The Sudanese-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali suggests Abdel-Magied must also have read the Koran with her eyes shut:
Yassmin Abdel-Magied, an Islamic activist, has been paid by the Australian government to visit countries such as Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Qatar, it is said, “to promote Australia”. Far from offering criticism of the misogynistic sharia laws on the books in those countries, Abdel-Magied recently stated that Islam is “the most feminist” of all religions.
Confronted with the abuses that are committed against women in the countries she visited, Abdel-Magied replied: “I’m not going to deny, some countries run by Muslims are violent and sexist, but that’s not down to sharia. That’s down to the culture and the patriarchy and the politics of those … countries.”
That is absurd. Abdel-Magied fits into a familiar pattern, where the government of a free society such as Australia invests a considerable sum in an individual or a group in the hope that the person is a “moderate” Muslim and will advance the assimilation of their Muslim minority through constructive engagement. Then the supposed moderate the government has invested in is exposed as a closet Islamist, in this case sympathetic to sharia law. The government is left red-faced. Others simply see red…
Yet what set of principles is less safe for women than sharia? As a moral and legal code, sharia law is among the most dehumanising, demeaning and degrading for women ever devised by man:
• Under sharia law, a woman’s testimony is worth half of a man’s testimony in court (Koran 2:282).
• Under sharia law, men are the “guardians” of women; women are to be obedient to men, and husbands may beat their wives for disobedience (Koran 4:34).
• Under sharia law, a woman may not refuse sexual access to her husband unless she is medically incapable or menstruating, a teaching based partly on Allah himself saying in the Koran, “Your women are a tillage for you; so come unto your tillage as you wish” (Koran 2:223)
• Under sharia law, a woman inherits less than a man, generally half as much, again based on holy writ: “Allah enjoins you concerning your children: the male shall have the equal of the portion of two females” (Koran 4.11, 4.12).
• Under sharia law, men and women who commit fornication are to be flogged. As to the punishment for fornicators, the Koran says: “Let not compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by Allah, if ye believe in Allah and the Last Day: and let a party of the Believers witness their punishment” (Koran 24:2).
• Under sharia law, a man may unilaterally divorce his wife through talaq, whereas women are limited to divorce either under specific circumstances, such as the husband’s impotence, or with the husband’s consent and payment of a certain amount of money (khul).
• Sharia law permits fathers to contract binding marriages for their children so long as they are minors; and although a boy married against his wishes may exercise his power to divorce his wife unilaterally once he matures, a girl’s exit from such an unwanted marriage is much more difficult.
• Under sharia law, the custody of children is generally granted to fathers, and mothers lose custody if they remarry because their attention is supposed to go to their new husbands.
• Although majority-Muslim countries have in practice abolished slavery (Saudi Arabia did so mainly as a result of foreign pressure in 1962), slavery still has not been abolished in sharia law. Sexual slavery was common in Islamic history and is accepted by sharia law.
Defenders of sharia note that in some respects, Islamic law improved the position of women in 7th century tribal Arabia, for instance by categorically banning female infanticide. Yet surely, in the 21st century, we can set the bar higher than that?
Contrary to the claims of Abdel-Magied, the problematic tenets of sharia are not some relic left over from the cultural practices of the 7th century. Today, sharia law is applied in many countries as a matter of reality, and it is also enforced in many Muslim communities in matters such as marriage, divorce, custody and inheritance proceedings.
Indeed, the countries Abdel-Magied visited are proud to call their legal code sharia law.
Read on.
And here are women who fled the countries Abdel-Magied visited, with rather different accounts of how “feminist” Islam really is.
Abdel-Magied, Abdo and Carland
