THE PLIGHT OF ISLAMIC WOMEN

Thanks to Marwan's Daughter for this excellent analysis of women who by birth or by compulsatory religion live diminished lives under the throes of Islam.

IN SOME QUARTERS IN AMERICA, some men believe that a woman must hold a full-time wage-earning job, as well as a second unpaid full-time job caring for the house, husband, and children. Anything else is seen as parasitical. The husband's parasiting off the woman's grinding second job goes unmentioned, of course.

These types of men interpret the Muslim view that a nikah-attached female is responsible solely for sexual availability to her husband as "protection." They view it as desirable, as the woman "does not have to work."

This resentful fantasy of females lazing in front of the television completely ignores Muslim reality: the women (in some Islamic countries, the majority of women) beaten freely and Koranically by their male owners; the female children molested and raped in nikah; the older and unwanted women divorced and left to starve because the Koran mandates no support; the women who lose their children; the uncovered and disobedient women who are harassed, attacked, mutilated by acid and knives, and murdered with the full collaboration of their parents, families, and entire communities—with the smiling approval of imams and government officials.

The dehumanizing Koranic injunctions that women are lesser beings, whose dress, words, movements, behavior, and participation in the public sphere must be restricted to be "holy" completely elude Western men who think this way. They can't even perceive the hideous injustice of a "heaven" where men whore with female robots for eternity, while their wives . . . wait, one supposes. They see only women whose sole responsibility is "putting out," and this makes them both resentful and envious—as a Muslim male is entitled to four females, not just their one. Yet they do not see this as simple prostitution—they see it as "protection."

The fear and blood and misery, the narrowed world, the bars on the windows and in the mind, are completely irrelevant. "She doesn't have to work." That is the beginning, and the end, of the "protection" analysis.