by Wafa Sultan
I hope what I write here can help other Muslims think about the marks they pass on to their children before those children are born. I suffered because of the contents of my inherited birthmark; I am still suffering and will continue to do so until my dying day. But, to a certain extent, I have managed to spare my daughters some of that suffering. My daughters may not be able to become a Margaret Thatcher, but I have not the slightest doubt that they will be more like Mrs. Thatcher than like my grandmother. Nor do I have the slightest doubt that my granddaughter will be able to be a Margaret Thatcher if she wants. I rejected my inherited birthmark, not solely out of compassion for myself, but out of compassion for future generations.
Again, I ask myself, “Who is that woman on Al Jazeera?” She says that she is a Muslim woman. But what is a Muslim woman? She is whoever Islam tells her she is in her early years. What motto does Islam painfully inscribe on her birthmark? “A woman is a defect.” This hadith pronounced by Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, was handed down mother to daughter, inscribed on one birthmark and then the next and then the next until it reached me. Millions of other traditions have accumulated around this one simple hadith, and these have not only hallowed it but have made it uglier.
In Islam, this hadith and all its ramifications are sacred: We are forbidden to overstep it, cast doubts on it, or question it. There is no more deadly conviction on earth to a woman than the conviction that she is a defect, and no other belief can make it any less offensive. I heard this belief repeated from my first moment of awareness. This was not the only hadith that dropped into my package, but it was the ugliest.
My earliest memory of my mother is her story of how she chose my name. She laughed when she told me the story, but I always wondered if she was crying inside. She told me she was not very happy at my arrival, and neither was my father, needless to say. My paternal uncle’s wife had already had two boys before she did. Under pressure from this calamity my mother was at a loss as to what name to give me. One morning my paternal uncle was passing by the veranda of our house when he saw my mother carrying me in her arms. He greeted her and asked: “Haven’t you chosen a name for her yet?”
My mother replied: “Not yet. Do you have any suggestions?”
My uncle said without hesitation: “Call her ‘Shit,’ it’s the only name she deserves.”
My mother told this story hundreds of times when I was within earshot. She would tell it jokingly to amuse her female friends from the neighborhood, unaware of how deeply she hurt me each time she said it. And so, to my birthmark, my mother added the name Shit at the behest of my uncle. Her own birthmark, however, handed down through the centuries dictated her treatment of me.
The most terrifying thing about a Muslim woman’s birthmark is that part which comes from the Prophet’s stories about his wives that create a trap every Muslim woman falls into: No man in my life can be better than his Prophet and I cannot be less obedient to him than his Prophet’s wives were to their husband. Men have internalized their Prophet, and women have internalized his wives.
How can the men and women of Islam escape from this trap? I’m not sure they can unless they are willing to look critically at some of these marriages, not as an affront to Muhammad or his wives, but to help explain a Muslim man’s attitude toward women and his treatment of them, given that Muhammad is their ideal.
The Koran says: “There is a good example in Allah’s apostle” (33:21). The Prophet contracted his marriage with Aisha when she was six years old and he was fifty. The marriage was consummated when she was nine. Bint al-Shati’s Wives of Muhammad, a biography of the Prophet describes that day for us in Aisha’s words:
“The Prophet married me when I was six years old and the marriage was consummated when I was nine. The Prophet of God came to our home in company with men and women who were among his followers. My mother came [to me] while I was in a swing between the branches of a tree and made me come down. She smoothed my hair, wiped my face with a little water then came forward and led me to the door. She stopped me while I calmed myself a little. Then she took me in. The Prophet of God was sitting on a bed in our home, and she sat me in his lap. Everyone jumped up and went out, and the Prophet consummated his marriage with me at our home.”
It is not because of its historical value that this story deserves space in my book. Rather, I want to discuss its moral importance and what it has done, and is still doing, to destroy the moral and mental fiber of Muslim men and women. A fifty-year-old man marries a six-year-old girl and consummates their marriage when she turns nine. This is a crime, pure and simple. It may not have been one at the time it happened, but the time has come for it to be considered as such. The ugliness of this crime does not lie only in the event itself, but in the religious and legal legitimization it has been accorded. It is the moral examples the individual Muslim extracts from this incident which invest it with its importance and gravity, not its time or place.
Islamic custom attaches no value to childhood. A child is his father’s property, who has the right to dispose of him as he would of any other property. When a mother picks up her young daughter of no more than nine years and places her in the arms of a man her grandfather’s age, her daughter’s childhood has been irreparably violated. When the mother’s action acquired religious and legal legitimacy, it became a way of life for fourteen centuries.
A child in the Muslim world has no rights. He is a piece of property, not a responsibility. Islamic teachings persuade Muslim children that their parents must be obeyed because they gave them life, but the same teachings tell the parents nothing of their responsibility for the quality and nature of that child’s life. Muslim education focuses on convincing the child of the necessity of blind obedience to his parents. He obeys their every command, save those that prevent him from obeying God. Allah gets hold of people through their parents and then goes even further: To guarantee the ogre’s control of the child, it orders him to disobey his parents when their orders do not accord with its own.
Islamic law touches on society’s responsibility toward children in only one instance: If a child’s parents leave Islam, society must intervene and restore the child to the Muslim fold. People in Muslim society fall, from earliest childhood, into their parents’ trap and live at their mercy, in the absence of any law that gives society the right to intervene to protect them from their parents’ tyranny. This situation continues throughout their lives. A Muslim man remains a child in his father’s eyes for as long as that father lives, and the only opportunity he gets to exercise his male authority is by keeping a firm hold over his wife and children.
The cycle of torment continues until you don’t know where it begins or ends. When a Muslim woman marries, she marries not just a man, but his father and mother, too, who, under Muslim law, play a major role in their marriage. The parents intervene in every matter, large or small, and the mother-in-law uses this situation as an opportunity to play the role denied to her earlier in life, frequently pouring her anger out on her daughter-in-law in order to exact her revenge for when she herself was a daughter-in-law. The young husband regards himself as legally and traditionally obliged to obey his mother blindly, and allows her to do as she likes as she interferes, arbitrarily and without restraint, in his life and that of his family.
A Muslim man unconsciously assumes the role his own father played and rules his wife with an iron hand while simultaneously feeling guilty for the oppression his mother suffered at his father’s hands when she was young. He justifies the situation by telling himself that he is giving her the right to take revenge for what she has suffered. His mother, in her unconscious mind, is imitating the role of her own mother-in-law as she vents the pain of her own youth on her daughter-in-law—and so the cycle continues as Islam uses women as a tool to oppress other women. Women in a society of this kind cannot themselves take revenge on men for having oppressed them, but they can vent their pent-up anger on other women.
I get a lot of letters from Muslim wome
n who curse me. I cannot explain this reaction of one woman to another by anything other than an expression of jealousy which devours them. When they read my essays, these women ask themselves, both consciously and unconsciously: “Why can Wafa Sultan exercise her freedom to express her opinions while I cannot? Why can Wafa Sultan live in a country that respects her as a woman while I cannot?” When they become frustrated by lack of an answer to their questions, they attack and curse me. I understand and respect their position. Perhaps even better than that, I empathize with them. My heart breaks because I know what a terrible life they lead, but the only thing I can do about it is to write and speak out. Perhaps, in the way I speak out against Islam, I can help them get out of the trap they find themselves in.
The story of Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha helps perpetuate this oppression to this very day. My sister decided to marry her daughter to the son of her paternal aunt when she was eleven years old and he was forty. I was an adolescent at the time and I can still remember my sister’s response to the women of the neighborhood when they asked her what her daughter thought of this marriage. “She’s still young, she’ll come to love him as time goes by. It’s a marriage in accordance with the law of God and his Prophet.” Alas, that never came to be. The marriage was a horrible and unhappy one that she was never able to escape. When my niece ran away from her husband, as she often did, and went back to her father’s home, she discovered that she had merely fled from one corner of her prison to another. Her father persuaded her that the best place for a woman is her husband’s house and, under pressure from her family, she went back to “the best place designated for her by God and his Prophet.” My niece, seeing no other way out, committed suicide at the age of twenty-six, by which time she was the mother of four children.
The story of Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha has a further and more horrifying effect on the relationship between Muslim men and women. In the story of the marriage, Muhammad pounced upon the nine-year-old Aisha the moment her mother placed her in his arms on a bed in her own home. Through the story of this “marriage,” Islam denies women the right to reach the stage of physical, intellectual, and emotional maturity at which they are fully ready to marry. It denies Muslim women the right to marry as a rational human being. That a girl should jump from her swing and become within a few minutes a mature woman in the arms of a man—this is something the most basic laws of morality cannot accept. The great misfortune is that this incident has been sanctioned by both religious and secular law and has become a way of life.
Under this law the childhood of many young girls is violated throughout the Islamic world. In many Arab countries such as Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, hundreds of crimes are committed every year against the rights of underage girls, who have no control over their lives, by men from the Arabian Gulf states. These men with their illicit money and their nonexistent morals take advantage of the poverty running rampant in these countries to buy minors for money. For each girl purchased by one of these monstrous pigs, it is the beginning of a journey of suffering, which usually ends with the underage girl being returned to her family after her childhood, her womanhood, her honor, and her reputation violated in exchange for trifling sums of money, in the name of marriage in accordance with the law of God and his Prophet. The minor returns to the hell of her life after she’s been abandoned in a society, which does not respect her plight. If she is able, she lives out the rest of her days as a morsel to be chewed over, mercilessly and without embarrassment, in the mouths of others.
There are other marriages of Muhammad’s, such as his marriage to Zeinab, that are ruinous to the proper relationship between a man and a woman. Zeinab was the daughter of Muhammad’s paternal aunt and the wife of his adopted son Zeid, hence his daughter-in-law. One day the Prophet went to Zeid and Zeinab’s home. The doorway was covered by a cowhide curtain which the wind lifted, allowing him to see Zeinab unveiled in her room. He was moved with admiration for her. Zeinab invited Muhammad to come in, but he refused and retraced his steps, murmuring: “Praised be He who changes hearts.” When Zeid learned from his wife what had happened, he went to Muhammad and told him: “Perhaps Zeinab pleased you and I should leave her to you.” Muhammad told him: “Keep your wife.” When you think about it, what we have just witnessed is a son who is passing his wife along to his father as if he was asking a friend of his, “Do you like my shoes? Shall I take them off so that you can have them?” Since this “sanctified” marriage took place, women in Islam have been put on and taken off like shoes for centuries.
But, Muhammad was unable to resist his desires and the rock began to tumble down from the mountain peak, verse after verse, enabling him to give free rein to those desires, while the Angel Gabriel began to shuttle back and forth, up and down, until he had resolved Muhammad’s dilemma. In the first of these verses from the Koran, God reprimanded Muhammad for having concealed his feelings: “You sought to hide in your heart what Allah was to reveal: you were afraid of man, although it would have been more right to fear Allah” (33:37). On his first journey Gabriel legislated for Muhammad to fall in love with a married woman, even though that woman was his daughter-in-law. Then the second verse rolled down, which ordered him to marry Zeinab: “And when Zeid satisfied his desire, we gave her to you in marriage” (33:37). Marriage to the wife of an adopted son was not acceptable in pre-Islamic Arab society, and a third verse conveniently descended in order to invalidate Zeid’s adoption and deter those who were beginning to criticize Muhammad’s marriage to his daughter-in-law. “Muhammad is the father of no man among you. He is the apostle of Allah and the Seal of the Prophets” (33:40).
The Muslim male, as portrayed here, is a poor soul who cannot control his instincts and, therefore, has the right to give them free rein in any manner he chooses. When God’s Prophet coveted his adopted son’s wife and God ordered him to satisfy that desire, this behavior, for Muslims, became enshrined in both religious and secular law. Muhammad banned adoption in order to justify his socially unacceptable marriage—by the standards of the time—to the wife of his adopted son. This ban put an end to a social system that at the time helped save many children who, for one reason or another, had been left fatherless, and the ban, to this day, continues to rot the soul of Muslim societies.
Many children who have lost their mothers or fathers in these societies end up as victims for whom no just solution can be found. The father’s new wife in these societies neither regards nor treats her husband’s children from another wife as if they were her own. Her belief in her faith, which bans adoption, prevents her, both consciously and unconsciously, from treating them warmly; new husbands behave similarly toward the children of their wife’s first marriage. Orphanages in these societies are nothing more than corrals where even life’s most basic moral principles are not observed. Society regards these children with contempt, as most of them are the offspring of extramarital relations. Revenge is taken on their fathers through them, and people refuse to adopt them because of their belief in Islamic law, which forbids adoption yet proposes no alternative. We all remember the disaster that faced the world in the wake of the war in Bosnia. Some 30,000 children were born illegitimately in the course of this war and, as their Muslim mothers refused to take care of them, they were distributed to Western countries, with the United States taking the lion’s share. No Muslim country offered to take in a single one of these children.
Of all Muhammad’s marriages, however, his marriage to Safia was the most horrific of all. Safia Bint Hayi was a Jewish woman whose husband, father, and brother Muhammad had killed when raiding the Khaybar tribe. She was taken prisoner in the course of the raid by one of Muhammad’s men named Sahm. Muhammad took Safia from him, gave him seven other female prisoners as compensation, and married Safia the same day he killed her husband, brother, and father. Once again, a woman is given no opportunity to make a decision regarding her marriage or, ultimately, her fate. Safia finds herself in Muhammad’s arms from one day to the next and does not h
ave the right to accept or refuse what he decides to do with her.
When discussing the deteriorating position of women in the Muslim world some defenders of Muslim law protest, claiming that Islam revered women, but that some of its followers had misunderstood the Koran and the Prophetic tradition. But I still have a question: Have the same followers misunderstood the Prophet’s attitude to women in his lifetime? Where are the Koranic verses or Prophetic traditions that can alleviate the ugliness of these attitudes? They are not to be found. How can we view the marriage of a fifty-year-old man to a six-year-old girl (consummated three years later) other than as rape? The answer is not to be found. How can we view the marriage of a man to his son’s wife as an acceptable act? There is no passage to make one think otherwise. How can we view a man’s marriage to his female captive after he has attacked her tribe and killed her husband, father, and brother except as a crime? We can’t because there are no verses or traditions to persuade us otherwise.
In order to understand Islam’s attitude to women, one has to think more deeply about the desert environment that gave birth to it. The tribe would go to sleep and wake to the rattle of the swords of another larger, better-equipped tribe. The raiding tribe would take the other tribe by storm, greedy for its land, its wealth, and its possessions. They would kill some of its men, and the rest would flee. Once the fires of battle had died down, the men of the victorious tribe would divide up the women from the defeated tribe among themselves just as they shared their livestock, possessions, and wealth. No tribe in Arab history was safe from raiding and its effects.