prophets” (Khatam al-Anbia), a title that was later reserved for Muhammad himself. Muhammad’s initial admiration for the Jews is reflected in one of the most famous hadiths attributed to him: “Hearken what the People of Israel say, and do not question it!”
In time, however, relations between Muhammad and the Jews of Yathrib deteriorated as the new Prophet demanded that non-Muslims convert to his faith or pay a poll tax. Muhammad now asserted that Islam had superseded Judaism and Christianity, the older messages from Allah. Several Jewish tribes reached an accommodation with their former guest and new ruler, and managed to preserve their existence, albeit in reduced circumstances, for several more decades under Islam. Three tribes, however—the Banu-nuzair, the Banu-Qaynaq, and the Banu-Qurayzah—refused Muhammad’s offer and were put to the sword, their women taken as slaves and their property seized as war booty. In the case of the Banu-nazir, the quarrel seems to have started over money. The Prophet had come to ask for a loan to finance his next operation against the Meccans. Although they had provided similar loans in the past, this time the Jews refused. It seems that Muhammad somehow believed that the Jews wished to assassinate him, and he decided to strike first. Since then, Islamic culture has been steeped in anti-Jewish prejudice, although most Muslim rulers never allowed this to lead to the kind of atrocities that Jews experienced in Christian Europe. In the mind of the average Muslim, whether Sunni or Shiite, the Jew is the quintessential conspirator who, prompted by unspecified dark motives, tries to destroy the existing moral and political order.
Some Western writers believe that hostility towards Jews among Muslims is a byproduct of the conflict over Palestine. But even a cursory look at Islamic literature—in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish—would reveal the Jew as the menacing “other” to be watched and contained, and, when perceived to be dangerous, killed.
Sunni Muslims claim that a Jew named Abdallah Ibn Saba created the cult of Ali and thus the entire Shiite school soon after the death of the Prophet as part of a Jewish conspiracy to divide Muslims and prevent Islam from conquering the world. He is supposed to have asserted that since all prophets had a designated successor, it was not natural for Muhammad to die without naming his heir, and that Ali had been named as Muhammad’s successor (wassi) not only in the Koran but also in the Old Testament.1 At the time Ibn Saba is supposed to have conducted his mission, there was no official text of the Koran as yet. At any rate, the Sunni claim that Shiism was a conspiracy plotted by a Jew continues to this day.
Shiites repay the compliment by claiming that Ali was denied his right of immediate succession to Muhammad as a result of a Jewish conspiracy. According to this theory, the Jews approached Abu-Bakr, the man who was to succeed Muhammad as the first caliph, and persuaded him to infiltrate the entourage of the new prophet as their agent with a view to preventing Ali’s succession, thus “corrupting” Islam from the start. Here is one Shiite account of the supposed conspiracy: “Before he went into hiding, the twelfth imam said: On the advice of a Jew, he [Abu-Bakr] agreed to verbally recite the confessional formula of Islam, hoping that the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) would leave rulership and authority to him. But he [Abu-Bakr] had remained an infidel at heart.”2
Sunni and Shiite scholars do not say how it was that a single Jew, although cursed by Allah and destined for the deepest recesses of hell, succeeded in splitting the Muslims and dramatically changing the course of Islamic history.
Despite all this, anti-Semitism had never struck root in Iran. Although Jews on occasion were subjected to enforced conversion to Islam, they never suffered the pogroms that their counterparts experienced in Europe. The 1906 democratic constitution had recognized Jews as an Iranian community and reserved one seat for them in the national Consultative Assembly (parliament). There were no Jewish ghettos in Iranian cities, and despite deep-rooted Islamic prejudices, Jews were allowed to live a more or less normal existence. Occasional attempts at inciting anti-Jewish revolts seldom attracted popular support.
Initially, Iranians regarded the creation of Israel as a Jewish state with some ambivalence. They had no love for the Arabs, and they were glad that the British were driven out of another corner of the Middle East. Thus the Iranian government’s decision to extend de facto recognition to Israel and allow it to open a special office acting as an embassy in Tehran in 1949 sparked little opposition even from the m
ullahs. At the time, Iran’s leftist parties, including the Communist Tudeh (Masses) and the social-democratic Zahmatkeshan (Laborers), welcomed the creation of Israel as a victory for the global anticolonial movement. Leftist Iranians pointed to the fact that Israel had a socialist government and expressed admiration for the kibbutzim movement as a model for destroying the feudal landlords in Iran itself. Over the years, many figures of the Iranian left, including a few who later joined the Khomeinist revolution, visited the Jewish state at the invitation of the Israeli trade union movement, the Histadruth, and came back with glowing accounts of a new nation using religious faith in the service of socialism.3 Although some prominent mullahs did express displeasure at the creation of the Jewish state, the Iranian clergy did not adopt a systematically anti-Israeli position. Khomeini himself never made an anti-Israeli remark until the early 1960s. In the early 1950s, he had established close ties with the Fedayeen Islam (Self-Sacrificers for Islam), a Shiite terrorist group modeled on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Moslemeen). The group did make occasional noises about fighting “the Jews in Palestine” but never took any action in that direction.
In the early 1960s, hatred of Israel was injected into Iranian politics as part of the Cold War. In the 1950s, Iran had joined the Baghdad Pact, later to become the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), thus emerging as part of the cordon sanitaire that the Western powers, led by the United States, were building around a hostile USSR. Although the United States was not a full member of the alliance—which initially grouped together Britain, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan—it was clear that the pact was part of Washington’s strategy to contain Moscow. (Iraq withdrew from the alliance after the 1958 coup d’état that destroyed the pro-West monarchy in Baghdad.) By 1960, three key Arab states, Egypt, Syria and Iraq, had switched to the Soviet side and embarked on an aggressive campaign of propaganda and sabotage against pro-West regimes in Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Having gained momentum thanks to a military coup that ended the pro-British imamate in Yemen, the new Arab radical regimes used the slogan “liberating Palestine” as a war cry to rally Arab and other Muslim masses to their side.