Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam

by Robert Spencer

  The contemporary Islamic scholar Azizah al-Hibri sums up the prevailing view: “The majority of Muslim scholars permit abortion, although they differ on the stage of fetal development beyond which it becomes prohibited.” Furthermore, says al-Hibri, all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence “permit abortion for exigencies such as saving the mother’s life.”154 Another Islamic scholar, the American convert Sherman Jackson, explains that only a “minority of jurists” believe that Islam forbids abortion “even during the first trimester,” and counsels Muslims against engaging in any kind of pro-life activism:

  [W]hile abortion, even during the first trimester, is forbidden according to a minority of jurists, it is not held to be an offense for which there are criminal or even civil sanctions. On this understanding, Muslim-Americans who oppose abortion should assiduously limit their activism to the moral sphere and avoid supporting positions that favor the imposition of criminal or civil sanctions in an area into which Islamic law itself never contemplated injecting these.155

  In light of all this, it is hard to understand why the idea is so widespread among conservative Catholics that Muslims would make good partners for action on life issues. In reality, the Islamic moral schema differs so sharply from the Catholic one that they have hardly any common ground at all. That is why, as we have seen, at the Beijing conference “many conference delegates said the Vatican seriously miscalculated its potential clout in the debate, especially among . . . Islamic governments to which it had appealed for support.”156 The Muslims opposed Vatican efforts to call for an end to abortion in all circumstances.

  Polygamy

  Even though Islam sanctions polygamy, Muslims in the West do not practice it openly, thereby leading some Catholics to want to enlist their help in the fight to defend traditional marriage. However, even if not every individual Muslim practices polygamy, Islam’s approval of it results in an idea of marriage that differs sharply from the Christian view. Polygamy dehumanizes women, reducing them to the status of commodities, and allows only accidentally for the mutual self-giving in love of Christian marriage. The Qur’an directs, “If you fear that you will not act justly towards the orphans, marry such women as seem good to you, two, three, four; but if you fear you will not be equitable, then only one, or what your right hands own; so it is likelier you will not be partial” (4:3).

  It should be noted that Islamic polygamy is not just a matter of the letter of the law that is no longer practiced among modern Muslims. In fact, it is more widespread among Muslims, even in the West, than most people realize. A New York City house fire in March 2007, in which a Muslim named Moussa Magassa was killed but his two wives survived, shed some light on Islamic polygamy in the U.S. The New York Times reported: “Immigration to New York and other American cities has soared from places where polygamy is lawful and widespread, especially from West African countries like Mali, where demographic surveys show that 43 percent of women are in polygamous marriages.”157

  Mufti Barkatullah, a senior imam in London, stated in 2004 that there were as many as 4,000 polygamous families in Great Britain. Ghayasuddin Siddiqui of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain (which describes itself as “a forum whose purpose is to debate, campaign and lobby on issues concerning the Muslim community in Britain”) estimated that there were fewer than that, but still a great many: “I’ve come across one man who has five wives and I would estimate that there are 2,000 men in polygamous marriages in Britain. Of those, 1,000 have multiple wives based here and the other 1,000 have one here and others in different countries.”158

  Polygamy is permitted by law in most Islamic countries, and is spreading quickly outside their borders—particularly in Europe, which has been host to waves of Islamic immigration. The Jerusalem Post noted that “Europe, while welcoming the reform of the Family Law in Morocco that made polygamy almost impossible, and pressuring Turkey to put an end to the practice (the country’s ban on polygamy is commonly overridden), is at the same time turning a blind eye to the existence of the practice within its own borders…. Immigrants from Mali, Egypt, Mauritania, Pakistan and other countries who come to live in Europe often bring along their extended families, which may contain two, three and even four wives, and all of their offspring.”159

  Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an Islamic advocacy group, said in 2007 that a “minority” of Muslims in America practiced polygamy, and noted “Islamic scholars would differ on whether one could do so while living in the United States.”160 Significantly, he didn’t say anything about the fact that polygamy is against American law; perhaps he realized even then that the legalization of same-sex marriage, a battle that was just beginning, would unlock the floodgates to all manner of hitherto unconventional familial arrangements being given the sanction of law. As numerous Catholic theologians and controversialists have pointed out, once marriage is separated from the natural birth and rearing of children, and a man can “marry” another man, all other restrictive definitions of marriage become arbitrary. Why then can’t a man enter into any kind of marital arrangement he wishes, including marrying four women at once? Multiculturalism, combined with the acceptance and legalization of same-sex marriage, has left the field clear for the legalization of polygamy in the U.S., and thereby also the further legal devaluation of the Catholic concept of marriage.

  This also explains why the supposed pro-life, pro-family Muslims have generally not stood with Catholics and Evangelicals on the front lines of the battle for marriage.161

  Divorce

  Neither will Catholics find in Islam an ally against the harm that easy divorce has done to the institution of marriage. In contrast to Catholic teaching on marriage’s indissolubility, a Muslim husband can divorce his wife at any time for any reason. All he has to do is say to his wife, “You are divorced.”162 The Qur’an mandates only a waiting period to determine whether or not the woman is pregnant (65:1), a period of approximately three months (2:228).

  It may seem that the simplicity of this procedure makes it all too easy for men to divorce their wives in a fit of anger. But this, too, is taken into account. A man may take his wife back twice after divorcing her. However, if he divorces her three times and then wants to take her back, it is not so easy. The Qur’an stipulates that she first must marry someone else and be divorced by him; only then can she lawfully return to her first husband (2:229-230).

  Women, too, can seek divorce in Islam, but it is not so easy for them. The Qur’an says, “If a woman fear rebelliousness or aversion in her husband, there is no fault in them if the couple set things right between them; right settlement is better; and souls are very prone to avarice. If you do good and are godfearing, surely God is aware of the things you do” (4:128).

  Muhammad’s favorite wife, his child bride Aisha, explains the manner in which a couple may “set things right between them.” This verse, she says, “concerns the woman whose husband does not want to keep her with him any longer, but wants to divorce her and marry some other lady, so she says to him: ‘Keep me and do not divorce me, and then marry another woman, and you may neither spend on me, nor sleep with me.’”163

  In other words, the Muslim couple sets things right between them when the woman adopts a position of begging supplicant.

  Child marriage

  Islam sets out a deficient and dangerous standard for the age at which a girl can marry—following Muhammad’s own example. Aisha recalls that she was six when Muhammad wedded her. He did not, however, take her into his household as his wife for another three years. Then he came for her. Aisha recounts:

  My mother, Umm Ruman, came to me while I was playing in a swing with some of my girl friends. She called me, and I went to her, not knowing what she wanted to do to me. She caught me by the hand and made me stand at the door of the house. I was breathless then, and when my breathing became normal, she took some water and rubbed my face and head with it. Then she took me into the house. There in the house I saw some Ansari [rec
ent Muslim converts] women who said, “Best wishes and Allah’s Blessing and a good luck.” Then she entrusted me to them and they prepared me (for the marriage). Unexpectedly Allah’s Messenger came to me in the forenoon and my mother handed me over to him, and at that time I was a girl of nine years of age.164

  According to Islamic tradition, too, Muhammad “married Aisha when she was a girl of six years of age, and he consummated that marriage when she was nine years old.”165 He was, at this time, fifty-four years old.

  Marriage to relatively young girls was not all that unusual for its time, but because in Islam Muhammad is the supreme example of conduct (cf. Qur’an 33:21), he is considered exemplary in this unto today. And so in April 2011, the Bangladesh Mufti Fazlul Haque Amini declared that those trying to pass a law banning child marriage in that country were putting Muhammad in a bad light: “Banning child marriage will cause challenging the marriage of the holy prophet of Islam . . . [putting] the moral character of the prophet into controversy and challenge.” He added a threat: “Islam permits child marriage and it will not be tolerated if any ruler will ever try to touch this issue in the name of giving more rights to women.”166 The Mufti said that 200,000 jihadists were ready to sacrifice their lives for any law restricting child marriage.

  Likewise, the influential website Islamonline.com in December 2010 justified child marriage by invoking not only Muhammad’s example but the Qur’an as well:

  The Noble Qur’an has also mentioned the waiting period [i.e., for a divorced wife to remarry] for the wife who has not yet menstruated, saying: “And those who no longer expect menstruation among your women—if you doubt, then their period is three months, and [also for] those who have not menstruated” [Qur’an 65:4]. Since this is not negated later, we can take from this verse that it is permissible to have sexual intercourse with a prepubescent girl. The Qur’an is not like the books of jurisprudence which mention what the implications of things are, even if they are prohibited. It is true that the prophet entered into a marriage contract with A’isha when she was six years old, however he did not have sex with her until she was nine years old, according to al-Bukhari.167

  Other countries make Muhammad’s example the basis of their laws regarding the legal marriageable age for girls. Article 1041 of the Civil Code of the Islamic Republic of Iran states that girls can be engaged before the age of nine, and married at nine: “Marriage before puberty (nine full lunar years for girls) is prohibited. Marriage contracted before reaching puberty with the permission of the guardian is valid provided that the interests of the ward are duly observed.”

  Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini himself married a ten-year-old girl when he was twenty-eight. Khomeini called marriage to a prepubescent girl “a divine blessing,” and advised the faithful to give their own daughters away accordingly: “Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house.”168 When he took power in Iran, he lowered the legal marriageable age of girls to nine, in accord with Muhammad’s example.

  Unsurprisingly, such laws are a boon to pedophiles, who, as Time magazine reported in 2001, can “marry poor young girls from the provinces, use and then abandon them,” all within the bounds of Islamic law.169 The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports that more than half of the girls in Afghanistan and Bangladesh are married before they reach the age of eighteen. In early 2002, researchers in refugee camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan found half the girls married by age thirteen. In an Afghan refugee camp, more than two out of three second-grade girls were either married or engaged, and virtually all the girls who were beyond second grade were already married. One ten-year-old was engaged to a man of sixty.

  Because of the Prophet’s example, such unsavory arrangements are resistant to reform. In an attempt to quash legislation that would raise the minimum marriage age to seventeen, in 2009 Muslim clerics in Yemen issued a religious decree, or fatwa, declaring that opposition to child marriage makes one an apostate from Islam.170 That law was passed but then quickly repealed after some Yemeni legislators dubbed it un-Islamic.171 The Moroccan imam Mohamed al-Maghraoui issued a fatwa in 2008 declaring that marriage with a nine-year-old girl was acceptable according to Islamic law; more Western-minded Moroccan Islamic authorities nullified al-Maghraoui’s ruling, but al-Maghraoui defiantly repeated it in 2011.172

  In Malaysia in December 2010, a government minister, Nazri Aziz, said at a press conference that the Malaysian government had no plans to legislate against child marriage, because of Islam: “If the religion allows it, then we can’t legislate against it.”173 Aziz did stipulate that the girl had to have reached puberty and begun to menstruate, but since the Qur’an contains regulations for divorcing a wife who has not yet begun to menstruate (65:4), even that was a Westernization.

  And in July 2011, the Saudi cleric Salih bin Fawzan, a member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, issued a fatwa of his own, declaring that Islamic law set no minimum age for marriage at all, and that therefore girls could be lawfully married off “even if they are in the cradle.”

  As with other aspects of Islamic law and practice, immigration has extended child marriage into Western countries. The Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) declared that in England in 2010, at least thirty girls in Islington, a neighborhood of greater London, were forced into marriage, and that some were as young as nine years old.174 In Sweden, there are several hundred reported incidences of child marriage every year.175

  Islamic apologists in the West frequently deny that Aisha was only nine when Muhammad consummated his marriage with her, but they cannot explain why so many Muslim clerics and Islamic nations base their stance on the legal age for marriage on Muhammad’s example. Many also invoke traditions that say that the Blessed Mother was in her early teens at the time that she gave birth to Jesus; here again, however, the Catholic Church does not legislate on the basis of this. Certainly the marriage of pubescent girls as young as fourteen or fifteen has been common at various times in Europe and America. However, the marriage of prepubescent girls has been unheard of in the West, and is known to cause them great physical and psychological harm. Today, child marriage causes this harm to girls all over the Islamic world, makes a mockery of the institution of marriage, and belies the common assumption among Catholics that Islamic morality is essentially identical to Catholic morality.

  And that is not all, by any means.

  Concubinage and sexual slavery

  The Qur’an forbids Muslim men to have sexual relations with “wedded women, save what your right hands own” (4:4; see also 23:1-6). Those whom their “right hands own” are slaves; since the Qur’an takes slavery for granted, it is still part of Islamic law. There has never been an abolitionist movement within Islam, for the fundamental principle of the Christian abolitionist movement, the equal dignity of all people before God, does not exist in Islam.

  Slavery is rooted in the Qur’an, which matter-of-factly allows a man four wives, plus an unspecified number of sex slaves, women captured in the course of battle with non-Muslims: “O Prophet, We have made lawful for thee thy wives whom thou hast given their wages and what thy right hand owns, spoils of war that God has given thee” (33:50). Muhammad, the supreme example for Muslims, was a slave owner.

  Of course the Bible, too, takes slavery for granted. But biblical justifications for slavery—the application of the curse of Ham to the Negro race was especially popular in the antebellum American South—were never understood among Christians to be as universal or strong as Muslim scholars have understood those in the Qur’an to be. Despite the Bible’s seeming acceptance of slavery, the early Church and medieval Church actively opposed it, and in modern times abolitionist movements arose among Christians in England and America because of the Christian idea of the universal dignity of the human person.

  In Islam, by contrast, no abolitionist movement has ever arisen. Muhammad’s exemplary status precludes it, as does the sharp and all-pervasive dichotom
y between believers and unbelievers. The enslaving of unbelievers is not considered to be a violation of their human dignity; after all, the Qur’an mandates that they offer “willing submission” to the Muslims, and “feel themselves subdued” (9:29).

  And even when the slaves are Muslims, the practice continues. Slavery is still practiced more or less openly today in Sudan and Mauritania, and there is evidence that it continues beneath the surface in some majority-Muslim countries as well—notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962; Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970; and Niger, which didn’t abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and according to a Nigerian study, as many as one million people remain in bondage there.176 These bans have been imposed by Western pressure; they have not arisen from an abolitionist movement within Islam.

  Inextricable from the concept of Islamic slavery as a whole is sex slavery, which is rooted in Islam’s devaluation of the lives of non-Muslims. The Qur’an’s stipulation that a man may take four wives as well as hold slave girls as sex slaves has been taken in Islamic law to refer to women captured in wartime, who are considered the spoils of war. Here again, Islam avoids the appearance of impropriety, declaring that the taking of married women as sex slaves does not constitute adultery, for their marriages are ended at the moment of their capture. A manual of Islamic law directs: “When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled.”177