Like his Part III, Part IV of CAIR rep Omer Subhani’s eleven-part farrago “Exposing Robert Spencer” is misnumbered. It’s called “Exposing Robert Spencer III: On ‘Beating’ One’s Wife.” (Here are my replies to Part I, Part II, and Part III.)
In this go-round, Subhani engages in his usual ad hominem attacks and substance-free argumentation, and ties himself into knots trying to prove that when the Qur’an says to beat a disobedient woman (4:34), it doesn’t mean anything like, say, beat a disobedient woman. Why, of course not! (He is referring to my Qur’an Blog on this passage.)
Along the way Subhani ditches Muhammad Asad, a twentieth-century convert to Islam (Leopold Weiss was his birth name) who penned a translation and commentary on the Qur’an that is especially beloved of Western Muslims and non-Muslim Islamic apologists, as Asad makes a sustained effort to whitewash all the unpleasant aspects of Islam that tend to make Westerners uncomfortable. But Subhani takes exception to my linking to Asad’s translation and commentary online (you can find it here), and ends up equating Asad with the website where his work is hosted:
Spencer makes a glaring error in his attempt to portray Islam as a faith where beating one’s wife is given sanction. It’s fairly obvious where the error (or crappy scholarship) lies- he relies only on translations of the Qur’an, not commentaries – big difference. See, Spencer will quote whatever he can get his hands on. In this case he relies on his usual assortment of web translations of the Qur’an and he also uses a Geocities web site that has the Muhammad Asad translation of the Qur’an. Yup, that’s our Islam scholar, Mr. Robert Spencer, using the best primary scholarship available… Geocities.
Of course, Asad ain’t Geocities and Geocities ain’t Asad, and here again Subhani assumes I don’t have a book that I do have — The Book Foundation’s handsome edition of Asad’s Qur’an is right here in my office, but Subhani apparently takes umbrage at my practice of linking to online material whenever possible, so that readers can verify the accuracy of what I say. For he is steamed, you see, that “Spencer will quote whatever he can get his hands on.” It would be much better, apparently, for non-Muslims not to know that such material exists, eh, Subhani?
Anyway, Subhani then goes into the Arabic meaning of the word daraba, which is the “beat” in “beat her” in Qur’an 4:34 (iDribuhunna — اضربوهن). He quotes all sorts of Islamic authorities who say it means a gentle tap, and then points out statistics about the abuse of women in America. There are just a few problems with this:
1. He does not, and cannot, deny the veracity of the Islamic sources I adduced that justify wife-beating. It’s just swell that there are other Islamic authorities who say you should only hit your wife with something like a toothbrush, or not hit her in the face, but the problem with all of them is that if you don’t say that it’s wrong to hit her at all, one man’s light tap is going to be another man’s brutal beating.
2. No one is saying, least of all me, that only Muslims beat their wives. Spousal abuse is found in every culture. But in America, creeps who beat their wives are arrested and punished. Are they in the Islamic world? How can they be, when the practice is given divine sanction?
And here again, this magnificent example of Islamic moderation and representative of the Council on American-Islamic Relations does nothing to stop spousal abuse in the Islamic world. Instead, he pours vitriol on me for daring to point it out.