Category Archives: Islam

Religions are Totalising Ideologies

Standard

I’ve been saying this for years, but it is hard to square with what we see at the neighbourhood Presbyterian or Baptist church. There it is all love and flower arrangements, saccharine hymns and fake, or even, sometimes, genuine friendliness and neighbourly affection. It’s hard for us to think of these peaceful and more or less loving people as taking point for a totalising ideology. Nothing to fear there. And, in truth, that is as often the case as not, for Christianity had, for the most part, had its teeth pulled a few centuries ago, though it is recognising itself more confidently of late as “the church militant” here on earth. Perhaps that is what prompted Giles Fraser’s latest Guardian column: “Wickedness, allied to the ‘truth’ of religious belief, can lead us to evil acts.”

The brutal attack in Woolwich has prompted in me thoughts of how wickedness, allied to the “truth” of religious belief, can lead men to heinous acts. For it is this sense of having access to the truth that makes religion the dangerous phenomenon that it so often is. Most of the terrible things human beings do to each other originate in a sense of moral conviction.

Though, given the first sentence of his opening paragraph, it is hard to see why he didn’t say: Most of the terrible things human beings do to each other originate in a sense of religious conviction. Let’s take it as read, though, that the certainty of having achieved the truth leads people often to do terrible things. But notice the scare quotes around the word ‘truth’ in that opening sentence. For the truth is that religion, of all human activities, is the most likely to lead people to the conviction that they know the truth in a way that others do not and cannot know it – unless, that is, they are willing to join the believers in proclaiming the truth that believers claim to know. And the problem with this kind of truth is that it is based, indeed, it must be based, on inadequate evidence, if anything about religious belief can be claimed to have evidence at all. But the kind of certainty that is based on religious conviction held upon inadequate evidence or no evidence at all, is of such a kind that it could easily (or even inevitably) lead to evil acts.

Let’s begin with Pope Ratzinger’s New Year’s message, celebrating the World Day of Peace. I need to quote at length, because it is important to get the whole miserable picture in order to understand the kind of certainty, and the kind of totalising ideology that this creates. Here are three paragraphs from the message:

Those who insufficiently value human life and, in consequence, support among other things the liberalization of abortion, perhaps do not realize that in this way they are proposing the pursuit of a false peace. The flight from responsibility, which degrades human persons, and even more so the killing of a defenceless and innocent being, will never be able to produce happiness or peace. Indeed how could one claim to bring about peace, the integral development of peoples or even the protection of the environment without defending the life of those who are weakest, beginning with the unborn. Every offence against life, especially at its beginning, inevitably causes irreparable damage to development, peace and the environment. Neither is it just to introduce surreptitiously into legislation false rights or freedoms which, on the basis of a reductive and relativistic view of human beings and the clever use of ambiguous expressions aimed at promoting a supposed right to abortion and euthanasia, pose a threat to the fundamental right to life.

There is also a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union; such attempts actually harm and help to destabilize marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society.

These principles are not truths of faith, nor are they simply a corollary of the right to religious freedom. They are inscribed in human nature itself, accessible to reason and thus common to all humanity. The Church’s efforts to promote them are not therefore confessional in character, but addressed to all people, whatever their religious affiliation. Efforts of this kind are all the more necessary the more these principles are denied or misunderstood, since this constitutes an offence against the truth of the human person, with serious harm to justice and peace. [my emphasis]

The kicker, of course, is in that last paragraph. Notice how smoothly Ratzinger makes the transition from speaking directly to the Roman Catholic Church’s pro-life and marital ideals to the statement that these are not “truths of faith,” and therefore, we are to understand, “not … confessional in nature.” Hence they are, we are also given to understand, binding on all people without exception. Lawmakers, politicians and others are therefore expected to accord unusual respect to these principles, for they are “inscribed in human nature itself,” and, as such, binding on all people. These are not truths of faith, but simply the truth about human nature, without qualification. Observing this truth, we are told, is necessary in order to preserve peace. One is reminded of “Mother” Teresa’s extraordinary claim (upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize) that abortion is the biggest threat to world peace! (Which led one to wonder why the diminutive zealot had been awarded the prize in the first place.)

Continue reading →

About these ads

Is a liberal Islam possible? The drivers of faith that make faith dangerous

Standard

I did not really intend to carry on with my posts about Islam, but something by Yasmin Ablihai-Brown in the Independent yesterday seemed (to me, anyway) to express her customary poorly concealed contempt for British society in a way that seemed to demand some kind of response. She asks, in her title, “Why do Muslims keep having to explain themselves?”; and then goes on, in the rest of her article, to suggest that the violent jihadists are really in some sense irrelevant to what is happening in Islam today. They should, she says, be examined by psychologists, because they are simply hyper-masculine freaks who have nothing to do with Islam. She doesn’t mince her words:

I have written extensively about the Rochdale and Oxford gangs and their sick values, but it’s clearly never enough. And how dare these letter-writers link me to the Woolwich savagery? What’s it got to do with me or the millions of other blameless British Muslims? We hate Islamicist brutes more than any outsiders ever could. They ruin our futures and hopes. And at moments of high tension, the most liberal and democratic of us fantasise about transporting them all to a remote, cold island, their own dismal caliphate where they could preach to each other and die.

Then she goes on to point out that many British Muslims think alike on this, and deprecate the fundamentalist Islamists like the Woolwich murderers and the Oxford criminals who were pimping young white women, speaking of them disparagingly as “white meat.” Indeed, she points out that were she to write as she does in many Muslim countries she would be silenced, and perhaps silenced forever, for there democratic freedoms are not understood, much less sought. But, sadly, her words are contradicted by the polling figures about the attitudes of British Muslims, and the fact that she would be silenced in most Muslim countries is indicative, surely, of something fundamental about Islam itself, and she should not suggest that, of course, Islam in Britain is completely unrelated to what is going on in Islam elsewhere.

Continue reading →

There’s always a proof text when you need one

Standard

Dan McPeek has very kindly suggested – some time ago – a link to a HuffPo article by an atheist Muslim. It’s entitled “An Atheist Muslim’s Perspective on the ‘Root Causes’ of Islamist Jihadism and the Politics of Islamophobia,” and it gives good reasons for thinking that Islamism is not a product of American imperialism, as is often suggested. It refers to a treaty between the United States and the Muslim Barbary states of North Africa signed into law in 1797, based on original negotiations by Thomas Jefferson, then American Ambassador to France. This is, just to put it in a historical context, before Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, the building of the Suez Canal, the British and French carving up of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War: events which are often thought to be flashpoints for the current relationships between the Muslim world and the West. It’s worth reading just to get things into perspective.

It is also only fair to point out (in a bit of potted history) that Imperial Islam engaged in capturing and selling European slaves in the slave markets of North Africa and the Middle East, and had a lively trade in African slaves long before Europeans became embroiled in the slave trade. Whole villages from parts of the British Isles, including Ireland, were captured and sold in the slave markets of Algiers. According to Wikipedia, the Crimean Khanate had a brisk slave trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. In a process known as “the harvesting of the Steppes” Slav people were captured and sold in Muslim slave markets. (Memories of these markets still exist in the Yemen, where recently it was proposed that captured women be sold for use as concubines, which would solve the problem of infidelity by Muslim husbands! It would be hard to make this stuff up!) Thousands were taken from Moscow itself for use in this trade.

The frequent accusation that European colonialism is responsible for the present evils of the world ignores completely the fact that for hundreds of years Muslim imperial ambitions gobbled up the entire territory of Eastern Christianity in the Middle East, as well as Persia, Afghanistan and India, Christian North Africa, Spain, and Sicily, and, eventually, Constantinople and the Balkans (including Greece), before Muslim imperial adventures were halted in France (at the Battle of Tours in 762), and at the very gates of Vienna (in 1529!), and that Imperial Islam engaged freely, not only in colonial expansion, but in the capture and use of slaves from conquered peoples, as well as from raiding parties in continental Europe as well as the British Isles.

While not justifying the bitter hatreds and the genocides in the former Yugoslavia, it must be remembered that for centuries Muslims comprised the dominant power in the Balkans, to whom the Serbs and others were subservient. Indeed, an example of this subservience can be seen in the practice of scouring the Sultan’s Christian subjects for strong boys who would, at the age of 12, be given to Muslim families, where they were indoctrinated into Islam and trained as Janissaries, an elite corps of the Sultan’s bodyguards. Many Janissaries rose to high position in the Ottoman Empire, but they were still a sign and symbol of subservience and the status of Christians and other religious minorities as al-Dhimma, the people of the Dhimma, that is, contract status as tolerated aliens in return for payment of a tax (essentially, protection money). The bitterness of the war in Chechnya is partly the result of the long period during which Russians paid tribute money and provided slaves for the Muslim Tatars, and their eventual victory over them and their subjection to Russian rule. Such historical memories run very deep.

Foregoing added on Friday, 24th May, at 20.36 Atlantic Time ——————-

I was going to ignore the outrageous beheading of a British officer soldier, Drummer Lee Rigby, on the streets of London by Muslim fanatics, a form of “individualised” jihad which seems to be becoming more attractive to Muslim radicals who seem no longer to have large jihadi organisations able to organise and carry out more ambitious attacks on infidels. However, Medhi Hasan — he of the encounter with Richard Dawkins who scoffed at Hasan’s belief in winged horses (or mules) and Muhammad’s night journey to Jerusalem and then through the seven heavenly realms — who is now the political director of Huffington Post UK, decided to weigh in with the declaration that the men who carried out the atrocity in Woolwich were acting contrary to Muslim teachings. For it says, Hasan tells us, in the Qur’an, that he who kills one man is as if he had killed all mankind, and he cites chapter and verse in doing so, concluding with the ringing pronouncement that:

Thus, the two supposedly Muslim men suspected of killing and mutilating an unarmed, off-duty soldier in the middle of a London street, while shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is Great”), were violating the injunction of their own holy book.

Hasan goes on to approve Prime Minister Cameron’s declaration that

Wednesday’s barbarism was “a betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities who give so much to our country”.

But we have a right, I think, to ask whether it is plausible to suppose that what these “barbarians” did was in fact contrary to the teachings of Islam, a religion which, historically, is blighted by events such as this, and continues to issue in barbarously cruel acts designed (so it seems) to terrify people into submission to the dictates of God’s last messenger.

Continue reading →

The growing religious challenge to Enlightenment values

Standard

I hate to harry this subject like a dog with a bone, but I think more needs to be said. It has been suggested that I am biased. Rahman wrote, in a comment on an earlier post:

This bias is I’m afraid, reflected in all your opinions – muslims bad, westerners good.

This, however, is not the case. But I would say, without reservation, that the Enlightenment (one of whose principle founders was Benedict de Spinoza (or Baruch de Espinosa), a Dutch Jew of Portuguese stock) is better than Islam and Christianity, or any number of other religions put together. Not only that, but it is worth defending against the incursions of religious beliefs and practices from whatever quarter. What troubles me so much about the growing presence, in the heartland of traditions whose sources lie within the history of the Enlightenment struggle with religion, and its partial liberation from religious prescriptions, of pre-Enlightenment religious traditions which are striving to roll up the Enlightenment and put it back into the box from which it came.

Indeed, I have been at pains to point out, over the last two years and a few months that I have been writing this blog, that not only is the presence of a very conservative Islam putting increasing pressure on what might be called “the Enlightenment settlement” in Western democracies, but, in part, I believe, prompted by this presence, Christianity, in its various forms, but especially in its Roman Catholic and evangelical forms, has been making increasing demands to public recognition in law and cultural practice. The recent signing into law, by the conservative Governor of Kansas, Sam Brownback, of a bill that defines life as beginning at fertilisation, is an example of this increasing intrusion of religious belief into the political sphere, which is a direct challenge to the Enlightenment principle of the separation of religion from the political realm. The Governor said, on the occasion of signing the bill into law:

All human life is sacred. It’s beautiful. With this, we continue to build this culture of life in our state.

This is not only a violation of the privacy and liberty rights of women; it is a direct challenge to the Western tradition of Enlightenment values of individual liberty and rational discourse. The sanctity of life principle is essentially religious, and, however valuable we think life is – and it is, in general, justly considered to be a great good – we cannot impose on women an obligation to bring each pregnancy to its “natural” termination, whether in spontaneous abortion or birth; nor may we impose on every person in states that they consider to be conditions of intolerable suffering the duty to live until their “natural” death. Both of these prescriptive attitudes are religious in origin and function, and have no place in liberal democratic jurisdictions.

Enlightenment values have priority, not Western or Eastern, Christian or Muslim, Sikh or Hindu. And the priority of Enlightenment values is such that they should provide protection for the freedom and equality of all. Practices which abridge this freedom and equality should be prohibited, especially when they may be seen as deliberate challenges to the possession of such freedoms and such equality. This is why I believe that the burqa should be banned in all free societies, and why, in general, religiously distinguishing dress, and practices, should be reserved to private space.

Continue reading →

“The New New Atheism” my Foot!

Standard

Theo – the vacillating, ‘not quite sure whether I’m cut out to be a priest’ – Hobson wrote an article for The Spectator recently, entitled “Richard Dawkins has lost: meet the new new atheists.” He begins by asseverating that

Richard Dawkins is now seen by many, even many non-believers, as a joke figure, shaking his fist at sky fairies. He’s the Mary Whitehouse of our day.

For those of you who were not around when Mary Whitehouse was a household name in practically the whole of the English-speaking world, Mary Whitehouse was a social activist prude, railing against what she saw as an increasingly permissive society. And of course it was an increasingly permissive society. The 1960s was undoubtedly a watershed decade in Western cultural history, when it seemed, especially to those who had been brought up in the 1950s, the world was being overthrown by sex, violence and rock and roll. She was, though, a stereotypical, comic figure, trying to command the tide of change, which washed over Western societies during the sixties, to cease, and people took considerable joy in poking fun at her. Search ‘Mary Whitehouse’ on YouTube, and you will find it hard to find anything besides parody.

It is simply ridiculous to suppose that Richard Dawkins is regarded in this way. What evidence does Theo Hobson provide for his opening claim that Richard Dawkins has turned into a parody of the Mary Whitehouse variety? None at all, really. He says, with considerable aplomb, about the new atheist “movement”:

So what was that about then?

– as though the new atheism were past and finished with, and we can now see it in historical perspective – when, of course, it is as lively as ever, and producing such phenomenal results as A.C. Grayling’s soundly philosophical The God Argument. Hobson wants us to think that the new atheism was just a flash in the pan, instead of a real shot, prompted mainly by the 9/11 attack on New York and the Pentagon, and the 7/7 attacks on London, which, now that we see them as fairly limited and not all that frightening, can be dismissed with a casual wave of the hand and a reference to vicarage tea parties, as though all religion were quite anodyne and harmless.

But, quite aside from the horrific impact of those religious atrocities on the Western consciousness, let’s not forget Christopher Hitchens’ classic remark:

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse. [god is not Great, 67] 

Of course, he might have said:

But we have a right to remember how barbarically religions behave where they are strong and making an offer that people cannot refuse.

For there are, after all, many places in the world where people have no choice at all about religion. Muslims will still quote the Qur’an to the effect that there should be no compulsion in religion. But we have a right to remember where people are still imprisoned (and often murdered) for blasphemy and executed for apostasy, where any perceived insult to the “prophet” Muhammad touches off social paroxysms of frenzied crowds baying for blood. How blind, really, is Theo Hobson? Can he not see?

Continue reading →

An Unpopular Position: Ban the Burqa

Standard

This post is now available in Polish translation over at Racjonalista: thanks, as always, to Malgorzata,

I believe, contrary to what seems to be the customary liberal consensus, that such things as the veiling of women should be forbidden, not only because it expunges women from public space, but because it is inevitably coercive for some (if not most) women – and it is, I think, meant to be coercive. Even those women who don the burqa as an expression of religious piety, I suspect, mean it to be coercive to other women in the same community. We have been having a rather long – yet, for all that, civil – discussion about this on the last post – entitled “The New Atheism and the Problem of Islam” – and while we are, perhaps, no further ahead than when we began, I think the different territories have been mapped out with some clarity.

I won’t repeat that discussion here, because in this post I want to use as an example something that happened recently at the University of Leicester. A sold-out talk by Hamza Tzortzis* on the existence of god was strictly segregated: brothers (male) and sisters (female) directed to one side or the other:

segregation signs on door

According to an article in the Guardian:

A message on the group’s [the university's Islamic Society] website says: “In all our events, [the society] operate a strict policy of segregated seating between males and females.”

Nothing could be clearer than that.

Continue reading →

The New Atheism and the Problem of Islam

Standard

A lot of people are simply not paying attention. It is, of course, true that the so-called “new atheists” are opposed to religion, and what makes their opposition in some sense “new” is the frank openness of their opposition. Some opponents call it strident and shrill. Academic criticism of religion is one thing, and the new atheism is something completely different, even though, to a large extent, it is anchored in proponents who are either academics or are at least not strangers to academic discussion and the intellectual rigours of academic debate. Yet lately they are accused of leaving that rigour behind, and, in the words of one of the latest commentators:

The New Atheists became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists rather than appraisals based on intellect, rationality and reason.

The words are those of Nathan Lean, one of the latest to join the ranks of those criticising what they perceive as the extremism of the new atheism. I take the words from another new critic of the new atheism, Jerome Taylor, whose article, “Atheists Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris face Islamophobia backlash,” appeared yesterday in the Independent. And Taylor seems to be fully in accord with other critics, ending his article with another quote from Lean, who claims that the new atheism “sprinkles intellectual atheism on top of the standard neocon, right-wing worldview of Muslims.”

One of the problems with the “new criticism” is that their criticism seems to be as incendiary and ill-founded as, according to them, the new atheist critique of Islam. Indeed, none of them seem to be above misrepresenting the objects of their criticism. For instance, in this latest sally forth from their fastnesses in Britain’s premier newspapers and magazines, Jerome Taylor says, without any qualification, that Sam Harris,

Wearing a palpable disdain for Islam on his sleeve he has also written in favour of torture, pre-emptive nuclear strikes and the profiling not just of Muslims but “anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be a Muslim.”

While I think that Harris would have been better off had he left his remarks on torture or pre-emptive nuclear strikes unsaid, it is only fair to point out that those who make this kind of blanket statement are seriously misrepresenting what he does say under these headings. Indeed, while the criticism of Islam in fairly general terms seems to me to be justified, given the written evidence of the Qur’an and the Sunnah, there is no excuse for someone like Jerome Taylor to ignore the contexts and the qualifications in terms of which Harris has spoken of torture or pre-emptive nuclear attack. Nor is it obvious that Harris is “using [his] particularly anti-Islamic brand of rational non-belief to justify American foreign policies over the last decade,” as Nathan Lean suggests in his Salon article, “Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheists flirt with Islamophobia,” which Taylor quotes with approbation.

One of the problems here, I believe, is that the new atheists have devoted themselves largely to the criticism of Christianity, and their remarks on Islam have tended to be prompted mainly by events, rather than by systematic study and critique of Islam itself. They have done so, for the most part, because they do not feel qualified to criticise Islam in depth. Indeed, as Richard Dawkins recently revealed, some of them have not even read the Qur’an. Of course, that would not settle matters, for the Qur’an itself is not given an historical context. As an apparently timeless revelation, understanding of the Qur’an is impossible without the interpretive gloss provided by extra-Qur’anic sources, such as the Sira (or biography of Muhammad) and the Sunnah, which comprises the whole complex of Qur’an, Sira and Hadith (the remembered sayings of the prophet of Islam). And even then, the Islamic doctrine of abrogation, in which earlier revelations are suppressed in favour of new revelations, is nowhere clearly explained. So, reading the Qur’an is not, in itself, sufficient to ground a comprehensive criticism of Islam. Yet Islam itself, since it makes such large and implacable claims, is in serious need of criticism. Indeed, since its eruption onto the Western stage and into the Western consciousness, on 11 September 2001, and the continued threat of violence from Muslims in response to any perceived insult to its prophet, or criticism of the finality of the revelation supposedly vouchsafed to him, such criticism is an immediate and urgent necessity.

Continue reading →

Muslims have hacked the Richard Dawkins Web Site

Standard

On opening the Richard Dawkins website today (9th April 2013), which I do every morning, you will be quickly taken to the following screen (click on picture to enlarge):

Muslim Hackers have Hacked Richard Dawkins' site

And now Comodo is warning that the site is unsafe, and the following screen is displayed:

Capture

So much for their commitment to free speech, a fundamental principle for democractic governance. In that connexion it is worth remarking that the female Prime Minister of Bangladesh has said the laws against insulting a religion are already strong enough that a new anti-blasphemy law was not necessary. According to the BBC:

Bangladeshi PM Sheikh Hasina has firmly rejected demands by Islamists for a new anti-blasphemy law to punish those who defame Islam and Prophet Muhammad.

In a BBC interview, she said existing laws were sufficient to punish anyone who attempted to insult religion.

Well, so much for democracy then. Indeed, inconsistently, she says:

This country is a secular democracy. So each and every religion has the right  to practice their religion freely and fair. But it is not fair to hurt anybody’s  religious feeling. Always we try to protect every religious sentiment. [my emphasis]

So, not a secular democracy after all!

Women in Islam

Standard

Rahman (a prolific commenter) took exception to my claim that women in Islam are property, and takes the election of women leaders in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India as proof that this is not true. The only Muslim country in which he allows that women constitute property is Saudi Arabia. A cursory glance at what is going on in Egypt at the present time should disabuse anyone of that simplistic view. However, following are some quotations from the Qu’ran and other authoritative sources in Islam that show that Islam is fundamentally misogynistic. I introduce these quotations with a few comments by Ibn Warraq regarding women in Islam (from his book, Why I am not a Muslim):

Muslim jurists have insisted that the justice demanded of husbands toward their many wives is in the nature of expenses or gifts for each of the wives and not that of love or sexual relations. The Prophet, of course, has special privileges divinely sanctioned by the Koran: He can have more than four wives without being obliged to share his nights equally between them:

O Prophet! We allow thee thy wives whom thou hast dowered, and the slaves whom thy right hand possesseth out of the booty which God hath granted thee, and the daughters of thy uncle, thy paternal and maternal aunts who fled with thee to Medina, and any believing woman who hath given herself up to the Prophet, if the Prophet desired to wed her—a Privilege for thee above the rest of the Faithful. We well know what we have settled for them, in regard to their wives and to the slaves;.. . that there may be no fault on thy part. . . . Thou mayest decline for the present whom thou wilt of them, and thou mayest take to thy bed her whom thou wilt, and whomsoever thou shalt long for of those thou shalt have before neglected, and this shall not be a crime in thee. (p. 33.49-51)

As Aisha, the prophet’s wife once remarked to Him, “God comes to your aid rather conveniently when it is a question of your desires.’ The Prophet enjoyed the embraces of nine wives and, according to al-Ghazali, Muhammad was able to perform his conjugal duties to all his nine wives in one morning. What is clear is that women are seen as objects: to be acquired and gotten rid of according to the man’s whim and fancy. If one wife does not suffice, advises al-Ghazal take some more (up to four). If still you have not found peace, change then. What could be simpler! [303]

Be warned, however! As Warraq says, it is impossible to argue this with a fundamentalist Muslim:

Yet to do battle with the orthodox, the fanatics, and the mullas [sic] in the interpretation of these texts is to do battle on their (the fanatics’) terms, on their ground. Every text that you produce they will adduce a dozen others contradicting yours. The reformists cannot win on these terms—whatever mental gymnastics the reformists perform, they cannot escape the fact that Islam is deeply antifeminist. Islam is the fundamental cause of the repression of Muslim women and remains the major obstacle to the evolution of their position. Islam has always considered women as creatures inferior in every way: physically, intellectually, and morally. This negative vision is divinely sanctioned in the Koran, corroborated by the hadiths and perpetuated by the commentaries of the theologians, the custodians of Muslim dogma and ignorance. [293]

Warraq also confirms what is said below about the relationship between marriage and sex in Islam:

As one Muslim jurist put it, marriage for a Muslim male is “the contract by which he acquires the reproductive organ of a woman [my emphasis], with the express purpose of enjoying it.”

There is in Islam a complete absence of the idea of association, partnership, or compan­ionship between the married couple. The Arabic word for “marriage” is “nikah” which is also the word for “coition,” and in contemporary French slang “niquer” means “to fuck.” Bousquet’s conclusion on the subject of Muslim marriages could be summarized thus: The Muslim marriage is essentially an act by which a woman, often without being consulted, must put herself sexually at the disposition of her husband, if need be next to three other wives and an unlimited number of concubines. She must be ready to be turned out as soon as she ceases to please and never expect a conjugal partnership to arise. [302-303]

Continue reading →