Little Tyrants who are the traditionalists of Islam

Little Tyrants who are the traditionalists of Islam

do you think Mohammad Shafia, is a Virtuous  Man?

It is quite shocking that Sharia law is becoming an acceptable alternative to the legal system in the U.K particularly for resolving domestic issues within Muslim families.  In this context, how are  ‘honour’ crimes understood in the Western democracies?  Year after year,  we are seeing rising levels of conflict most often between the young females in migrant Muslim families, and their more traditional male relatives. When  blood  is shed, it is almost always by the males in the family, with older females aiding and abetting.  

Of the trial reported widely in Canadian media last week, It is clear that Mohammed Shafia, the Muslim father from Afghanistan, settled in Canada since 2007,   has absolutely no feelings of remorse for his actions in murdering  his 3 teenage daughters and his wife.  Not only has he repeatedly been labelling them ‘whores’, he is reported to have also said he hopes the devil shits on their graves.  We are left wondering, is this man really 58 years old? When did he lose all human feeling? All sense of decency? Indeed we wonder,  what has made him lose all sense?  And what are we to make of his sneering, equally unrepentant polygamous second wife who is clearly his accomplice in these horrific murders?  What are we to make of their son, brought up in Canadian society, who yet obeyed the father’s tribal/religious /freakishly controlling personality? 

 As we hear about Mohammed Shafia’s volatile temper , his petty tyrannical demands,  his rages when his wishes were not being obeyed , we can see that like many men of his ilk,  his psychological state and emotional development has really not passed beyond the toddler stage of human development.   Shifting focus from him and his reprehensible acts, it is legitimate to ask, (in the interests of truthful analysis, and for the sake of preventing further such murders, come on, let’s not fear being labelled racist)  what is it about Middle-Eastern/Afghani/Pakistani /Turkish/ Iranian origin  men that can make them feel totally justified in murdering female members of their family?  In what sort of mindset, can such acts of extreme violence, be equated with restoring  men’s ‘honour?’

The girls or adult women might want to go to university, develop a career, or they might wish to dress to please themselves, or they might want freedom as to who they meet, or who they marry. Underneath these range of desires is the desire to think, feel and express themselves, ultimately, to determine the course of their life for themselves.  This is what men such as Shafia cannot stand.  It is loss of control over what are defined as their possessions: female relatives are defined as the possessions of ‘their’ men.  

We who do not accept that women are men’s possessions, whether on religious, moral or legal justifications,  are the ones who find it hard to understand Shafia’s crime against his own wife and children, the youngest only thirteen.   Last week, as I read various commentators it is clear they were struggling to  comprehend the  disgust and hatred he has expressed, underlying his horrific violence. 

But what if our mind set was different? What if our mindset was derived from Islam? I wish to show that the rationale for Shafia’s conduct lies, fairly and squarely,  on the ideology of Islam as promulgated in the Koran,  also, the teachings of its eminent scholars since its inception and most importantly, on the example of the life of the founder of Islam himself, Muhammed.

Much is being said about the distinction between honour killings,  and whether there is any difference between these and domestic violence in general. Of course it is a lamentable truth that domestic violence occurs in the homes of people of all classes and nationalities.  The difference is that only in Muslim households,  is the suppression and  control of girls and women defined as a religious duty of the males, whatever their age.   Only in Islam is violence legitimated in order to exact obedience from the wayward wife or daughter.  The founder of Islam, whom it is every good Muslim ‘s religious duty respect and to obey, helpfully  defines in one sentence, the limits of what the good woman ‘s entire aspiration should be:  ‘When a woman observes the five times prayer , fasts during Ramadan, preserves her chastity and obeys her husband, she may enter by any of the gates of paradise she wishes’.  And here is what the  good man of Islam should aspire for: ‘After fear of God, a believer gains nothing better for him than a good wife who obeys him if he gives her a command, pleases him if he looks at her,  is true to him if he adjures her to do something, and is sincere towards him regarding her person and his property if he is absent’.  Both these quotes are from the book ‘Sayings of Muhammed’ 1968, translated from Arabic into English by Ghazi Ahmed. It is the cultural expectations of pleasing and obeying men, that all Muslim women are familiar with.

So here we have the ugly tragedy played out on the minds and bodies of countless generations of women since the inception of Islam.  ‘Obey Me, please Me…’, demands each Muhammad and in his domain, his home, on pain of death, he must be obeyed.  Islam places the man as the god of the household.  Each man should have the wife and children essentially, obeying him, pleasing him and when they do  not, the moral fabric of the Muslim man’s Universe is torn. When these men emigrate to the Western countries with their laws on individual freedom and women’s rights, they do not drop the beliefs that shaped their consciousness from birth.   So all across the world, where there are such households headed by such men – such good believers of Islam – we hear of women being beheaded, being burnt, being buried alive, being strangled, being stabbed and being drowned. 

For generations upon generations, such acts occurred – a recalcitrant wife or daughter disappeared and it was no-one’s else’s business, thank you very much. The owner of his property can dispense with it how he likes.  The most that might happen is that the parents of the diseased wife might protest, but even then, not very much.  The husband held all the power.  What else is the marriage  ceremony but about giving away the daughter to the other household?  Even to this day, some good Muslim parents say, the good daughter leaves home once, on the day of her marriage, and then the second time  she leaves the home, is from her husband’s house, to be buried.  

 These men ( is it surprising so many of them  are called  Muhammad?)  must live up to their forebears’ example of what it mean to be a good Muslim man. Above all else, above the injunction to provide  for your family, above the injunction to pray five times, or to keep the fast, or to give to the poor, above all these religious duties is the duty to be seen to be in control of  your women.  If you are not, your very masculinity, that which gives you the right to be in charge of the household, sit with pride in the community of Muslim men in the mosque, is in jeopardy.  Thus we see these murderers, brazenly unrepentant, with head held high.

 The fear provoked by the cold-bloodied rage of these men is such  that most  right thinking people who wish to interpret Islam in gentler more humane ways, have cowered before them. Cowered and complied in the self-serving definition of  ‘honour’, and so generation after generation, in all Muslim societies, established as they were by force, ( over many centuries, the invaders gave three choices to the vanquished) convert, die or work to death paying high taxes)  the free thinkers, the brave, the true and the beautiful have been sacrificed. They have been murdered and their bodies left in unmarked graves. Their desire to live their life according to their own truth, their refusal to live as obedient slaves marked them as  deviant,  dangerous and disgusting.  Thus defined, there is no one to remember them, no one to cherish their memory, no one to be inspired by their acts of defiance to a code that gives men all power, that makes women the slaves of men’s arbitrary, often cruel double standards.   

Shame on the wives and mothers and sisters that collaborate.  Shame on the brothers, sons, uncles who kowtow to such fathers as Shafia and do not defend the girls and women in the family, who desire to live with dignity and honour as humans, not as the servants and playthings of depraved, and morally repugnant men such as Muhammad Shafia.

Written in honour of the memory of Rona (52) Zeinab (19)  Sahar (17) and Geeti (13). Rest in Peace. 

May the cultish thinking that justified your killing, itself soon die instead of spreading as it currently is, like a cancer, across the globe.  

May those who bully, coerce and use force and violence to silence others, whether in private or public life, themselves become disgraced, and their memory turn to dust. 

May all people who value equality and justice,  join together and refuse to bow to intimidation and the cowardice that, under the guise of cultural relativism, excuses such murderers as ‘followers of a different tradition’. 

We global citizens who are true democrats and who love justice, know that every tyrant seeks to legitimise his tyranny.  The traditionalists of Islam are no different.