Islam, Muhammad, and Women

I just finished a week intensive course on Islam last week at Erskine. It was an excellent class both as an overview of the history of the second most influential religion in the world and as an introduction to Islamic theology and culture.

By some estimates, Islam is the fastest growing religion in America. It is also estimated that of American converts, women make up 65-75%. Indicative of this trend is the fact that Dr. Ingrid Mattson is the president of the Islamic Society of North America, the largest Muslim umbrella organization in North America. This marketing stunt, a disgrace to most orthodox Muslims throughout the world, flies in North America and aids their proselytizing of ignorant, abandoned, and abused American women, looking and longing for protection and love.

But you know that these scads of female converts are not being told the truth. When asked what might annul a Muslim man's prayers, Muhammad answered that there were three things that might annul his prayers. First, if a donkey walked in front of him, second, if a dog walked in front of him, and third, if a woman walked in front of him. This is one of the reasons why to this day, women pray behind the men during prayers. When it was suggested that Muhammad demeaned women with his statement, making them equal to dogs and donkeys, he replied by stating that women are worth only half as much as men because of their feeble minds. Elsewhere, after having a vision of hell, Muhammad commented that hell was mostly filled with women. Adding insult to injury, Muhammad is well known to have had at least 13 "wives" and many other concubines. His favorite wife was a 6 year old girl. But being a gentleman, the Prophet waited until she was 9 to consummate the marriage. And of course it is no surprise that the Qur'an explicitly allows, and even encourages, Muslim men to beat their wives if they are suspected of unfaithfulness.

But the list goes on. There is of course a facade of morality and modesty in the Muslim world, but the allowances for "temporary" marriage are poorly disguised houses of prostitution, not to mention the allowance of polygamy and easy divorce affected by the ever merciful three-fold declaration of "I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you."

One episode records the Prophet seeing his nephew's daughter-in-law in less than her usual apparel. Apparently his nephew saw the keen glances the Prophet was giving his wife and offered to divorce her for him. The Prophet, being the upright man he was, of course refused. But arriving home that night, he received a vision which ordered him (quite against his will) to take his nephew's offer and to marry his wife. Tales multiply of Muhammad's exploitation of women, and the legacy of the Muslim slave trade pushes the details from disgusting to horrific.

The total number of persons enslaved by Muslims is some 4 or 5 times the number enslaved by Westerners (not to excuse their faults in the least), and where the mortality rate of the western slave trade was something like 1 in 10, the Muslim slave trade sent in the neighborhood of 4 in 5 to the grave, marching them across such harrowing terrains as the Sahara Desert. And of the (by some estimates) 180 million slaves taken by Muslims through 14 centuries of aggressive slave trade activities, most were women sold as concubines. It was the usual practice to kill any children born to these slave concubines, and all male slaves were castrated.

Of course there are and have been "decent" Muslims and ignorant Muslims and liberal Muslims who would never dream of these sorts of atrocious schemes or practices and would readily denounce various abuses in the history of their faith. And well and good; and they need to renounce their nominal paganism and come to the truth in Christ. But there is a deep deception being promulgated particularly in this nation, largely motivated (I believe) by the billions of dollars being pumped into our nation's universities and various charitable organizations, all payoff money for the continuation of Islamic slavery ("submission") through lies and deceit.