Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World's Fastest-Growing Faith

by Robert Spencer

  What the Quranic decrees amount to, taken together, is a discouragement of polygamy unless necessity for it exists. It is also evident that the general rule in Islam is monogamy and not polygamy. However, permission to practice limited polygamy is only consistent with Islam's realistic view of the nature of man and women and of the various social needs, problems, and cultural variations.26

  The Muslim scholar Seyyed Hossein Nast rails over "the prejudice of Christianity" against polygamy, a prejudice that has invaded some overly modernized segments of the House of Islam. "Some," he says, "have even gone so far as to call it immoral and prefer prostitution to a social pattern which minimizes all promiscuous relations to the extent possible."27 But it is inaccurate, at best, to suggest that polygamy's critics prefer prostitution or promiscuity, and to claim that polygamy minimizes these within Islam.

  Nasr begins from the notion, almost universally accepted these days, of human nature as a steam boiler: when the pressure mounts, let off some steam. If you're filled with anger, punch a wall or at least a pillow. If you're filled with sexual desire, let it out somehow, for holding it in will injure you. So Islam is more realistic and humane than Christianity because it provides for this letting off of sexual steam in a safe and secure way-polygamy-as opposed to one that's fraught with physical dangers and harm to the women involved-prostitution.

  In fact, this steam-boiler picture of the soul is a relatively modern idea, popularized by secular psychology. Sages through the centuries, Christian and non-Christian, took the opposite view, the one well summed up by James, the brother of the Lord and first bishop of Jerusalem: "Resist the devil and he will flee from you" (James 4:7). Accordingly, in the Catholic tradition, St. Thomas Aquinas taught that habits are eradicated not by being fed, but by being starved.

  Not until modern times was this wisdom rejected on a large scale anywhere. If it is false, then we would expect to see Nast's statement borne out in Muslim countries where polygamy is common: there should be no prostitution or promiscuity there. Yet recently Muslim Bangladesh was forced to legalize prostitution, causing "hundreds of sex workers" to dance in the streets of the capital, Dhaka.28 Where did these hundreds of prostitutes come from in a Muslim land? Isn't it likely that their counterparts can be found elsewhere in the Muslim world (despite legal restrictions) and that Islam's "realistic" approach to sex doesn't render these prostitutes bereft of clients, but all the more popular?

  Even if a Muslim man has only one wife (which is the most common arrangement in most Islamic societies), his Qur'an-based permission to take another wife without her consent (as well as to beat her) makes Islamic marriage a fundamentally different institution from marriage in the West. Whether or not they use it, Muslim men have divine permission to commit acts that in a Western context would be considered infidelity.

  In Philip Mansel's elegantly written history of Constantinople after the Muslim conquest, he offers a moving case in point involving the daughter of the sultan of the Ottoman Empire:

  Yet even these most powerful and privileged of Ottoman might be tortured by jealousy. Adile Sultan, daughter of the great nineteenth-century reformer Mahmud II, married an army officer, Mehmed Ali Pasha. They were in love. One day at the fashionable meeting-place in the Golden Horn called the Sweet Waters of Europe, she attracted his attention. Since she was thickly veiled, he did not know who she was. He dropped a scented handkerchief at her feet. That night the Pasha found the handkerchief on the pillow beside his sleeping wife.

  One day, according to Mansel, Adile Sultan traveled to a mosque far from her home. Taking advantage of the celebrated Oriental hospitality, she stopped for a rest at a mansion along the way. While enjoying coffee and sherbet set out for her, she was astonished to find that her hostess, too, was the wife of Mehmed Ali Pasha! She said nothing, however, and returned home-where, Mansel says, "thereafter she lived in seclusion, writing poems of increasing sadness. When she died in 1898, she was buried beside her husband. They never referred to his infidelity.""

  This is the story of just one woman, but it doesn't take much knowledge of human nature to recognize that it's a story that is still being repeated the world over. The Qur'an commands a man not to take more than one wife unless he can treat all of them equally, but Muslims have generally understood this to mean equal economic support. An equal distribution of affection wouldn't be possible-even the Prophet favored Aisha over all his other wives. Bukhari reports that one follower of the Prophet was bold enough to ask him, "Who is the most beloved person to you?" Muhammad answered: "Aisha." 30

  What might his other wives have thought?

  Inequality of affection can make a polygamous marriage a prison of sorrow. The Prophet's harem wasn't immune. Aisha is forthright about tensions among Muhammad's wives; she is one of the main sources for our knowledge of the celebrated incident, recounted in the last chapter, of Muhammad's dalliance with Mary the Copt on the day reserved for Hafsa. She also reports that "Zainab was competing with me (in her beauty and the Prophet's love).""

  So pervasive-naturally-was jealousy in the Prophet's polygamous household that Aisha admits to having been jealous of a dead woman: Khadija, the Prophet's first wife and the only one who had him exclusively to herself.

  Narrated Aishah: I did not feel jealous of any of the wives of the Prophet as much as I did of Khadija (although) she died before he married me; for often I heard him mentioning her; and Allah had told him to give her the good tidings that she would have a palace of Qasab (i.e., pipes of precious stones and pearls in Paradise), and whenever he slaughtered a sheep, he would send to her women-friends a good share of it.32

  Whenever women in the House of Islam have dared to speak about polygamy, the story is the same. Halide Elib, a proto-feminist in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, said flatly that polygamy "was a curse, a poison which our unhappy household could not get out of its system.... The constant tension in our home made every simple ceremony seem like physical pain, and the consequences hardly ever left me. The rooms of the wives were opposite each other and my father visited them in turn."33

  A twenty-first-century American Muslim wife was no less aware of the devastating effects of polygamy. April Ray El-Hage, wife of convicted al-Qaeda terrorist Wadih El-Hage, successfully resisted her husband's attempts to take a second wife. She couldn't, of course, deny that he had a right to marry again; to do so would have been, by her own account, "un-Islamic." But here again, her heart was greater than her religion. With her God-given sense that polygamy was wrong, she fought back the only way she could: "I made his life hell.... I was becoming a real b ." It took six months for Wadih El-Hage to relent, but April Ray ultimately won: her husband broke off his engagement to a second woman.34

  A women's advocate in Egypt, Abu Qomsan, shares April Ray's outlook. She indignantly describes a contemporary Egyptian TV show, Hag Mitwalli's Family, that idealizes polygamy: "They make polygamy look very nice, very romantic, very rich like a dream. It is the worst show I have ever seen in my life. It is the worst show Egyptian television has ever made. They destroy all life values.... It makes me very angry."35

  Polygamy encourages seeing women as commodities, which has always been a prevailing view in Islam. This concept reached its apotheosis in the fabled Topkapi palace of the Ottoman sultans, particularly in its harem. Akbar S. Ahmed describes it this way: "It was in the harem that the all-powerful sultan spent most of his life. Every inhabitant of the 230 small, dark rooms was his to command. It is not difficult to imagine the unlimited sensual pleasures available to the sultan (the number of concubines often exceeded a thousand); and only to him." Ahmed goes on to describe the palace's lavish and eclectic furnishings, accented by Qur'anic verses on the walls. "But the Quranic verses underline the fact that in spite of so many quotations from the Quran this was not Islam.""

  Why not? What in Islam forbade the sultans from keeping such a palace and treating women so?

  Apologists like Seyyed Hossein Nasr complain that it isn't f
air to attack Islam for its polygamy, "as if polygamy has been practiced with Islam alone."37 Certainly not; but Islam offers a woman no protection against it. Muslims point to the great Old Testament figures, like David and Solomon, who were polygamous. But neither Jews nor Christians practice polygamy today. They understand their scriptures as teaching a higher morality, including an idea of marriage as a unique and divine bond that cannot be broken.

  Divorce

  The classic Christian idea of marriage rules out not only polygamy, but divorce as well. Jesus reminds the Pharisees,

  Have you not read that He who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one?" So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder. (Matthew i9:4-6)

  It is true that the West's present-day record on this issue is dismal. In fact, Muslims criticize Westerners of hypocrisy on the matter of polygamy, given that a substantial percentage of Western men nowadays practice serial polygamy through easy divorce and remarriage. Still, Islam cannot take the moral high ground here, either. A Muslim man may divorce a wife if she displeases him in any way (even by protesting a polygamous arrangement). It is almost unheard-of for a Muslim woman to divorce her husband, although it does seem to happen under certain specific circumstances. To achieve the divorce, all a man has to do is pronounce to his wife the famous triple declaration: "You are divorced, you are divorced, you are divorced."38 That doesn't mean, however, that a Muslim woman can be divorced and put out of her home in a matter of minutes. The Qur'an, in a sura entitled "Divorce," prescribes a waiting period to make sure that the wife is not pregnant: "Prophet (and you believers), if you divorce your wives, divorce them at the end of their waiting period. Compute their waiting period and have fear of God, your Lord. You shall not expel them from their houses, nor shall they go away, unless they have committed a proven vile deed" (Sura 65:1).

  An American Muslim woman, Naasira bint Ellison, explains how it works in practice:

  Firstly, many options are taken and tried before coming to the decision of the divorce. If the man and woman decide that they can no longer live together successfully as a husband and wife, the husband (in most cases, not always) pronounces the divorce by saying "I divorce you." At this point the waiting period begins. The waiting period lasts for three menstrual cycles to assure the woman is not pregnant. This period allows the couple time to think about what they are doing and if this is what they really want to do. There are no lawyers involved to antagonize an already delicate situation.

  This, she says, is "the most humane and most just system of divorce that exists."39 Muslims point proudly to Sura 4:128, which forms a foundation stone of this system: "If a woman fear ill-treatment or desertion on the part of her husband, it shall be no offense for them to seek a mutual agreement, for agreement is best."

  Aisha's explanation of this verse reveals what kind of "agreement" is meant: "It concerns the woman whose husband does not want to keep her with him any longer, but wants to divorce her and marry some other lady, so she says to him: `Keep me and do not divorce me, and then marry another woman, and you may neither spend on me, nor sleep with me.' "40 Thus the "mutual agreement" is rather like one between a beggar and a king. The woman agrees to give up her conjugal rights and to receive nothing from her husband, even basic support, as long as she is spared the shame of divorce. Meanwhile, the husband has his wife's blessing to marry another woman.

  A Muslim husband need not show just cause for divorcing his wife. One man in Abu Dhabi considered divorcing his wives simply in order to be able to have more children: "Forty-year-old Salem Jemaa Mabruk has 27 children, and aims to have ioo. He said in an interview in the daily newspaper Al-Ittihad that he might have to divorce some of his four present wives and seek more energetic ones."41

  True, there are plenty of married men in the West who divorce in order to get a more "energetic" wife. Both Islamic divorce law and current Western laws are quite different from the saying of Jesus that shaped Christendom's understanding of divorce: "For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so" (Matthew 19:8). This is one of Jesus' "hard sayings." In light of the breakdown of the family in the West, Muslim claims to take a more realistic view of human nature by allowing for divorce and legislating its parameters could conceivably find real purchase within the former bounds of Christendom. In fact, despite Jesus' words, almost all Christian communions now allow for divorce and remarriage in one form or another. Only the Catholic Church still considers remarriage after divorce to be a grave sin; in Catholicism the granting of annulments is often known as "divorce by another name," but in fact annulments are granted only under quite specific conditions. Pope John Paul II reaffirmed this early in zooz, saying, "Marriage is indissoluble.... [Divorce] ... has devastating consequences that spread in society like the plague."42

  One observer of Islam remarks that in Egypt, "a great many men" have taken advantage of Islam's divorce laws and "have married twenty or thirty women in no more than ten years. By the same token, women of no great age have married more than a dozen men, one after the other. It is observable today ... that some men are in the habit of changing their wife once a month."43

  Muslim divorce laws can force a woman into virtual prostitution. The Sharia stipulates that after a man has divorced the same woman three times, he cannot marry her again until she has married and been divorced by another man.44 This kind of repeated marriage and divorce is made common in Islam by the way divorce is granted. Consequently, in some places, notably the Iranian holy city of Qom, there are men who make a living as "one-night husbands": they marry thrice-divorced women, consummate the marriage, and divorce them the next day, so the women can now lawfully go back to their families.41

  UNICEF recently profiled a woman who is a double victim, both of child marriage and of easy divorce:

  Zeinab is 26 years old. She was married at the age of io, and at 12 gave birth to a girl. However, the trauma of the early delivery was too much for her young, fragile body, whose whole left side became paralyzed. As a result, her husband sent her back to her family. He eventually abandoned her completely and re-married. She and her daughter, now 13, are now living with an aunt and earn some money selling potatoes. But Zeinab cannot afford to send the girl to school.46

  UNICEF never mentions that Zeinab is a Muslim, although she bears the name of one of the Prophet's wives. In any case, however, she would find no relief from her plight in Islam, which condones child marriage and unilateral male-initiated divorce; nothing in Islamic law and practice prevents Zeinab's story from being repeated all over the Muslim world.

  Female Circumcision

  The barbarity of female circumcision is practiced within the House of Islam as well as by some Third World non-Muslims. In line with Muhammad's suspicion of women, its stated object is the reduction of female sexual response, so as to restrain a woman's wanton nature. But in fact, the Islamic justification for this custom seems to be weak. It is scarcely found at all in such bastions of Islam as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Turkey, Iran or North Africa.47 It is observed, however, among Muslims in Egypt, Ethiopia and the rest of East Africa, and elsewhere, and is justified in religious terms. According to Badawi, those who practice it are on shaky Islamic ground: "there is no single text of the Qur'an and Hadeeth which requires female circumcision."48

  Well, almost none. One hadith comes from about as eminent a source as one can find in Islam: one of Sunni Islam's "Four Great Imams," the foremost collector of hadiths, Ahmad ibn Hanbal (from whom the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence takes its name). This great imam, who was renowned for traveling all over the Muslim world in search of authentic hadiths, quotes Muhammad as saying, "Circumcision is a law for men and a preservation of honour for women."49 However, despite the respect that ibn Hanbal enjoys among Muslims,
there is little mention of this statement of Muhammad elsewhere. Sunan abu-Dawud reports a single hadith relating to the practice, and even this one is generally considered "weak," or of doubtful attestation, by most Muslim scholars: "A woman used to perform circumcision in Medina. The Prophet said to her: Do not cut severely as that is better for a woman and more desirable for a husband."50 Note that he doesn't forbid it, but he does apparently restrict it, ruling out the more barbaric forms that are, nevertheless, still carried out today.

  Some important Muslim divines encourage the custom. According to Reliance of the Traveller, circumcision is required for both men and women.51 Sheikh Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, the grand imam of Egypt's Al-Azhar University (and thus, according to the BBC, "the highest spiritual authority for nearly a billion Sunni Muslims") called circumcision "a laudable practice that did honor to women."52 Female circumcision is, moreover, deeply ingrained in the societies where it is applied. As one Egyptian said simply, "It is the custom. God wills it."53

  A Different Understanding of Rape

  Numerous reports from the Middle East suggest that the Western understanding of the concept of rape barely exists in the Muslim world. Or more precisely, they know what it is, but under Islamic rules of evidence, it almost never happens. In recent years, Muslims have often charged that non-Muslim soldiers in Bosnia, Kashmir and elsewhere were guilty of raping Muslim women. But inside the House of Islam, the picture is cloudier, not so much because male passions are better controlled but because the Sharia makes the crime of rape virtually impossible to prove.

  The testimony of the victim herself is inadmissible. Reliance of the Traveller dictates that "if testimony concerns fornication or sodomy, then it requires four male witnesses." It appends to this the commentary of the Muslim legal scholar Sheikh cUmar Barakat, who specifies what these witnesses need to have seen. They must testify, he says, "in the case of fornication, that they have seen the offender insert the head of the penis into her vagina."54