Understanding Islam VIII: Islam’s Misogynistic History

The dualism of Islam allows for two ways to treat women. They can be honored or they can be beaten. If you’re going to study Islam you have to study women as a separate category because Muhammad had a misogynistic love/hate relationship with them. The reason for this is simple, Islamic doctrine denies that men and women are equal. Men are greater than women. The Qur’an has entire sections devoted to how women are treated inferior to men (too many to note here). On the subject of wife beating, the Qur’an is clear. It says that if a woman does not obey her husband or submit she can be beaten. Some argue that since Islamic women are beaten from an early age, by the time they are married they are used to this treatment and it does not seem to bother them. Wife beating is thoroughly entrenched in Islam. This is not a religious aberration in Islam, it is fundamental to their doctrine.

Muhammad left a great deal of information about the thrashing of women. In a hadith Muhammad is noted as saying that if hitting a woman is necessary do not strike them in the face (unsightly and unbecoming). Because Islam’s holy books are dualistic they hold contradictory positions. There are statements that says that it is proper to beat a woman, then somewhere else, in another hadith, Muhammad supposedly says: “Do not strike Allah’s handmaidens.” The truth is there are explicit rules laid out as to the gradation of how the man makes the woman submit and the final stage is a beating/thrashing. It is a form dominance through progressive punishment.

Then there are child marriages and the rape of children. In 2002, research in refugee camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan found that half the girls were married by age 13 [“Violent Oppression of Women in Islam”, Spencer and Chesler, Frontpage Magazine, pg. 15.] In an Afghan refugee camp more than two out of three second grade girls were either married or engaged. Virtually all the girls who were beyond second grade were already married. This is pure Sunna or the way of Muhammad. How do we know this? When Muhammad was in his mid-fifties, he was engaged to Aisha, a child of six. At age nine he consummated the marriage with her. So, when the 60-year-old Pakistani Muslim is engaged to the 10-year-old it is Sunna, it is the way of Muhammad.