“Allah's Apostle never killed anyone except in one of the following three situations: (1) A person who killed somebody unjustly (2) a married person who committed illegal sexual intercourse and (3) a man who fought against Allah and His Apostle and deserted Islam and became an apostate.” (Sahih Bukhari v.9, b.83, no.37)
We have seen that if you are a woman or a non-Muslim, you are going to have an uncomfortable time (to say the least) under sharia. But if you're a Muslim male, it's entirely different, right?
Not quite. While Muslim men enjoy many luxuries under Islamic law, sharia still holds plenty of seventh-century barbarisms in store for anyone who breaks its rules, and others who misbehave are also likely to find themselves in trouble. Islam matches, and maybe even exceeds, the brutal punishments laid out in the Old Testament of the Bible – the main difference being that Islam has never evolved away from these harsh rulings, and they are still part of Islamic law today, for any Muslim authority to legitimately enforce if they so choose.
Perhaps the most notorious and well-known of the Qur'an's over-the-top punishments is the penalty of amputation for theft: “As for the thief, both male and female, cut off their hands. It is the reward of their own deeds, an exemplary punishment from Allah. Allah is Mighty, Wise.” (Qur'an 5:38) This prohibition, however, does not seem to have been absolute, as Muhammad encouraged the taking of booty from his enemies after raids and battles on numerous occasions, and the Qur'an even directs that one-fifth of all war spoils should be donated to Allah and his charitable works (8:41).
Islam also mandates death penalties for a variety of offenses, one of the most striking being for apostasy – leaving Islam. Numerous hadith traditions have Muhammad recorded as saying simply, “Whoever changes his Islamic religion, then kill him.” (Bukhari v.9, b.88, no.6922, and others). Umdat al-Salik says that “when a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostasizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed”. Many radical Muslims take this law very seriously, and it has even been implemented in the new Afghanistan, which – backed by Coalition forces – is supposed to be a flowering democracy: Abdul Rahman, a convert to Christianity, was arrested and put on trial for his life there in 2006, only to later be released due to international pressure.
Homosexuals are also to be put to death, in line with Muhammad's sayings: “If a man who is not married is seized committing sodomy, he will be stoned to death” (Abu Dawud, b.38, no.4448); “Kill the one who sodomizes and the one who lets it be done to him” (quoted in Umdat al-Salik). There are currently several convicted homosexuals awaiting execution in Iran.
Sharia also punishes adultery with death by stoning. Apologists for Islam are quick to point out that while Islamic law may indeed command this, the punishment is not mandated in the Qur'an, which says only that adulterers should be given a hundred lashes (24:2), and that therefore the law can be easily reformed. However, in one hadith tradition caliph Umar explains that the Qur'an did originally contain a verse calling for the stoning of adulterers, but it was somehow inadvertently dropped (Bukhari v.8, b.86, no.6830). Also, Muhammad himself enforced the stoning punishment, as on one occasion when he came across some Jews who had convicted a couple of adultery. Muhammad asked them what their prescribed punishment was for such a crime. Ever since the destruction of the Temple Mount in 70 CE, the Jews had moved away from barbarous capital punishments, and the group that Muhammad encountered attempted to dissemble, claiming that the punishment the Torah prescribed for adultery was lashes only. However, Muhammad called them out on this and scolded them for ignoring their scriptures, before ordering that the couple be stoned anyway (Bukhari v.4, b.61, no.3635). Convicted adulterers are still feeling the sting of those stones in the Islamic world today.
When British teacher Gillian Gibbons was recently arrested in Sudan for allowing her pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammad, many Westerners were surprised at the anger and death threats that came her way from Sudanese Muslims. Left unexplored in the mainstream media were the roots of this farce, going back to the time of Muhammad, who ordered the assassinations of people who wrote “insulting” poems about him. To this day, some Islamic legal schools still teach that non-Muslims in Islamic countries who “mention something impermissible about Allah, the Prophet . . . or Islam” can face one of four fates: death, enslavement, ransoming in exchange for money or release without paying anything, depending on the will of the person in charge. It is unanimously agreed among all the schools that if a Muslim insults Muhammad they should be put to death.
Islam is also very clear in condoning slavery. Muhammad owned dozens of slaves and did not at all disapprove of the practice. He even gave Muslims permission to have sex with slave girls they owned: “And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess.” (Qur'an 4:24) Islamic tradition records numerous unsavoury incidents in which Muhammad gave his men permission to rape women they had captured in battle, e.g: “We got female captives in the war booty and we used to do coitus interruptus with them. So we asked Allah's Apostle about it and he said, 'Do you really do that?' repeating the question thrice, 'There is no soul that is destined to exist but will come into existence, till the Day of Resurrection.'” (Bukhari v.7, b.62, no.137) In other words, you can have as much sex as you like with your captives; the women won't get pregnant if Allah doesn't want them to. The Prophet also did it himself, “marrying” the wife of a Jewish leader whom he had just ordered beheaded after the siege of Khaybar. It is not recorded whether she consented, but it seems unlikely that she would marry and have sex with a man who had that same day murdered her husband.
Slavery has been a constant throughout Islamic history, particularly trading among non-Muslim slaves. Muslim forces would launch regular raids on non-Muslim lands specifically to acquire slaves, particularly from Greece and India, and would then sell them off for trading in other parts of the Islamic world. These slaves often also faced pressure to convert to Islam. One English captive from the eighteenth century recounted how he finally gave in to this pressure after his Muslim captors resorted to torture, setting him on fire on multiple occasions.
There is even evidence that some Western Muslims still keep slaves today. In 2006 a Saudi man in the US was found guilty of keeping a woman as a slave. The following month an Egyptian couple living in California were convicted of keeping a ten year old girl as a slave. And in early 2007 an attaché of the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington and his wife were charged with keeping three Christians in slave-like conditions.
But how is this any different to Christianity? The Bible, like the Qur'an, takes slavery for granted, never condemning it, and the Old Testament even contains regulations about selling your daughters as slaves.
And yet there has been opposition to slavery within the Christian world as far back as the Dark Ages. St Isidore of Seville declared that "God has made no difference between the soul of the slave and that of the freedman". Charlemagne and other Christian leaders also opposed it. In the 1500s, the Catholic missionary and bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas was instrumental in enacting a Spanish law forbidding the enslavement of the Indians. Furthermore, the end of slavery has its roots in Christian principles, as pioneering abolitionists such as Clarkson, Wilberforce, and Garrison were motivated by their deep Christian faith, and the Biblical assumption of the dignity and equality of all who are redeemed in Christ. Even Abraham Lincoln was compelled to help the families of slaves by appealing to Christian principles, including the Golden Rule of Jesus: Treat others as you wish to be treated.
This is not the case with Islam. Islamic slavery lasted longer and brought suffering to more people than did Christian slavery. It is estimated that the transatlantic slave trade, which operated between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved 10.5 million people, while the Islamic slave trade lasted from the seventh century to the nineteenth and involved 17 million people.
There was no abolitionist movement within Islam. When slavery did end, it was through British military force. Slavery is still openly practised in Sudan, and only ended in several Islamic countries (through Western pressure) very recently. And there is evidence that it is underhandedly practised in a good deal of other countries, such as Niger, which only abolished slavery in 2004 but where the laws are largely ignored and as many as a million people remain in bondage.
There are, of course, brave anti-slavery campaigners in the Muslim world, but they are finding it hard going because of the support for it in the Qur'an and Muhammad's (the Perfect Man's) example.
With all this oppression mandated in Islamic law, you may find yourself wanting to stay indoors and relax with a bit of self-expression or appreciation of the arts. But alas, this is forbidden also. Muhammad banned musical instruments: “Allah Mighty and Majestic sent me as a guidance and mercy to believers and commanded me to do away with musical instruments, flutes, strings, crucifixes, and the affair of the pre-Islamic period of ignorance. On the Day of Resurrection, Allah will pour molten lead into the ears of whoever sits listening to a songstress. Song makes hypocrisy grow in the heart as water does herbage.” (quoted in Umdat al-Salik) No doubt this would have been on the mind of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini when he famously uttered, “Music is treason to our nation and to our youth.” Muhammad also prohibited representational art: “Angels do not enter a house wherein there is a dog or some images (or pictures, etc) of living creatures (a human being or an animal etc).” (Bukhari v.4, b.59, no.3225)
And don't even think about sitting down and chilling out with a glass of wine, for alcohol is an “abomination, of Satan's handwork” (Qur'an 5:90).
It seems that Islam, in its traditional form, really doesn't allow you to do an awful lot, even if you're an astute believer. Of course, many Muslims do not subscribe to many of their religion's harshest ideals, and most Muslim countries are not enforcing full sharia law. But this system is precisely what Islamic supremacists want to impose on the rest of the world – by violence, if necessary. It is a system which is discriminatory and barbaric, and it stifles - maybe even denies - freedom of thought and expression. Which is why those of us in the West who value our freedom need to be aware of what it is we are defending ourselves against, if we are ever to summon up the will to prevent it from coming to pass.
For, as we shall see, Islam and liberal democracy do not go hand in hand.
No comments:
Post a Comment