Syma Mohammed is claiming that Muslim women find it significantly more difficult than men to find a partner, as evidenced (she says) by the disproportionate number of women to men at various Muslim marriage events in the UK. She offers a number of explanations, including the fact that Muslim men can marry “people of the book” but women can’t (they must marry Muslims), and that Muslim men are likely to be able to get a wife from “back home”, while women are unable or unwilling to do this. I do not believe the situation is as rosy for Muslim men looking for wives as she makes out.

For a start, in fact very few practising Muslim men marry non-Muslim women. Many scholars recommend against it, as men are expected to make every effort to ensure that their children are raised as Muslims, and this means they see both their parents praying regularly and neither of them (for example) drinking alcohol. In fact, some even say that it is forbidden in a western context as we do not live in a Muslim country, and so the husband cannot guarantee that the children will be raised Muslim if the marriage breaks up and the mother objects. This cannot account for any significant surplus of unmarried Muslim women.

Second, one cannot entirely rely on the disproportionate number of women at these marriage events as a guide, because men and women may have different reasons for going to them. It could well be that the women who attend want to choose their own spouses because they do not want to rely on their own families to choose one for them, as the author says, because they want someone on her intellectual or achievement level, if not higher, and perhaps someone who might have a different mentality to someone their families might find for them. This is less likely to be a problem for men, who are not expected to obey whoever they marry.

She does not acknowledge that men are often expected to have a home ready for the wife to move into, or at least, have a steady job that can pay for all her needs. In theory, a man is expected to be totally responsible for meeting all the wife’s and children’s needs, such as food, clothing and shelter, although many families now accept that it is impossible to do this on one income in London unless one is very wealthy. In many Muslim countries, men cannot marry until their mid-30s because families demand high dowries for their daughters and, sometimes, gifts for themselves also, as well as an expensive wedding and feast and so on, and this is still true with some Muslim immigrant families here. If a man is finding it difficult to get work (as many men are given the economic climate), he is much less likely to be able to persuade a family to allow their daughter to marry him (and the woman does need the family’s permission).

Finally, converts often find it particularly difficult, because immigrant Muslim families are often wholly unwilling to allow their daughters to marry converts. In some cases, they will entirely refuse someone from outside their ethnic or tribal group; some will assume that someone who has experienced life outside Islam will go back to their old life, and some rejections are simply racist. This is not to say that this is never a problem for female converts, but Muslim concepts of “suitability” often demand that the husband have some advantage over the wife in wealth, profession, family history or whatever as he is the head of the household. A female convert will often express the desire to marry an Arabic-speaking man, which is likely to be greatly easier for her than for a male convert, particularly if the Arab is from one of the old Arab tribes.

None of this is to say that a woman who marries easily is guaranteed a satisfactory marriage, but there are factors which may make it easier for a woman to get married, particularly a convert, than a man. It may be easier for a well-educated Muslim man of immigrant background with a good job and a nice house to get married than a similarly well-placed woman, but it is not easier for men in more reduced circumstances.

This article by former Tory peer, Baroness Shreela Flather, appeared in the UK Daily Mail on Friday, and consists of a broad-brush attack on Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim “migrants” (note: not all — perhaps not even most — Muslims of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin in the UK are migrants at all), accusing them of maintaining multiple families through polygamy so as to milk the state for benefits. The trick, supposedly, is to marry one wife under Islamic law (i.e. not officially) and another officially, so that one wife (and her children) gets benefits as a single parent, while another gets social security as a married couple.

Two articles have been published exposing the claims in Flather’s article: this one sheds some light on Flather’s background, while this one at Left Foot Forward notes that although birth rates among those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin in the UK are higher than average, they are “not so much higher as to assert there is a general culture of very large families”; according to a Runnymede Trust report published in 2005, their birth rates were both below 3, and thus “far too close to the replacement rate of 2.1 – or the mythical 2.4 children that was deemed to be the ‘normal family’ for most of the immediate post-war period, to be described as some epidemic of large families among these communities”. Furthermore, the rate had been in steady decline, year on year, since 1983. (Report in PDF here.)

I find its central claim about “migrants” being able to bring wives not officially married into the UK to be suspect. In Pakistan, Shari’ah law is the law as regards marriage; any marriage of Muslims within the Shari’ah (that is, up to four wives) is recognised. This is not the case in the UK, which is what would result in the wife being able to claim benefits as a single mother; but this raises the issue of what basis the wives use to migrate to the UK when they have no legally recognised relationship with any British citizen or resident. The man can only bring one wife, and the first wife (should any jealousy arise) could easily claim that she was the “real wife”, by British legal standards, as she was the first woman he married, as all such marriages are recognised in Pakistan. The marriages would have to be conducted in the UK for the second wife to be the official wife, yet how did either of the wives get to the UK? (I should make it clear that I am aware of similar scams being perpetrated by Muslims in the UK and USA for years and in fact some Muslim speakers and bloggers have condemned it. However, this does not explain how anyone can get a second wife into the country on this basis.)

What irks me most about this article, however, is the suggestion that Flather was “brave” to be making it. It’s not brave for a member of the Establishment to be making broad, unsubstantiated claims about an unpopular minority group in the popular press. Bravery requires that there be some risk of personal harm or loss (such as when an ordinary person speaks out about abuse going on within a powerful organisation), not merely the possibility of public censure. It seems that every time someone makes a public attack on Muslims, however ridiculous or insulting the claims are, the reputation for violence Muslims picked up during the Rushdie era (and that was more than 20 years ago) is exploited, when in fact nobody has ever suffered serious harm in the UK for making this sort of public statement and Flather has no more reason than anyone else who has done this (and there are many) to expect it to happen to her, given her long-standing middle-class status and lack of any real connection to the two communities she attacked. Her attack was not brave; it was cowardly.

The BBC issued an advert asking for “Caucasian” white Muslim women to contribute to a programme about their lives since 9/11. They say:

The BBC World Service, Heart and Soul series, is making a programme on Caucasian Female Muslim converts to Islam over the last 10 years since 9/11. We are looking for Muslim sisters happy to share their own personal experiences of converting into a faith which has been on the political agenda over the past decade. The basis of this programme is to mark 9/11 by celebrating these personal, spiritual journeys. The programme will be broadcast on radio internationally.

I’m not going to publish the contact details, because I am sick of media features on converts to Islam overwhelmingly concentrating on white women. There have been so many such features and so often they come with the subtext of “why would a white, middle-class woman want to be a Muslim?”. It’s as if we did not live in a multicultural society and converts to Islam do not come from all of the various ethnic backgrounds and both sexes — why do they not want to hear from black women converts, for example? There are a huge number of them, particularly in London. When I first converted, I heard the story of a man of Hindu background who converted to Islam and was thrown out of the family home by his father when this was discovered. Why are these stories not worth telling?

The bit about being broadcast “internationally” is a clue — perhaps they think foreign audiences want to hear about “real British people” rather than those of foreign backgrounds (needless to say, it doesn’t matter if you are of a white foreign background). White Muslims are not new; they have existed in Turkey, Syria, Bosnia and many other places for centuries. Although at least one of the two contacts is a Muslim, the same might not be true of the others involved in the programme and so the sneering judgementalism found in other documentaries of this type might be just as obvious in this, so if the open racial bias does not put you off, I would advise extreme caution.

About three years ago, I wrote a response to a new “Islamic marriage contract” which had been issued by the so-called Muslim Parliament (now the Muslim Institute) and a couple of other secular-leaning “Islamic” organisations, and the three names listed as contacts regarding it were Cassandra Balchin, Ghayasuddin Siddiqui and Mufti Barkatullah. I contacted the last (whose mobile number was attached to a press release) to make sure that he really did endorse it, expecting him to say no, but it turned out that he in fact did. There are a whole host of reasons why the “contract”, which has been reissued as Tehmina Kazi’s article mentions above, is redundant: it is Islamically invalid, regardless of whether a lone scholar endorses it; it is not written in legal language and is full of irrelevant boilerplate as well as vague undertakings that have no place in a legally binding contract, and so would not stand up in a court of law in the UK; besides this, there are moral objections, such as that, as Dr Tawfique Chaudhury notes, “the contract lowers the status and position of the husband treating him constantly from an angle of mistrust”.

The contract is, from any perspective, full of holes. One would think it had been put out as some sort of discussion document; as a legally-binding contract, either in a Shari’ah court or a British court, it is terribly weak and for purported community leaders to endorse it and claim that it empowers women, or anyone, is totally irresponsible. The collaboration of Barkatullah with Siddiqui and Balchin, neither of whom represent traditional Islam and neither of whom are known for their scholarly credentials, is baffling. As I have said before, Siddiqui’s whole career seems to have been spent with the Muslim Parliament, an outfit which faded from view after siding with Khomeini in the Rushdie affair and having moved more recently to a modernist position, hence their reconciliation with Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, now trustees of the Institute, who excoriated the so-called Parliament as “the Mullah’s supporters’ club” in their book Distorted Imagination. He is a community leader without a community.

As for Barkatullah, one suspects that the secularists who wrote this thought that putting his name on it would stop any traditional Muslims from objecting to it, or worse, enable them to accuse us of going against Islam by attacking this “brilliant Mufti” or whatever, but what they fail to understand is that when a scholar puts his name to something that is plainly un-Islamic, it does not mean that we accept it. It means the scholar is out on a limb, and it may lead to his rejection by the community. It is not the first time Barkatullah has come out with outlandish statements; after Abu Hamza and his friends were driven out of Finsbury Park in 2003, he went on the radio to claim that the mosque would be closed to cleanse it of “physical and spiritual filth”, alleging that the Saudi royal family had been cursed from the minbar in that mosque after having funded its construction. Perhaps he might explain where he got the concept of “spiritual filth” from, or how long any mosque that had been used by the Fatimids to curse the Sahaba, let alone the Saudi royal family, was closed for purification after it came back into Sunni hands. In our conversation in 2008, he claimed that the Hanafi madhhab allows for conditions to be included in marriage contracts and used the hadeeth about “the most deserving of conditions”, when in fact, the only madhhab that makes all conditions binding is the Hanbali, not the Hanafi, and the Hanbali school has almost no followers in the UK. The other schools makes stipulations by the wife binding only if linked to a right to a divorce, or an automatic divorce. He also made out that the overwhelming majority of Muslims (I think he meant in the UK) followed the Hanafi madhhab, as if the minority that do not (which includes the Somalis, Moroccans, east and west Africans and most converts) are insignificant.

This does not mean we should not help women to avoid being exploited or abused, but there are other ways of doing this, such as by educating Muslim women and their families about their rights. If reaching practising, orthodox Muslims is the aim, then it cannot be done without respecting the Shari’ah, let alone linked to a barely-concealed attack on it. Perhaps the latter is in fact more important to some people than the former. This contract is incredibly weak, and anyone (especially any woman) adopting it so as to protect their interests in their marriage may find themselves without any protection.

One of the articles mentioned that the tests were justified on the basis of “dark age prejudices” about Asian women: two Australian legal scholars, Dr Marinella Marmo and Dr Evan Smith, say that the women were presumed to be “submissive, meek and tradition-bound” and always virgins before marriage. They also point out that the tests were of no use, because not every woman has a hymen (and it is often perforated before marriage, particularly if they marry at 35). The assumption was therefore that if a woman was a real bride, she would be a virgin. However, it is not reported that these kinds of tests happened anywhere else, even though women from other non-white parts of the Commonwealth, such as Nigeria, came to join settled spouses.

Could it have been, regardless of the excuses offered, that the tests were nothing more than gratuitous sexual abuse, perhaps intended to make immigration to the UK as unpleasant as possible? One recalls that Enoch Powell’s notorious speech specifically mentioned the inflow of thousands of dependents, not immigrant workers. Immigration officials knew that, in general, there is a much stronger taboo about extramarital or premarital sex in South Asian society and that men and women do not touch each other unless they are married or closely related. They knew, then, that the woman would enter her marriage having suffered a traumatic and humiliating experience which they would be unable to tell anyone for fear of rejection or, in some cases, violence. It is odd that no more stringent investigation, with a view to prosecuting those responsible if they are still alive, has taken place.

G2 carried the above article, and it featured a number of Muslim women who claim they are challenging stereotypes and extremism; they include Tehmina Kazi (who has commented here in the past) from the so-called British Muslims for Secular Democracy, Sara Khan of Inspire, Houriya Ahmed who was with the Centre for Social Cohesion until recently, and one Rabia Mirza who is involved with an outfit called Cheerleaders Against Everything which has “informal links” with both the BMSD and the English Defence League. (Having looked at CAE’s Facebook page, it’s not a Muslim group; she just happens to be involved in it.)

If you saw the print edition, you might have noticed that neither of the two women were wearing hijab, and that’s where their claim to be “challenging stereotypes” starts to come down, because stereotypes about Muslim women usually involve those who do wear hijab. There actually are nowhere near as many barriers to Muslim women who refuse the hijaab, or who come from families where it’s not worn anyway, achieving in mainstream society as there are for those who do wear it. Significantly, of the “record number” of Muslim MPs that were elected at the last general election, none of the females wore hijaab and all of the males were clean-shaven.

Then there’s the problem with the groups they represent. British Muslims for Secular Democracy uses the non-Muslim definition of a Muslim — namely, someone who looks like a Muslim, has a Muslim name and claims (however dishonestly) to be one. Two of their trustees are Taj Hargey and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, whose status I have discussed here in the past. Alibhai-Brown is a particularly poisonous character, notorious for her broad-brush character assassinations of Muslim women in the popular press. Sara Khan’s group “Inspire” (note: the site has sound which plays automatically) is barely less problematic; it is currently organising an event at City Hall in London, entitled “Speaking in God’s name: Re-examining Gender in Islam”, whose publicity reads:

Unfortunately some of those who deny women their rights claim to do so in God’s Name. For too long these ultra-conservative views in the UK have remained unchanged and unchallenged - until now.

The line-up of speakers includes only one person who could be called a scholar in the traditional Islamic sense; the rest are activists of one sort of another, and are expected to present standard secularist, anti-orthodox views laced with generalised attacks on traditional scholarship and a few stereotypes of their own (such as that classical scholars were all or nearly all men, which was not true, particularly in the very early days which is when most of the work of deciding what was or wasn’t the Shari’ah was done). Although there are no speakers known for extreme hostility for genuine Islam or Muslims (like Hargey or Alibhai-Brown), they do have Amina Wadud, who gave one of her “woman-led Friday prayers” at Hargey’s institution in Oxford. It is significant that no scholar and nobody from any major Muslim organisation in the UK has been invited, so it is not a dialogue with conservative Islam, or even Islam as normally practised in the UK, but merely about it, in the court of a mayor with a long history of hostility towards Islam. It’s a case of “about us, without us”.

They also make some specious claims about female “extremism”, such as that there is a “lack of Islamic literature for female followers and provision for women at mosques” which is why people like Roshonara Choudhary, who stabbed the MP Stephen Timms last year, had to learn their faith from the Internet. There is actually no shortage of such literature — you only have to pay a visit to any Islamic bookshop — and it is not just women who learn about Islam from the Internet; there are many cases of male extremists “self-radicalising” by reading material online, but there are also a lot of quite worthy Islamic forums online, as well as Islamic resources such as question-and-answer websites. As for good-quality Islamic teaching, particularly in English, there is a shortage of that for everyone, particularly adults and converts.

However, my biggest criticism of them is that they are not breaking any ground for Muslim women who wish to follow the deen in its fullness, and that includes wearing the hijaab. It has always been possible for someone with brown skin to tell a right-wing, white-dominated think-tank what its leaders want to hear, and get a job, and there have always been men and women of various ethnicities working in the race relations and equality sector. Neither is there any dispute about the right of a Muslim woman to wear hijab and be a housewife or full-time mother or run a sewing business at home. What’s at stake is the right to wear hijaab and do a normal job, and when these women take off their hijabs and talk about stereotypes about extremism and hijab in the same article, it does the women who practise the deen properly no favours.

But first: the first third of the programme was on new laws the government is proposing which would make it a requirement of anyone marrying a British citizen and intending to settle in the UK to have some proficiency in English before they can get a visa. Of course, this only applies to non-EU foreigners, so if you marry a Portuguese person who only speaks Portuguese, they don’t even need a marriage visa, but if you marry a Brazilian who only speaks Portuguese, they do, and won’t get one (unless, of course, they are entitled to any EU citizenship due to recent European ancestry — not necessarily Portuguese, I might add). Quite why Portuguese is any more valid in the UK coming from someone from Lisbon than from someone from São Paulo is a mystery, but it’s not Portuguese-speakers they are targeting, of course; it’s those who speak Urdu or Hindi or Bengali — the supposed hordes of Pakistanis marrying brides from the village back home, but of course, everyone gets caught up in it.

The programme featured a young woman who had married a man in Syria but was unable to bring him to the UK as they could not guarantee that they could support him, and feared that the language barrier could be used against him as well. Several panellists brought up the inconsistency of the government claiming to be pro-marriage while implementing immigration laws which split up married couples. I do feel some irritation, as I’ve said before, when I hear white people complain that laws they think should only apply to others turn out to apply to them as well. Still, I don’t see why the laws cannot be formed so that they specifically target British Asians who want to marry semi-literate, non-English-speaking brides from back home in preference to people from their own community, and make sure that they don’t impact anyone else.

Back to Virginia Ironside and Clair Lewis, though.

Virginia Ironside gave her “Sunday Stand” from “a crowded corner of west London”, namely under a railway bridge in Shepherds Bush, and quite why she had to do it there and in an anonymous back garden rather than in a TV studio is a mystery. At least they used a proper camera. She claimed at the beginning:

“If a baby’s going to be severely disabled or totally unwanted, surely an abortion is the act of a loving mother. Life is only a gift if the person living it feels cherished, loved and wanted and sadly, the world is full of unwanted children. To go ahead and have a baby, knowing that you can’t give it some kind of stable upbringing seems to me to be cruel.

“There is an argument that parents will love a severely disabled child and that a fatherless child will get all the love it needs from its mother, and some argue that the parents of a disadvantaged child will become better people. We all love the feeling of doing good, but to create a child who may well be going to suffer all its life is very, very unfair and no good parent, and no good mother, would want to impose that suffering on a child.”

Of course, where a baby is unwanted and where one is likely to be severely disabled are two totally different situations, but the problem with allowing abortion across the board is that it could easily be used to get rid of babies that are found to be disabled, much as it is used to eliminate girl babies in some regions of the world. Many people are uneasy about using abortion to get rid of severely disabled children, quite rightly, but will not go as far as to accept that revising the UK’s liberal abortion laws may be necessary to make this behaviour more difficult. The kinds of conditions one can get an abortion for are not limited to the most extreme; they have included a cleft palate, as stated earlier, but also include physical disabilities that leave the child’s intellect intact, like spina bifida. The American philosopher Peter Singer has specifically mentioned spina bifida as a condition in which it was better that the children affected did not survive, and that doctors he had encountered in Australia had left them untreated such that they died before they were six months old. As William Peace points out:

The most severe form of Spina Bifida, Myelomeningocele, results in paralysis and life long urinary and bowel dysfunction. I will readily agree this is less than ideal but is it reason to end a child’s life? I think not and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes points out that most people with Spina Bifida “are of normal intelligence” whose physical problems range from severe to minor. Essentially doctors, nurses, and parents are deciding to end the life of a child who is cognitively intact. Again, why? Why end a child life who has Spina Bifida? According to Singer, to survive such a child would need “multiple operations, would be severely disabled in various ways”. I do not have Spina Bifida. However, I did have a rare neurological condition [hydromyelia] that caused great pain and paralysis. I had dozens of spinal taps as a child, three massive spinal surgeries, and spent months on end in the hospital. This was in the late 1960s and 1970s when pediatric neurology was primitive at best. Yet no one suggested I should die. In fact, I am not be able to move well over half of my body, struggle to control my bowels and bladder but do not consider myself “severely disabled”. Long ago when I characterized myself as such my mother hissed at me: “You can use your mind, the most important part of your body, consider yourself lucky”. My mother was right and as a result I am alive. I have a family, a career and lead a happy life. If Singer were my parent I might be dead.

I should add that I have had quite a few friends over the years that have various disabilities, including blindness, quadriplegia (both, in one case), muscular dystrophy and M.E. (various levels of severity). It disturbs me to hear someone presume that they can decide whether these people’s lives are worth living, when they obviously think they are. Even if not, I am sure they would not want others to make up their mind for them, so to speak; even Lynn Gilderdale, who had severe M.E. and eventually chose to end her own life, was profoundly shocked when another sufferer in the UK, Sophia Mirza, died because of mistreatment:

I’m so sorry that reading about Sofia in my journal upset u so much, but I completely understand why it’s had such a big impact on u - it’s been a huge shock 4 me, too.

I understand all the “implications” hearing about the death of a severe M.E. sufferer has 4 other severely affected ppl like us….it’s all too real, isn’t it? Too possible….too near 2 our own situation….too likely that it could happen 2 us. This may sound awful (or u might feel the same), but altho I obv hate knowing that there are so many severely affected PWME (People With M.E.) - & I’d never belittle someone’s experience, or suffering - I have 2 admit that I don’t often get extremely upset when I read articles about PWME, because, 2 be honest (& I hope this doesn’t sound patronising), I’ve probably been thru what they’ve been thru & more (does that sound bad? I don’t mean it 2).

However, with Sofia it’s different - she’s gone that 1 step further, if that makes sense? And it’s a step that I’ve been SO close 2 (forcibly) taking SO many times in the past, & 1 that I could so easily be pushed over at anytime…..And I can’t help but think, if it happened 2 Sofia, what’s 2 stop it from happening 2 me?

Ironside put it to Rev Jepson, in the panel discussion, that she regarded all life as sacred, while she herself believed that life itself was only a gift if the person living it had some sense of security or being loved, and “to be brought up by people who hate you … is a curse”, while Jepson held that it was very dangerous to make the value of life contingent on someone else loving you. Kiran Bali, a “Hindu leader”, put her faith’s perspective that life begins at conception where “soul and matter” combine, and that abortion can only be justified where either the mother’s life is in danger or in cases of rape. Ironside also said she had been to eastern Europe and seen orphanages full of severely disabled children, and that one would not wish that life on one’s very worst enemy. The problem, of course, is that these situations arose either because governments harassed their populations into having more children than they wanted (as in Romania) and because those societies did not value the lives of disabled children. That, of course, has nothing to do with British attitudes to abortion or disability, rather it has to do with local attitudes, and our policy will have no effect on that, but really the change there has to come in terms of compassion and respect for those affected in those countries, not of easier access to abortion.

To be honest, I find Jepson a weak defender of disabled children in this matter; she seems incapable of coming out and saying that getting rid of a baby because it’s disabled is wrong, and all the more so if the baby is simply imperfect and has an easily-corrected deformity. Even after she launched the (unsuccessful) attempt to have doctors prosecuted for aborting a baby with a cleft palate, in interviews around the time she called for the law to be implemented properly (or something similar), rather than specifically condemning the abortion of babies for such trivial impairments and, maybe, calling for the law to be strengthened, as it was clearly not strong enough as nobody was prosecuted.

I also find Lewis’s case against abortion on these grounds problematic:

I do not have a view about abortions per say because I believe it is personal choice - I do not claim to know ‘The Correct’ date by which all terminations should be done. That is not my subject area, my subject area is equality and human rights. I do think the laws should be equal for all humans who are born here. If it’s ok til 24 weeks then it should be ok for everyone. If the law decides any time is ok, any time should be ok for everyone.

This issue should not be blamed on women, nor should women be hid behind by eugenicists. It is experimental science, not women which has demanded this. Women’s right to choose is about the right to choose whether stay pregnant or not, not about the right to commit social eugenics under social pressure (and then take the blame).

In her write-up piece today, she alleges that “those who choose to terminate usually do so under a medical and social pressure which is almost completely one sided and unfair.. it wrongly blames women for the neglect of people in society by making them responsible for the fix”. Like a lot of modern feminism, this absolves women of the responsibility they have for the decisions they make: they do not have to bend to a doctor’s suggestion that they get rid of a fetus, a doctor’s authority is nothing like what it was, and neither will society condemn them for bringing home a disabled child. There was a time when they would have been encouraged to leave a baby with Down’s Syndrome, for example, in an institution and go and have a normal life, but that was a long time ago, in most places. If a woman (or a couple) decides to get rid of a child because of a disability, that is their choice and their responsibility.

Towards the end of the discussion, Ironside claimed, “if I were the mother of a suffering child, I mean a deeply suffering child, I would be the first to want to put a pillow over its face”, and the shock of hearing this clearly registered on Rev Jepson’s face, and when challenged by the host, she said she thought any good mother would do the same. This is clearly a preposterous suggestion, and if the majority of mothers did that to their children if they were “deeply suffering”, we would hear about it far more. From my research into M.E., I’ve not heard of even one mother who, faced with a child who is suffering with extremely severe pain and sickness, cannot tolerate light or sound or bear to be touched, and cannot speak or swallow or move, sometimes for many months or years, has put a pillow over the child’s face. Not one. (No, not Kay Gilderdale either.) It’s actually a huge slur on mothers in general, actually. Many will fight for their disabled or severely ill children for years.

However, as many disabled people are painfully aware, many people will actually condone or seek to find excuses for a parent who does murder their severely disabled child, such as that the child was in pain or that the parent was under stress, when in some well-documented cases, the child was not suffering (or their suffering could be easily remedied) and the murdered child did not even live with the parent. At FWD/Forward, Anna details the litany of excuses made for the murder in Canada in 1993 of Tracy Latimer, who had cerebral palsy, by her father. She also mentioned that there had been a string of other killings of children with various severe disabilities by their parents or carers (in Canada alone), who often received lenient sentences, and a commenter noted that organisations that represented parents of autistics often jumped to the parents’ defence. This is of huge concern to actual autistic people.

An awful lot of research into various conditions is geared towards finding a pre-natal test so as to offer women the choice of aborting the pregnancy, rather than on curing the illness itself. When I wrote here in June that, to some autism advocates, “the idea that you might not want kids to be autistic is kind of like saying you want autistic people strangled at birth”, one woman with autism responded that this was exactly what it was, as much of the research was intended to facilitate abortion. The same is true, according to the same Anna at FWD/Forward, of much research into muscular dystrophy (and much money is being spent on this that could be spent on improving the lives of those already living with it). Abortion is a false cure, usually sparing the parents the difficulty and, maybe, the heartbreak of raising, and possibly outliving, a severely disabled child. Whoever they bring into the world to replace that child if they choose a termination is someone else entirely, their brother or sister, not a cured version of that child.

The article alleges that, although Islamic organisations will tell you that honour killings have nothing to do with Islam, “Islamic orthodoxy generally condones the practice, whilst not explicitly recommending it per se”. He cites as the “most egregious case” the book Umdat al-Salik, which he translates as “Reliance of the Sojourner” even though it is translated into English as “Reliance of the Traveller”, which he calls “a manual on Shari’a (Islamic law) certified by Al-Azhar University, the most prominent and authoritative institute of Islamic jurisprudence in the world, as a reliable guide to orthodox Sunni Islam”. Al-Azhar is, of course, an important centre of Islamic scholarship, but it is not “the most authoritative”, particularly in this day and age although many individual scholars at al-Azhar are well-regarded. The book also has endorsements from scholars in Syria and Jordan.

He claims:

The manual states (01.1-2) that “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right,” except when “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers)” kills his or her “offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” Hence, according to this view a parent, who murders his or her son/daughter for the sake of “honor,” whether owing to issues of chastity, apostasy and the like, incurs no penalty under Shari’a. This ruling is derived from a hadith (Sahih Muslim, Book 19, Number 4457) where it is affirmed that one should not kill a child unless one could know “what Khadir had known about the child he killed.” Khadir is a figure featured in the Qur’an who accompanies Moses on a journey and kills a son of believing parents for fear that he would rebel against the will of God (18:74 and 18:80-81).

The statement about retaliation not being obligatory when the killer is an ancestor is accurate, but what this means is that the victim’s immediate family have no automatic right to demand the death penalty. There are other categories of penalty in Islamic law, including the fixed penalties called hudood (hadd is the singular) and discretionary penalties or ta’zeer. The last is what is appropriate in such cases: it is down to the judge to set the appropriate punishment, and whether he can impose the death penalty is something you will have to ask a scholar about, but it is inconceivable that anyone should be able to get away with killing a child unjustly.

As for the hadeeth basis for the ruling, I have seen an explicit hadeeth which opposes submitting someone to retaliation for killing one of their children. As far as the story of Khidr (the “Khadir” in that article) is concerned, it is explained in more detail elsewhere by the Reliance’s translator, Nuh Ha Mim Keller, because it is commonly used to justify unlawful acts by so-called saints or mystics as Khidr (peace be upon him) clearly does things that would be unlawful if done by anyone else. In fact, he had the knowledge referred to here precisely because he was a Prophet, a rank nobody has today, or for that matter, had in the time the Reliance was written. So, the hadeeth makes it clear that killing a child is forbidden, full stop.

Al-Tamimi (if that is his real name) claims:

Therefore, it is incumbent on human rights organizations working in the Muslim world to put pressure on Islamic religious authorities to denounce unequivocally the practice of honor killings, discuss openly and honestly the religious basis that condones the custom, and work to formulate a reformed interpretation of core Islamic texts that teaches why honor killings are wrong from a religious viewpoint, all of which will end impediments to introducing stricter legal punishments for honor killings in Muslim countries.

However, Islamic law already condemns such killings, and the reason there is resistance to changing the law has much to do with the force of tradition and nothing at all to do with the killings being in any way religiously justified. There are already human rights groups working to protect women from honour killings in some of these countries, and there are shelters for women (although a lot of women at risk from such killing end up in prison for their own protection) and lawyers who help them prosecute violent relatives. The fact that these people face a difficult job because of corruption and entrenched local tradition does not mean that what they are doing is not part of Islam; as Robert Fisk points out, a substantial proportion of honour killings in these places is the work of non-Muslims, and there are large parts of the Muslim world where honour killings aren’t at all common, so clearly it has much to do with local tradition and nothing to do with Islam.

As Muslims, we have to accept what Allah has revealed. That is what Islam means — submission of our wills to His. This includes when someone else is given rights over us in a way we don’t like or may be commonplace in our culture. Those who don’t like polygamy cannot simply argue “we don’t like it”, as non-Muslim opponents of aspects of Muslim culture commonly do; instead, they resort to dishonesty, interpreting certain passages of the Qur’an, and certain incidents which took place in the life of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaih wa sallam) as if they meant things they do not actually mean — in this case, that polygamy is actually forbidden in Islam. The fact is that the Prophet and his Companions (radhi Allahu ‘anhum) didn’t consider it forbidden, and practised it.

An example Achelois uses is that of the marriage of Fatima (radhi Allahu ‘anhaa) to ‘Ali, who subsequently proposed to the daughter of Abu Jahl, who had been one of the harshest persecutors of the Muslims in Mecca and was killed in one of the early battles:

Now you can bring in ten different reasons why it was good and necessary and important and helpful and then I will bring ten counter-arguments and this will go on and on. That is why I didn’t want to link that post to Islam because idealism is different from experience and experience tells us that although the Prophet lived with over a dozen women as wives and slaves as a father he had very different sentiments for his daughter and his granddaughter. What was made halal by Allah, and that is your argument, was forbidden by the Prophet for his daughter and granddaughter. He knew how much it could hurt a woman and he didn’t want his daughter or granddaughter to be hurt like that, and the thing is they didn’t! They were not hurt through polygamy. You said polygamy doesn’t always mean abuse. No, it doesn’t but it always means hurt and even the Prophet knew it. Was Ali the kind of man who was incapable of treating all his wives equally? No! But even then the Prophet didn’t want his daughter to share Ali with another wife (he had concubines so it all boils down to sharing rights). I am not saying what the Prophet did was wrong, I am saying it was great and that is what we should all do. If Shariah is to be brought in why not base it on the Prophet’s experience rather than idealism?

When I pointed out who the proposed second wife was, Achelois flatly contradicted the hadeeth in Bukhari that states that the intended second wife was the daughter of Abu Jahl. There is at least one other hadeeth in Bukhari which states that this is who she was. The point is that, although the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) accepted that Ikrimah and other descendents of Abu Jahl were Muslims, this did not mean that he was willing for his daughter to have to put up with living with them in the same house given what Fatima had suffered at their father’s hands, and perhaps even theirs, as a child. A similar incident involves Wahshi, who as a non-Muslim killed the Prophet’s uncle, Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib; the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) told him that he never wanted to see him again even though his Islam was accepted. The lesson is that, although we are not allowed to hold grudges against people, especially Muslims for things they did before they were Muslims, this does not mean we have to love them as individuals or open ourselves up to them.

Achelois doesn’t give a source for her story. Still, I trust Bukhari because he was only a few degrees separated from the actual incident, rather than any modern academic who has read (and certainly has not memorised) a few books about the incident and is many, many more steps removed. The issue of whether women so close to the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) have a rank other women — even Sahabiyyat, many of whom were in polygamous marriages — don’t have does not occur to Achelois, it seems. Still, she does mention that some of them put conditions into their marriages that their husbands not take second wives, and this course of action (the condition must be linked to divorce or a right of the wife to divorce) is available to women who are determined not to be part of a polygamous marriage.

She also contended that the Shari’ah is “not monolithic” because various Muslim countries implement it differently. She named four countries — Bosnia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Tunisia — as having “sharia law to some extent” but having banned polygamy. The fact is that the prohibitions on polygamy in all of them were imposed not by Muslims who had decided that it was a bad thing for women, but by secularists or communists who were attached to European ways and either hated Islam or religion of any kind. As the behaviour of the states in both Turkey and Tunisia demonstrates, secularists of the sort found in these countries do not actually give a stuff about the rights of Muslim women, whether as regards education or marriage or just being able to go about their business without harassment. They only care about women of their own kind. These countries may also have some legislation which includes legacies of Shari’ah, but very often they are influenced by cultural tradition and are not wholly Shari’ah (laws on child custody after divorce are a common example). The point is that you cannot judge what Shari’ah is by the laws found in Muslim countries, especially places like Tunisia where secularists have a stranglehold on power. This is highly relevant: by definition, laws fabricated by men who hate Islam cannot possibly be considered representative of Islamic law, or of the variety of how Shari’ah is implemented. There is a big difference between misguided attempts at Shari’ah codes, like the Hudood Ordinance in Pakistan, and the deliberate suppression of Shari’ah by those who hate it, along with numerous other aspects of Muslim religion and culture — the naming of children, dress, even the alphabet, to name three things which were forcibly changed in these countries.

A further trick of the anti-polygamy set is to put a whole load of baseless conditions on it, such as the requirement that the first wife agrees (curiously, they never mention that the second wife should agree when a third is taken, and so on). This is a totally baseless condition and assumes that the first wife will almost never agree. In a comment on Ginny’s blog, Achelois introduces the condition that the husband “be available for every delivery of every child”, meaning be in the house (because all women give birth at home, don’t they?) or at least the same town. However, this isn’t a requirement either: the husband may have good reason to be away, such as business or the illness of another family member (including another wife). If this should be a requirement for a polygamous marriage, surely it should be a requirement for a first marriage also?

The fact is that Islam does not demand that we do the best thing every time. Men don’t have to be around when their babies are born, be it in the same room or the same country. There comes a point where a man’s absence equals neglect and can become grounds for divorce or even a court claim, and becomes a sin, but being there is not a religious obligation. It does not always assume the absolute worst in human nature, as many of its modern critics seems to be doing based on a few horror stories coming out of some Muslim countries. It does not forbid things to everybody based on the fact that some people are not to be trusted with it, because that is how naughty children are to be treated, not adults. Why should all men be denied a right just because a few abuse it?

Achelois seems to have an intense distrust of Muslim men, and assumed that I would be different from other men she has encountered because I’m white and a western convert — by which she meant I might agree with her, and not defend polygamy basically because I would see that it was the root of a whole lot of the evil she sees in Arab society, such that she directed an Egyptian woman who hates wearing hijab, wears it only at her mother’s insistence and wants to find a husband who will let her remove it after marriage, towards my blog among other places. Personally, I became a Muslim to be a Muslim, not to be an Arab and whatever is wrong with Arab society has nothing to do with me, but I have personally known of white converts be somewhat cynical in their treatment of women, as I mentioned in my last post on this issue. Why she thought I would necessarily agree with her on polygamy is a mystery — she has obviously not read much of this blog, and may not be aware that there are numerous white converts in such marriages. I don’t condone the abuse of women, but I am not going to condemn polygamy out of hand because God and His Messenger permitted it and because polygamous marriages can, and often do, work.

I’ll do the Frostrup one first. This is a British woman who met a Yemeni Muslim man who’s 29; his wife is 23, he married her when he was 15, and they have four children. Yet, this man doesn’t love his wife and they no longer have sex, because she’s smelled her perfume and knows he’s cheating on her. He can’t get rid of her because she’s his cousin and the mother of his children, and because his father would chuck him out and leave him without a place in the family business, and penniless.

Frostrup tells her that this man has already had “sexual relations with a child” which is illegal in this country regardless of whether it’s their culture or not. Well, if the relations took place outside the country, such as in Yemen, the law of this country does not matter. She was only a year younger than the age of consent in the UK anyway, and it’s lower in much of Europe, never mind Yemen. She also assumes that her correspondent converted to Islam only for the sake of her lover, giving her a lecture on how their behaviour makes bad Muslims of both of them:

In Yemen, women are stoned to death for such “licentious” behaviour, so thank your lucky stars your “crime” is being committed over here. I’m certainly not condoning such Stone Age punishment but trying to make you understand the enormity of your actions.

Unfortunately, I can’t get access to the Facebook debate which started when Fareena shared it, because my account is suspended due to an upgrade, but despite someone saying that it was traumatising to see that it was a non-Muslim woman talking sense to a Muslim one, I’m not wholly convinced that the story is genuine. It is too much one of those daytime TV programmes in which stupid people try to get stupid problems resolved by a TV presenter. All too often it’s a woman who has some piece of dead wood she, for some inexplicable reason, can’t seem to dump. This woman, religious or not, is a married man’s bit on the side. Islam has nothing to do with it other than that he is Muslim and that she has converted (if either of them exist), probably in the hope that he will take her on.

However, one thing Frostrup didn’t see fit to point out is that, if this man’s wife really has had four children in eight years, then she probably has her hands full and is unlikely to be the same girl she was when he married her in her early teens. The couple are still young and it is unlikely that he would have married someone he had absolutely no feelings for or attraction to. It is just wrong for a second woman to interfere in a vulnerable, but still viable, marriage in this way.

Onto Achelois’s post. This was flagged up by a tweet from Organica last Friday and I replied that polygamy was part of the Sunnah and that you couldn’t blame it for the fact that some polygamists were bad. I’ve personally seen Muslim men in monogamous marriages in the west who treat their wives with as much contempt as described in that post. Some are cynical, making promises to their wives before marriage knowing that, legally, they cannot be held to them. I’ve told the story before of how I was approached by a Kenyan family in east London whose daughter supposedly wanted to get married, but decided otherwise because her elder sister, who had married a “salafi” white convert, was told she could continue at college before marriage but was expected to drop out afterwards. The woman suggested to me did not trust that I would allow her to continue her studies, whatever I promised. I’ve also heard of sisters who were members of a Sufi tariqa being told by their non-tariqa fiancés that they could attend the big national gatherings, but their husbands “changed their minds” later.

Achelois’s post consists of a number of stories of polygamist husbands in some unnamed Gulf country treating their wives and daughters badly, among them one who refused to let his daughter go to college because he wouldn’t let anyone but himself drive her there, and he was out of town visiting his other wife. Another was a wife who was accused of adultery and divorced because she bore a child when the husband believed he had a “low sperm count” due to a medical condition, so the baby could not be his.

Neither of these stories need be directly related to polygamy, of course. The first husband could have done the same when he was away on business. The actions of the second, however, are clearly very much contrary to Islamic law as a husband is only allowed to accuse his wife of adultery if he actually catches her doing it, or if she bears a child when he has not had sex with her or he knows for sure that he is infertile, such as having lost his testicles years ago and functioning on HRT since. “Low sperm count” does not mean certain infertility; it just meant he was unlikely to have children. This is even true if a white couple have a dark-skinned baby, as testified to in a hadeeth; this could be caused by there being black ancestry in the family, much as happens when a light-coloured camel bears a dark-haired foal. This is, of course, very likely in Arabia which is right next to Africa and a lot of people are mixed-race, but it has even happened among white Afrikaners in South Africa.

Achelois has made her distaste for polygamy known in the past, based on matters of her family history, but polygamy does not in itself mean that a man will be a pig to his wife; it just means that a pig has two, three or four wives to oppress rather than just one. Monogamy is not a new thing in the west. Achelois calls polygamy a “pre-evolution” relic, “an archaic practice from when societies and human beings didn’t know and hadn’t learnt the value of human life and feelings”. The fact is that monogamy was the enforced norm in the west long before feminism or other modern ideas like representative democracy or the rule of law had been heard of. Marriages were notoriously difficult to get out of in most western countries until quite recently; some countries, particularly in the Latin-speaking Catholic world, still prohibit divorce. Churches told women who were in abusive marriages that marriage was for life — for better or worse, richer or poorer, etc.

Evolution is a modern, western concept and “evolved” always seems to mean being more like middle-class urban white westerners. Does anyone really suppose that there aren’t a fair number of such people carrying on relationships on the side, or maintaining multiple relationsihps without marrying any of them? There are entire social movements these days which embrace “polyamory”, meaning multiple relationships, with or without marriage, for both men and women. (Why does Islam permit polygyny but not multiple husbands? One good reason is that a child has a right to know who his or her father is, which would not be possible if a woman had two or more husbands, particularly if they were the same colour.) I do not doubt that there are men who abuse polygamy, but these sorts would abuse single wives or even other people generally, and there are sometimes very good reasons for having it (such as after a war), and some women for whom sharing a husband means more time to themselves. I have always said that Muslim men should recognise that most women do not like it and respect that, but we cannot blame it for men not treating their wives decently. It is just a separate issue.