Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Such open justifications of violence against women are remarkably easy to find. On Egyptian television during a 2010 talk show, a Muslim cleric, Sa’d Arafat, reviewed the rules for beating one’s wife. He began by saying, “Allah honored wives by installing the punishment of beating.”21 Beating, he explained, was a legitimate punishment if a husband did not receive sexual satisfaction from his wife. But he added: “There is a beating etiquette.” Beatings must avoid the face because they should not make a wife ugly. They must be done at chest level. He recommended using a short rod.

  If that sounds almost comical it should not distract us from the shocking reality that violence against women has surged in Egypt since the Arab Spring. When supporters of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to celebrate his inauguration in June 2014, dozens of women were sexually assaulted, and a nineteen-year-old was brutally gang-raped. These crimes were incited by Islamist preachers such as the Salafi Abu Islam, who said that any women going uncovered to Tahrir Square “want[ed] to be raped.”

  Nor is it only women who are discriminated against under sharia. More than thirty Islamic countries have state laws that prohibit homosexuality and make it a criminal offense, punishable by everything from lashing to life imprisonment. In Mauritania, Bangladesh, Yemen, parts of Nigeria and Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, convicted homosexuals can be sentenced to death. In Saudi Arabia, a man found guilty of homosexual activity may be executed or he may receive a hundred lashes and a lengthy prison sentence. In Iran, men who play “an active role” receive a hundred lashes, while the “recipient” can be put to death. For lesbians, the punishment is one hundred lashes; after four convictions, it is death.22 A 2012 study by an Iranian human rights group (IRQO) in association with the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School found that some lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals in Iran are openly forced to undergo gender reassignment surgery.23

  Death by Stoning

  Sharia also sanctions the odious punishment of stoning, a practice that should be unthinkable in this century, yet remains far too common. Today at least fifteen countries and territories have laws that allow or require death by stoning, particularly for crimes of adultery or other forms of “sexual promiscuity.” A survey for the Pew Institute in 2008 found that only 5 percent of Pakistanis opposed stoning for adultery; 86 percent were in favor of it.24

  Iran has the highest per-capita rate of stonings in the world. Under its legal system, judges are allowed to convict a defendant based not on evidence but on a “gut feeling” of guilt. In an odd echo of the religious persecutions of the European Middle Ages, when the accused could prove his or her innocence only by surviving an ordeal such as walking over burning stones or being immersed in frigid water, present-day Iranian stoning victims can survive only if they can escape. But whereas men are buried up to their waists, making escape an option for the strong and swift, women are usually buried up to their chests, wearing their chadors, making escape all but impossible.

  Stoning occurs all over the Muslim world. In Tunisia, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice demanded the stoning of a nineteen-year-old who had posted nude images of herself online. In my homeland of Somalia, a thirteen-year-old girl reported that she had been gang-raped by three men. The Al-Shabaab militia that then controlled her town of Kismayo, a port city in the south, responded by accusing her of adultery, found her guilty, and sentenced her to death. Her execution was announced in the morning from a loudspeaker blaring from a Toyota pickup truck. At the local soccer stadium, Al-Shabaab loyalists dug a hole in the ground and brought in a truckload of rocks. A crowd of one thousand gathered in the hours leading up to 4:00 p.m. Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow—named after the Prophet Muhammad’s nine-year-old wife—was dragged, screaming and flailing, into the stadium.25 It took four men to bury her up to her neck in the hole. Then fifty men spent ten minutes pelting her with rocks and stones. After the ten minutes had passed, there was a pause. She was dug out of the ground and two nurses examined her to see if she was still alive. Someone found a pulse and breathing. Aisha was returned to the hole and the stoning continued. One man who tried to intervene was shot; an eight-year-old boy was also killed by the militia. Afterward, a local sheik told a radio station that Aisha had provided evidence, confirmed her guilt, and “was happy with the punishment under Islamic law.”

  In 2014, a group called Women Living Under Muslim Laws circulated a petition to the United Nations, asking that body to enact international laws against stoning. They collected a paltry 12,000 signatures. While some Muslim clerics disavow stoning, others say the hadith supports it, while still others argue that Muhammad was merely following contemporary Jewish practice. These arguments are all presented as rational positions, as if there is a debate worth having on the subject. But how can there be any position on stoning other than that it is barbaric and evil?

  The classic Western response to relativist arguments was offered by Sir Charles Napier, who in 1842 was appointed commander of British forces in India. When local religious authorities complained against the banning of sati, explaining that it was the Hindu custom to burn alive the wife of a man who had died, Napier replied: “My nation also has a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. . . . Let us all act according to national customs.” Today, however, such an exchange is scarcely imaginable. Instead, Western authorities bend over backward to accommodate Muslim “sensitivities” and often excuse or look the other way when Muslims violate universal human rights—even when they do so in our own countries.

  Needed: A New Language of Emancipation

  Beyond the ways it restricts women’s rights and legitimizes violence against them, sharia does something more. Because of the very foundation of sharia in the dictates of the Qur’an and the hadith, there is no vocabulary in Islam that can be used to emancipate women. All the words for female rights and basic female freedoms are invariably Western. If you fight for access to education or the right to vote or the right to drive or the right not to be beaten or stoned, the vocabulary you have to use in making that argument is Western because Islamic texts and the Arabic language simply do not have the words for these types of rights and opportunities. By contrast, when women face opposition to their emancipation, those words and that vocabulary are exclusively Islamic. In Somalia, people say to women who do not want to be in polygamous marriages, “Oh, yeah, sure, you want to be just like the gaalo.” The gaalo are the infidels, a derogatory term that means being unfaithful to God. So if you don’t want to be a second or third wife, or you don’t want to be replaced by a second or third wife, you are simply being unfaithful to God. It is almost impossible to have a discussion about these issues that doesn’t bring Islam into the conversation. People say, “It’s ungodly, it’s not what the Prophet Muhammad said to do.”

  This is not to say that women have a long history of being fully emancipated in the West. Until well into the 1970s, as is well known, a married woman couldn’t even open a charge card at a Sears store in her own name. Historically, some of the most vocal forces opposing the emancipation of American women came from the Christian clergy. Many argued that the subservience of women was a God-given fact, and that to release women from the home would lead to the enslavement of men. Yet there were equally convinced clergymen on the other side. Reverend Theodore Parker of Boston said in 1853, “To make one half of the human race consume its energies in the functions of housekeeper, wife, and mother is a monstrous waste of the most precious material God ever made.”26 In Islam, by contrast, such arguments are scarcely ever heard.

  Cultural relativists prefer to wrap the issue of sharia in the intellectual equivalent of a black jilbab or blue burqa and intone the old platitudes that we should be nonjudgmental about the religious practices of others. Why? The ancient Aztecs and other peoples practiced human sacrifice, tearing the still-beat
ing hearts out of their sacrificial victims. We teach our children that this happened five hundred years ago, but we don’t condone it—and wouldn’t if the practice were suddenly revived in Mexico today. So why do we condone the “sacrifice” of women or homosexuals or lapsed Muslims for “crimes” such as apostasy, adultery, blasphemy, marrying outside of their faith, or simply wishing to marry the partner of their choice? Why, aside from the publication of reports by human rights organizations, is there no discernible reaction?

  In the twenty-first century, I believe that all decent human beings can agree that such barbarous acts should not be tolerated. They can and must be condemned and prosecuted as crimes, not accepted as legitimate punishments.

  The abuses carried out under sharia are irrefutable. If we are to have any hope for a more peaceful, more stable planet, these punishments must be set aside.

  There is probably no realistic chance that Muslims in countries such as Pakistan will agree to dispense with sharia. However, we in the West must insist that Muslims living in our societies abide by our rule of law. We must demand that Muslim citizens abjure sharia practices and punishments that conflict with fundamental human rights and Western legal codes. Moreover, under no circumstances should Western countries allow Muslims to form self-governing enclaves in which women and other supposedly second-class citizens can be treated in ways that belong in the seventh century.

  Yet that is not enough. We must also address and reform Islam’s most powerful social tool: the informal grassroots enforcement of its strictest religious principles in the name of commanding right and forbidding wrong.

  CHAPTER 6

  SOCIAL CONTROL BEGINS AT HOME

  How the Injunction to Command Right and Forbid Wrong Keeps Muslims in Line

  When I was a teenage girl growing up in Nairobi, I wondered aloud in our house why the ritual prayers had to be said five times a day. Why not cut the number down to once a day? My half sister overheard me talking and almost immediately launched into hours of lectures, not just on that day but on many subsequent days, about my failures to perform my sacred duty as a Muslim. Nor did she confine herself to lecturing me. She also went about lobbying my extended family to have me “sent away” to be treated for “madness” because I had dared to ask a question about our faith and its practice.

  This illustrates how the practice of commanding right and forbidding wrong functions in Islamic society. Debate and doubt are intolerable, deserving of censure, with the questioner reduced to silence even inside her own home. My half sister believed it to be her duty and obligation to correct me: to command me to do right and forbid me to do—or even think—wrong.

  This is only part of a larger truth about Islam. It is almost always the immediate family that starts the persecution of freethinkers, of those who would ask questions or propose something new. Commanding right and forbidding wrong begins at home. From there, it moves out into the community at large. The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century had to work quite hard to persuade family members to denounce one another to the authorities. The power of the Muslim system is that the authorities do not need to be involved. Social control begins at home.

  The constant personal and intellectual unease that many of the Muslim students in my Harvard seminar felt with any discussion of the political organization of the Islamic world is directly connected to this overarching concept of commanding right and forbidding wrong. When the Qatari man challenged me on the first day of class, he was following these principles. He was not the last to do so. I had a male student from Nigeria who claimed to be an expert in sharia, among other things. He, too, repeatedly rose to “correct” me, each time calling me “sister,” to emphasize the kinship element—although I was no doubt an apostate to him—and thereby also attempt subtly to nullify my role as the seminar leader. Women and men have very specified roles in Islamic society. It is spelled out exactly how each sex should act. And a man has an unequivocal right to command a woman, even if that woman is purportedly his teacher.

  In short, taken together, commanding right and forbidding wrong are very effective means of silencing dissent. They act as a grassroots system of religious vigilantism. And their most zealous enforcers find in these words an excuse not just to command and to forbid but also to threaten, to beat, and to kill. I think of it as the totalitarianism of the hearth.

  Origins of Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong

  As far back as the philosophy of Aristotle and the Stoics in ancient Greece, Western civilization has understood the concept that the law must “command what should be done and forbid what should not be done.” Thus the underlying concept of commanding right and forbidding wrong is not completely unique to Islam. The historian Michael Cook even speculates that “this ancient wording, like the owl on Athenian coins, found its way to pre-Islamic Arabia” from ancient Greece.1

  Whatever the origin of the phrase, however, Muhammad’s interpretation of it is explicit and novel. The Qur’an itself spells out the concept in three different places: “Let there arise out of you a band of people inviting to all that is good, enjoining what is right, and forbidding what is wrong: They are the ones to attain felicity” (3:104). “Ye are the best of peoples, evolved for mankind, enjoining what is right, forbidding what is wrong, and believing in Allah” (3:110). And later: “The Believers, men and women, are protectors one of another: they enjoin what is just, and forbid what is evil” (9:71).

  Some scholars have argued that these Qur’anic definitions might mean little more than separating believers in Islam from nonbelievers, “right” entailing choosing the faith of Allah and “wrong” the decision to worship anything else. But that is not how the injunction has usually been interpreted.

  Of course, all religions have rules. Some Protestant sects were especially intrusive in policing their members, as the early history of New England confirms. But the comprehensive nature of commanding right and forbidding wrong is uniquely Islamic. And because Islam does not confine itself to a separate religious sphere, it is deeply embedded in political, economic, and personal as well as religious life. As Patricia Crone explains, “Islamic law obliged its adherents to intervene when they saw other believers engage in sinful behavior and to persuade them to stop, or even to force them to do so if they could.” The importance of this function was even comparable with that of jihad, because for the Muslims of that era, “fighting sinners and fighting infidels were much the same.” In its practical application during the medieval era, commanding right and forbidding wrong entailed the Islamic ruler hiring a censor and market inspector who “would patrol the streets with armed assistants to ensure that people obeyed the law in public,” whether it was attending Friday prayers, fasting during Ramadan, maintaining modesty in dress, forgoing wine, or segregating men and women.2

  Remarkably, more than a thousand years later, little has changed. The religious police in Iran and Saudi Arabia, who beat women for displaying an ankle in public, the followers of the British-born lawyer and imam Anjem Choudary who carry out vigilante Muslim patrols in London,3 chastising women for refusing to cover up and knocking alcohol out of adults’ hands, and the sharia brigades cracking down on alcohol consumption in Wuppertal, Germany,4 are the twenty-first-century commanders of right and forbidders of wrong. Today, as much as in medieval times, the concepts of commanding right and forbidding wrong entail telling individual Muslims how to live, down to the most intimate aspects of their lives.

  Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Practice

  At its most extreme, the concept of commanding right and forbidding wrong provides the justification for fathers, brothers, uncles, and cousins who carry out honor killings of female relatives they believe have committed irredeemable transgressions. In many parts of the Islamic world, any behavior deemed immodest is reason enough to kill a daughter or female relative. And immodesty is extremely broadly defined: it could include singing, looking out a window, o
r speaking to a man who is not a relative. Marrying for love, in defiance of one’s parents, is also a frequent justification.

  No one knows the exact number of honor killings that happen around the world every year. Five thousand is the most commonly cited estimate, but that number illustrates only that the practice is underreported. The practice has certainly become more prevalent since the late twentieth century as more and more nations have formally adopted sharia. Almost a thousand honor killings occur annually in Pakistan alone.5 The problem is that honor killings are often not reported, or are ignored, or are disguised. There is often little or no incentive to bring them to the authorities in countries where the authorities sanction them.

  What does honor violence look like in practice? In Lahore, Pakistan, a twenty-five-year-old woman who married against her father’s wishes was stoned to death outside a courthouse. Also in Pakistan, a girl was shot dead while doing her homework because her brother had thought she was with a man. A Pakistani father and mother doused their fifteen-year-old daughter with acid because she had looked twice at a boy who passed by on a motorcycle, and from that they “feared dishonor.” Her mother said that her daughter cried out before she died, “I didn’t do it on purpose. I won’t look again.”6 But the mother added, “I had already thrown the acid. It was her destiny to die this way.” When seventeen-year-old Rand Abdel-Qader’s father killed her in Basra, Iraq, because she had allegedly fallen in love with a British soldier stationed there, local officials commented: “Not much can be done when we have an honor killing case. You are in a Muslim society and women should live under religious laws.”7