Islam and Women’s Rights
by Mike Bond
Anyone who has spent time in a Moslem country is aware of the huge gulf between the west and Islam regarding women. It is almost unimaginable what the world is like behind a veil, a burka, a black gown that heats you like an oven under the Middle East sun. To have one’s sexual organs cut away with a broken bottle or rusty razor, to be forced to submit to a man no matter how foul or evil he may be.
In the Koran, women’s eyes are described as a trap that can lead man down to Hell. In countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan, women are stoned to death for glancing at a man in the marketplace; any man can charge a woman with adultery for which the sentence is death. As we know, girls can be shot for wanting to go to school. Women can have their hands and feet cut off for expressing themselves in public. In Saudi Arabia a woman can be arrested for simply going out of the house alone, or driving a car.
The results of this insanity are manifold. First and foremost, women don’t have a life. The misery, lack of freedom, serfdom and hatred experienced by women can be overwhelming. Happiness becomes an impossible, irrelevant goal.
Secondly, the Moslem world has not progressed since the middle ages, the period when Moslem scholarship came to an end as the religion became more and more conservative. A society or culture cannot progress without a feminine side. Our souls and minds are both masculine and feminine, they do not evolve alone.
The so-called “Arab spring” has been a total disaster. In Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the few rights women had have been diminished. To have aided and abetted this process is one of the great foreign policy failures of the Obama administration – a failure that may endanger our nation for centuries to come.
The Organisation for Islamic Cooperation, composed of fifty-seven Moslem countries, has been agitating for the United Nations to ban what it calls “defamation of religion”. By this it means that any criticism of Islam will be against world law. The proposal is backed by leaders of such nations as Turkey, Pakistan, and Yemen. Were it adopted, it would mean that we could not even criticize Moslem countries for their treatment of women, as that treatment is upheld by their religion.
Islam is accelerating its takeover of African countries, in places like Mali, where architectural monuments are being destroyed because they “displease Allah”, and where women now are not allowed to wear short skirts. Worldwide, from Europe to Indonesia, Islam is strengthening its hold, and its control of women.
Women have made much progress in the last hundred years. Even in the western world, there is still much to do. But our culture faces a new risk, a return to the horrors of the past, a horror that millions of women live every day. We must not fall prey to political correctness that tells us we have no right to criticize how others live, to assuming the world is advancing. It’s not. The danger, and the risk, are real.
