The Mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali, has gained
international attention this week by saying that women are generally at
fault if they are raped. Speaking to a Muslim audience in Sydney, he
explained that rape (specifically, zina, sexual activity forbidden
under Islamic law -- a word mistranslated in published accounts of the
Sheikh's words as "adultery") is "90 percent the woman's
responsibility. Why? Because a woman owns the weapon of seduction.
It's she who takes off her clothes, shortens them, flirts, puts on
make-up and powder and takes to the streets, God protect us, dallying.
It's she who shortens, raises and lowers. Then, it's a look, a
smile, a conversation, a greeting, a talk, a date, a meeting, a crime,
then Long Bay jail. Then you get a judge, who has no mercy, and he
gives you 65 years."
Al-Hilali invoked another Islamic scholar in support of his views:
"But when it comes to this disaster, who started it? In his
literature, writer al-Rafee says, if I came across a rape crime, I
would discipline the man and order that the woman be jailed for life.
Why would you do this, Rafee? He said because if she had not left the
meat uncovered, the cat wouldn't have snatched it. If you get a kilo
of meat, and you don't put it in the fridge or in the pot or in the
kitchen but you leave it on a plate in the backyard, and then you have
a fight with the neighbour because his cats eat the meat, you're
crazy. Isn't this true? If you take uncovered meat and put it on the
street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park, or in the backyard,
without a cover and the cats eat it, then whose fault will it be, the
cats, or the uncovered meat's? The uncovered meat is the disaster. If
the meat was covered the cats wouldn't roam around it. If the meat is
inside the fridge, they won't get it. If the woman is in her boudoir,
in her house and if she's wearing the veil and if she shows modesty,
disasters don't happen."
In the uproar that followed, Muslim leaders in Australia and elsewhere
distanced themselves from Al-Hilali. Ali Roude of the New South Wales
Islamic Council declared that Al-Hilali had "failed both himself and
the Muslim community...As a father, brother and son myself, I take
offence at the portrayal of both men and women in the alleged published
comments."
Yet at the same time, Al-Hilali had defenders. Abduljalil Sajid of the
Muslim Council of Britain said that al-Hilali's remarks had been
taken out of context, and affirmed that "loose women like
prostitutes" encourage immorality in men. As for al-Hilali, Sajid
said that "he is a great scholar and he has a great knowledge of
Islamic jurisprudence....I respect his views. His intentions are noble
in order to make morality and modesty part of our overall society."
It was also somewhat surprising that Al-Hilali's remarks generated
any uproar at all. After all, the idea that a woman is responsible if
she is raped did not originate with him, and this was not the first
time it has been enunciated in the West. One notorious example occurred
in September 2004 in Denmark, when the mufti Shahid Mehdi of the
Islamic Cultural Center in Copenhagen said on the Danish television
program Talk to Gode that women who venture outside without a hijab are
"asking for rape."
Australian Muslim moderate leader Tanveer Ahmed acknowledged that "in
a large number of Muslim households, young men will be taught that
white women are cheap and easy. It is extrapolated to a much bigger
scale, for it symbolises for them a moral corruption endemic in free
societies, the kind they believe has led to a breakdown in families.
Their views have some overlap with social conservatives in general, who
see human freedoms, especially with regard to sexuality, as having gone
too far."
Even more significantly, Ahmed conceded that "what Hilali says is
consistent with a strict, conservative interpretation of Islam. This
remains the fundamental difficulty with Islam's attempts to sit with
modernity. As long as Muslims view their religion as sitting above
history and culture -- with the Koran as the literal word of God, which
in their view makes Islam undebatable -- there will always be Hilalis
who can point to certain texts and argue for a social and legal
structure consistent with 7th-century Arabia....This is a man who knows
the Koran in intimate detail and his views are consistent with a strict
reading of the Muslim holy book."
They are also, unfortunately, consistent with the example of Muhammad,
Islam's prophet, as I show in my new book The Truth About Muhammad.
The Qur'an tells men: "And all married women (are forbidden unto
you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess" (4:24) --
that is, slave girls who are considered the spoils of war. All too
often in Western countries, particularly in Europe's restive Muslim
enclaves, young Muslim men have understood this as permitting the rape
of non-Muslim women who venture out uncovered -- in accord with Shahid
Mehdi's statement.
What's more, in traditional Islamic law rape cannot be established
except by the testimony of four male witnesses who saw the act, as
stipulated by Qur'an 24:4 and 24:13. Consequently, it is even today
virtually impossible to prove rape in lands that follow the dictates of
the Sharia. Unscrupulous men can commit rape with impunity: as long as
they deny the charge and there are no witnesses, they get off
scot-free, because the victim's account is inadmissible. Even worse,
if a woman accuses a man of rape, she may end up incriminating herself.
If the required male witnesses can't be found, the victim's charge
of rape becomes an admission of adultery. That accounts for the grim
fact that as many as seventy-five percent of the women in prison in
Pakistan are, in fact, behind bars for the crime of being a victim of
rape.[i] Several high-profile cases in Nigeria recently have also
revolved around rape accusations being turned around by Islamic
authorities into charges of fornication, resulting in death sentences
that were only modified after international pressure.[ii]
In light of all this, al-Hilali's remarks should not be surprising --
but they should continue to be cause for concern. For they illustrate
the fact that the clash of civilizations isn't just taking place in
Iraq and Afghanistan and other places where the warriors of jihad are
fighting today. It is taking place right at home, in Western countries
where our deeply-held cultural values are being subjected to an
increasingly forthright and assertive challenge. If we do not defend
them now, it is those who agree with Sheikh al-Hilali who will
determine the mores of the future.
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