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Robert Spencer: Deception and Denial Are Not Reform

Jan 15, 2013 2:00 am By Robert Spencer

At Atlas Shrugs I explain the difference between the all too common deception and denial and the all too rare genuine Islamic reform:

Deception and denial are not reform, and yet Muslim
spokesmen in the West constantly confuse these things with one another, and
expect non-Muslims not to notice.

The
Change This campaign
is an initiative of a Muslim women’s charity in
Scotland that claims that Muslim men who think that the Koran allows them to
beat their wives are “manipulating” the real teachings of Islam,
which they think forbids wife-beating.

I am all for a campaign to persuade Muslim men not to beat
their wives. But here we come up to the perennial problem: denying that the
texts of the Koran and Hadith regarding wife-beating say what they clearly say
is not reform; it is just deception. It may be self-deception, but it is
deception nonetheless. It may play well with non-Muslims who don’t know what
those texts say, but it won’t convince any wife-beating Muslim husband to stop
beating his wife: he knows, in the words of one Muslim wife-beater, that
“the Koran says it’s okay.”

The Koran’s infamous wife-beating verse goes like this:

Men are the managers of the affairs
of women for that God has preferred in bounty one of them over another, and for
that they have expended of their property. Righteous women are therefore
obedient, guarding the secret for God’s guarding. And those you fear may be
rebellious admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them. If they then
obey you, look not for any way against them; God is All-high, All-great. (Koran
4:34)

This is, of course, an extremely controversial verse, so it
is worth noting how several translators render the key part of this verse, ÙˆÙŽØ§Ø¶Ù’Ø±ÙØ¨ÙوهÙÙ†ÙŽÙ‘,
waidriboohunna.

Pickthall: “and scourge them”
Yusuf Ali: “(And last) beat them (lightly)”
Al-Hilali/Khan: “(and last) beat them (lightly, if it is useful)”
Shakir: “and beat them”
Sher Ali: “and chastise them”
Khalifa: “then you may (as a last alternative) beat them”
Arberry: “and beat them”
Rodwell: “and scourge them”
Sale: “and chastise them”
Daryabadi: “and beat them”
Asad: “then beat them”
Dawood: “and beat them”

Laleh Bakhtiar, in a recent translation that has received wide
publicity
, translates it as “go away from them.” In light of this unanimity
among the translators, both Muslim and non-Muslim, this seems difficult to
sustain — all of these authorities got the passage wrong until Bakhtiar? But
her impulse is understandable, as many Muslims today regard this verse with
acute embarrassment. Muhammad Asad adduces numerous traditions in which
Muhammad “forbade the beating of any woman,” concluding that wife-beating is
“barely permissible, and should preferably be avoided.”

Unfortunately, however, this is not a unanimous view. The Koran
commentary Ruhul Ma”ani reflects
mainstream Muslim understandings of this verse when it gives four reasons that
a man may beat his wife: “if she refuses to beautify herself for him,” if she
refuses sex when he asks for it, if she refuses to pray or perform ritual
ablutions, and “if she goes out of the house without a valid excuse.”

Also, Muhammad’s example is normative for Muslims, since he
is an “excellent example of conduct” (Koran 33:21) — and according to a
canonical hadith, Muhammad’s favorite wife, his child bride Aisha, reports that
Muhammad struck her. Once he went out at night after he thought she was asleep,
and she followed him surreptitiously. Muhammad saw her, and, as Aisha recounts:
“He struck me on the chest which caused me pain, and then said: Did you think
that Allah and His Apostle would deal unjustly with you?” (Sahih Muslim 2127)
Aisha herself said it: “I have not seen any woman suffering as much as the
believing women.” (Sahih Bukhari 7.72.715)

If the organizers of the Change This campaign expect Muslim
men who beat their wives not to be familiar with this material, they are naïve.
If they have no such expectation but simply wish to give non-Muslims in
Scotland and elsewhere in the West the impression that core Islamic texts do
not sanction the beating of women, their focus is not actually on helping women
at all, but on burnishing the ever-tarnished image of Islam.

Either way, one group is certain to lose out: Muslim women
who are brutalized by their husbands. And that abundantly illustrates the cost
of the all too common practice among liberal Muslims, of pretending that
problems within Islam do not exist, rather than confronting them head-on and
working for genuine reform.

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Filed Under: Moderate Muslims, women's rights in Islam


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