Women-haters beat their wives. Patriarchal culture and customs allow wife beating. Almost all religions, monotheistic or polytheistic, advise women to be submissive.
In Muslim countries wife beating manuals have been always selling well. But recently an ordinary wife beating manual, ”A Gift For Muslim Couple” caught the attention of media because it was selling in Canada, where domestic violence is considered a crime.
It is a manual to control, restrain, scold, and beat wives into submission to create a happy, healthy, and satisfying marriage; a marriage to last a lifetime.The book says, research has shown men are looking for successful methods to achieve a happy satisfying life long marriage. Absolute control of and submission by their wives is the key.
‘There are many lessons in this book–
- The necessity “to restrain the wife with strength or even to threaten her.”
- “How the husband should treat the wife with kindness and love, even if she tends to be stupid and slow sometimes.”
- The absolute rights of the husband, which include his wife’s inability to leave “his house without his permission,” and that his wife must “fulfill his desires” and “not allow herself to be untidy … but should beautify herself for him. (‘She cannot leave the husband’s house without his permission./She should not refuse when he calls her for intercourse /She should not call him by his first name when calling him.’ page 45)
- How a husband should scold her, to use harsh words, “beat by hand or stick,” withhold money from her or “pull her by the ears,” but should “refrain from beating her excessively.”
People who demand banning of the books that criticize religion do not say a word against the book that advises men to beat their disobedient wives. The book advocates domestic violence in order to attain a life long happy marriage.
The book was a big seller in North America. Canada talks about the book.
Moderate Muslims are angry. They condemn the book for inciting violence against women. They even demand ban on the book.
The book is 100 years old. Maulavi Ashraf Ali Thanvi, the author of the book died in 1943. I like old books about prophets and religions written by early biographers and scholars. They did not try to whitewash the anti women or the anti science parts of religious scriptures or did not try to hide prophet’s dirty linen under the carpet. Today’s scholars or religious apologists interpret the ‘holy texts’ as if the author of the texts is a rational, modern,scientific and humane. They try hard to make god sounds like an advocate for equality and justice rather than an ignorant and misogynist. They do it because in the 21st century it is not politically correct to treat women as inferior beings or slaves. Religion and superstition remain where they were, only the tips and tricks for making people fool have been changing over time.
If people who believe in equality between men and women think that ”A gift for Muslim couple’ is 100 years old and it is out of time and out of place and it should be banned, then what about the book which is 1400 years old and which also asks men to beat their disobedient wives (Surah Nisa 4.34) and incite violence against women! Anybody thought of banning the Quran as well as other misogynistic religious scriptures?
I am against banning books. I want people to learn what really the religious scriptures say, how barbaric, inhuman, hateful and misogynistic those texts are! In the meantime let’s try to prevent the apologists of religion from whitewashing religion’s justification for domestic abuse and encourage people to have a scientific outlook.
[57% of boys, 53% of girls in India think wife beating is justified.]
I guess their idea of a “happy marriage” does not include a “happy wife”.
i agree with your views though not all religions endorse the submission of women..though the indian religons such as buddhism, hinduism, sikhism are better than islam and christianity in this regard yet people here are culturally brainwashed against women.
honour killings, dowry deaths are common in north india. the christians on other hand are far better in upholding women rights even though their religion is baised against women.
i am atheist myself yet its the conservative attitde of men than religion which affects the women
In Suriname I have seen hinduism in practice. Women are quite second rate.
No Gurmeet. Actually other religions are just as bad or worse! In Hinduism we have hymns dating back to the Vedas that sanctify the killing of baby girls and widows! That makes the most extreme form of violence on women not only permissible but actually a sacred/ religious act. This is the reason why Indians don’t even they are doing something wrong in killing women and girls en masse in India. We have annihilated almost 20% of the female population — that kind of violence is unprecedented in human history on any group of people. You talk about Buddhism. Have you ever actually read Buddha’s views on women or what was done to women during his time. Buddha believed that women were like “rot” — inferior and dim witted, and would ruin men and his precious order. He refused to allow women into Buddhism and when he did he said no matter how senior a nun she always had to bow to a male monk however junior he was. In old Buddhist texts — like the Jataka tales, this sort of ‘evil’ character is always projected on the women who are then subject to horrible forms of violence. Like Vasavadatta and Upagutta’s tale. In the end Vasavadutta has her ears, nose, hands and feet chopped off as punishment and is left to bleed to death.
A-greed!
While I can understand where your sentiments come from, and I do personally oppose censorship in all its forms, I disagree with your position regarding the historical relevance of the text itself in the modern era. What people often dont realize is that just be because a text is historical, it doesn’t mean that it is necessarily valid. Just because the text was written by a Muslim 100 years ago, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the text is considered to be a source of valid information. At the limit the text only highlights the relative views of a particular author in a particular temporal context. And lets not forget that the relative position of all women 100 years ago in all countries is also worthy of comment and criticism. Also, the use of one Ayat in the Quran devoid a contextual understanding of the entirety of the text is also problematic. This selective interpretive framework devoid of a wider hermeneutical understand of any text is especially dangerous. And lastly, with regards to the previous post about Asian religions being “better” than Islam and Christianity seems ludicrous if one considers that until the end of the 20th C. Hindu women were also thrown into the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands in a practice known as sati. As a matter of fact, if one were to study Hindu dharma (obligations of adherents), one would be quite surprised at the social duties that are demanded if hindu women. I think there has to be further knowledge needed in this topic both on the part of Ms. Nasreen and the commentators to this article. Mysogeny and chauvinism is not a product of religion but of men in areas of power.
A vital part of humanity’s drive to civilisation is increasing the freedom of women. A truly civil society cannot have half the population ‘enslaved’ by or living in fear of the other half.
There’s a lot of screwed up stuff there, but the one that stuck out to me was “She should not call him by his first name when calling him.”
What should she be calling him? Master?
I just can’t understand beating someone you claim to love.
Not an aggressive man myself I can get my head around beating up someone you hate. I don’t condone it but it at least makes some sort of sense
Hurting someone physically on purpose, pre-meditated and calculated excludes any kind of love.
“I just can’t understand beating someone you claim to love.”
Love can be so passionate it becomes infernal. It’s not enjoyable. The few ecstatic moments keep you going though. Fortunately since our divorce many years ago we are free of it. But yeah, sometimes I miss those ecstatic moments. They will never come back.
DV isn’t about love or hate.
It’s about CONTROL.
Numbers Chapter 6 is at least 2000 years pld Moses gibberish perhaps 3000 years old but just as brutal and insane as this 100 year old criminal Muslim book….. forcing women to drink piss & eat dirt from the temple floor IN THE LAW OF JEALOUSY to see if “her thy doth rot” or not is surely worse than this perverted pack of lies from Allah & his liar Mohammed to ensure vaginal ownership for the alleged holy penis
How come this is allowed in Canada, but they ban Hothead Paisan? What’s good for the goose…
Thanks to the collaboration of anti-porn radical feminists with the religious right in Canada, all the religious wife and child beating manuals a misogynist could want are legal and available here in Canada, but anything writing about safer sex or sex in general for LGBTQ folks is dirty porn and must be seized at the border.
The Vatican hates radical feminists too. You’re in good company.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2012/04/the-vatican-rebukes-radical-feminist-nuns/
Or, I’m a porn-neutral feminist who IDs as a radical feminist themself while acknowledging the incredibly nasty parts of the incredibly vital and trailblazing second wave, and how that particular chapter is still screwing over Canadian queers. Either or.
What the hell, Ophelia?
Yeah, you make a good point. Binary idealogical oppositions must be constructed. I think a lot of people get caught up in the fictional constructions and have to ignore the way ideology works when they make arguments that centre on supposed oppositions.
Jesus married a prostitute, many of the fathers of the church owned concubines or used prostitutes, church officials recently attended the hundreth birthday of a prostitute and former prostitutes make up a disproportionate percentage of many fundamentalist churches. And of course, the vatican is threatened enough by radical feminism to crack down on radical feminist nuns. One could easily make the argument that the church benefits from ecconomic exploitation of women and that in areas where the exploitation is exagerated, the benefit to the church is exagerated.
I tried to find out if this was true, googled “Canadian porn” to see if there was a news story about this Canadian ban on porn, and instead came up with a load of links to Canadian porn sites. If porn is banned in Canada, how is there so much porn in Canada?
Maybe you should instead google “R. vs. Glad Day Bookstore” and Catharine Mackinnon (who otherwise has an amazing career in human rights)’s involvement with Canadian obscenity laws. Do some fucking homework now and then, hmm?
I did do some homework. I found that gay porn was broadcast on a local Canadian news network the other day. Also googled the case you just suggested and failed to see how “anything writing about safer sex or sex in general for LGBTQ folks is dirty porn and must be seized at the border” since the case involves one magazine and doesn’t represent a blanket ban on gay porn, which is apparently available in Canada and apparently “MacKinnon and Dworkin have…stated that the new interpretation of the law, introduced by the Butler decision (R. v. Butler, [1992] 1 S.C.R. 452 (Supreme Court of Canada)), actually declares that the obscenity law was unconstitutional if used to restrict materials on a moral basis, but constitutional if used to promote sex equality. Thus, the decision makes it illegal to censor material on basis of explicit homosexual content, but such material could be censored if it could be shown to harm women.”
And then there is another problem with your argument, namely that even if there was a blanket ban on gay porn (and, according to you, materials about safe sex) in Canada and even if feminists had brought that about, that doesn’t explain how feminists caused the legal status of “wife-beatng manuels” since those things would have been legal before the advent of the law and before the advent of anti-porn feminism.
I suppose I could tell you to do some homework and learn how to write a coherant argument, but whatevs.
i fully agree with you…keep it up
You make a very good point about the clarity of old books in comparison to the weaselly words of more recent apologetics. This book (which I admit I have not seen) appears to be only too clear and decided in its attitude to women.
There is a double tragedy here. A tragedy for the abused and misprized women trapped in a loveless relationship; and a tragedy for the Muslim male who allows his human sensibilities to be damaged by the indoctrination of such poisonous ideas. These husbands are missing the whole point of marriage.
“These husbands are missing the whole point of marriage.”
Muslim marriage seems only to be concerned with the husbands sexual satisfaction and the foundational belief that his control of all members of the household has to be absolute and unquestioned.
No wonder democracy and equality are a concept foreign to muslim thought.
Woman are chattel, so are female children, to be disposed of and dealt with as seen fit.
So no, they are right at the point.
imagine a world without male entitlement, where no single male feels compelled to rape, own or dominate any woman… Where women decide who to love, when to love and how to love…. a world where children are loved & taught to love never resented as property of the rapist patriarch… a world where feminism admits all are born chosen & cherished with no exceptions, where no one lies to obtain a cheap thrill … where no woman is suspected or feared disloyal to an owner
The necessity “to restrain the man with strength or even to threaten him.”
“How the wife should treat the husband with kindness and love, even if he tends to be stupid and slow sometimes.”
The absolute rights of the wife, which include her husband’s inability to leave “her house without her permission,” and that her husband must “fulfill her desires” and “not allow himself to be untidy … but should beautify himself for her”.
How a wife should scold him, to use harsh words, “beat by hand or stick,” withhold money from him or “pull him by the ears,” but should “refrain from beating him excessively.”
You see? It’s not hard.
H-m-m-m, I will have to spend an afternoon to conduct a careful inspection of the Christian section (many, many shelves) of the B&N bookstore here in Mississippi, and also the small Christian Bookstore business near my home, to see if there are such instruction manuals for relationships which appeal to that (large) segment of our population. My only personal experience has been with the Cana Conference instruction from the RCC in the 1950’s, and that was enough to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. Until I take a good look at what goes on here in my own backyard, I don’t want to throw stones at other countries, but it seems to me lately that modern Canadians may have gone overboard with “sensitivities to cultural differences.” I’m sure that there are economic reasons for that in a city like Toronto.
The only time I was inclined to beat a female partner I decided to call the cops instead. You got that right. I called the police ON MYSELF rather than escalate the level of physical violence that had already occurred.
I just wanted to leave, but she had destroyed some of my property and threatened to destroy other property. She also interposed herself in a way that I could not leave her home without resorting to a level of violence I was not comfortable with. So I called the police. I was so blacked out with rage and fear that I could not even tell them the address (I was calling from a cell phone). I had to read the address off of her mail.
There is no reason to assault anyone. Even if someone is using force against you, there are options one can take to avoid escalating the situation. The police said I did the right thing.
With havin so much content and articles do you ever run into any issues of plagorism or copyright infringement? My site has a lot of exclusive content I’ve either authored myself or outsourced but it appears a lot of it is popping it up all over the web without my authorization. Do you know any techniques to help prevent content from being stolen? I’d really appreciate it.
Throughout the grand pattern of things you’ll get an A for effort and hard work. For the moment I will subscribe to your issue. Scottsdale Dental Design Studio, 5425 East Bell Road #101 Scottsdale, AZ 85254?
Bacopa, I have never heard of such thing. But you did the right thing man and very proactive. I salute you for your foresight and intelligence. Here is what happens legally if you had not done the right thing:
http://fatiha.hubpages.com/hub/Wife-battering-a-crime-and-its-legal-implications-in-Canada
Only the Islam is the religion which differentiate the rights of man and women and also give rights for the women as a wife the husband shouldn’t allow to beat the women ..