Published in The Times of Israel (Only women can save Islam)
We all get angry over one policy or another, over one mistake or another, but to lead 1.3 Billion people using anger as a platform is a disaster.
Islam is an angry religion. Where does all that anger come from?
Why do we Muslims find it in our best interests to show a disproportionate amount of anger as compared to compassion for others?
Does it come from knowing we failed our own religion by cocooning over the last 500 hundred years instead of opening our minds to learn from others? (Must read: “What Went Wrong?” by Professor Bernard Lewis)
Or does it come from the realization that Muslim countries are the most backward in the world in terms of sciences, economics, and political order, and it is not getting any better?
In my opinion, all that anger comes from one single phobia: Control of our women in the face of their equality and freedoms in western societies. Islam hates the West because it threatens that control.
Often, terror is not associated with that symbolic fact. Americans, for example, sometimes blame their policies – support for Israel — on terror, and other times, they blame themselves for not being politically correct. Why? Because they were led to believe it by an Islam that wishes to hide its weakness and because countries that respect women and hold them with high regard, like Israel, threaten our chokehold on women. Very few understand Islam within the context of our single-minded obsession.
Next time you see a western woman leader wear a Hijab in an Arab country, ask yourself what Diplomatic negotiations went on behind the scene for her to comply with a custom that belittles her power and prestige. This is why western female politicians rarely visit Muslim countries and Muslim leaders are happy they do not.
We are so obsessed with controlling our women that we mutilate them sexually at tender ages, we cover them in black from head to toe in 50°C temperatures to demonstrate our control to the world, and we forbid them to drive and travel on their own, or think for themselves. The Sharia law facilitates our control and channels our anger over others. Sharia is our weapon and shield to dominate our women and to defend against those threatening our ignorance.
Like Neanderthals defending their properties from raids, we defend our women from Western cultural raids. We fear Democracy and the effect it may have on our tight lock over their freedom and liberties. Islam will spend billions to insure that Democracy never takes hold in any Arab country. Look at how a Tunisian immolating himself for economic reasons has turned the Arab Spring into sectarian wars we all fear. This was no accident. Next time you hear an Arab or a Muslim leader say, “Democracy is in the eye of the beholder”, or “We have our own form of Democracy”, think Muslim women.
In the Zanzibar attack on the two British girls, the Hijab, or the all-weather Abaya, the ultimate symbols of that control, were at stake. A lesson to all the Zanzibari present or future baby makers not to follow suit as well as a lesson to westerners not to parade their free women in front of ours. Islam knows that if a Muslim woman sheds her fears and revolts, Islam, in its present form, is doomed.
The obsession sometimes leads us to commit atrocities against our own, not only the western culture. In 2002, a fire broke out in a girl school in Makah, Saudi Arabia. Fifteen girls burned alive because the religious police stopped the rescue efforts. None met the public dress code as they attempted to escape. Better die, you heap of disobedient flesh reasoned Islam.
Amongst those liberal Muslim countries, like Syria and Lebanon, the duty of today’s deformed Islam is to teach our women how to be docile and obedient servants. It is eased into the lives of our men by building more Mosques funded by Saudi Arabia, and by dispatching more Imams taught in the finest religious universities in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. As a young boy, I used to watch my mother dance the night away in Aleppo dressed with a bareback evening dress. Today, almost all the women in Aleppo are obedient, Hijab-wearing, baby-making slaves.
Besides the western culture threatening control of our women are the minorities whose women enjoy far more freedom and far more respect. The burning of churches in Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood ignoromaniacs is but an expression of eradicating those who dare threaten our dominion. We Muslims want all the minorities to leave these Muslim lands because their gentler culture is a menace. .
What a good Muslim who cares for his identity and sees the damage committed in the name of religious zealotry to do is to respect Muslim women and to hold them in high esteem. Alternatively, to anger those Muslims riding their oil barrels while snapping their whips one must extend a friendlier hand to all the minorities, a duty that saves us from ourselves.
Nothing threatens Islam of today more than to see Muslims write freely about its ills, when it comes to Muslim women, outside its control and reach.
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