Majnun, Junoon, and Jihad

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer

I’m currently engrossed in a subject inspired by a book by Michael Griffin, “Reaping The Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement In Afghanistan.” I was about half way through his informative and depressing book when other articles continued to provoke my study of the Muslim world. In a New York Times article, Nicholas Kristof related how most world religions perpetuate the oppression of women. His theme was blunt: “Any person’s human rights should be sacred, and not depend on something as earthly as their genitals.” That caught my eye.

Then one of my favorite columnists, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, wrote “Driving Miss Saudi” after a trip to Saudi Arabia, a title-spinoff of the popular movie “Driving Miss Daisy” starring Morgan Freeman as a black chauffeur driving a very white and Jewish Miss Daisy, played by Jessica Tandy, around a southern town.

Jane Ahlin of the Forum added to my resource list with her column about the Burkha-less Egyptian guide who can’t marry her Coptic Christian boyfriend because her family would kill both of them to protect their “honor.”

Eboo Patel wrote “Religious Prejudice Simmers,” directed at Americans who have prejudice toward Muslims. As if we don’t have the right! Patel used a Gallup Poll to back up his point. Four out of ten Americans admit they dislike Muslims, while nearly two-thirds admit they have little or no knowledge of Islam. I suppose the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have something to do with that.

I keep a file on Muslim countries and the religion that dominates them. While surfing it, I ran across an article about radical Muslim clerics campaigning against having women appear on TV, newspapers and magazines in Saudi Arabia.

Adding to this mess of misogyny in the oppression of women, I have to add our own “Christian” sects and churches such as the Southern Baptist Convention and the Roman Catholic Church, ever diligent in keeping women barefoot on the kitchen floor and constantly looking for buys in maternity clothes at neighborhood garage sales.

When “Obsessive Passion” Turns Into “Totally Crazy”

Usually, we hear about the two major tribes of Muslims, the Sunnis and the Shiites. There is another much smaller Muslim sect called Sufis. They are the Quakers of Islam. A Pakistani rock star named Salman Ahmad has a band named Junoon, which means “obsessive passion” in Urdu, a language spoken in Pakistan. The word “junoon” comes from the word “majnun” which means “totally crazy.” Ahmad says he is a Sufi because “the Sunnis and the Shiites have switched their brains off for over 400 years.” I think he is right. In examining their progress over the last four centuries, the only things they have created come from endorsing Western oil checks and buying loads of Viagra.

When the Taliban, the conservative “wing” of Islam, took over Afghanistan from the Soviets in the 1980’s, they attempted to establish sharia, the rigid guidelines of earlier times that kept women as second-class citizens and virtual slaves. As soon as the Taliban branch had the power, they sent tens of thousands of employed women home –- engineers, doctors, social workers, secretaries, government workers –- absolutely paralysing the country because women held 25 percent of the jobs. The Taliban sent 7,790 female teachers home, thus automatically closing 63 schools for elementary school boys because their teachers were mainly women. The 8,000 female undergraduates at Kabul University, the top university in the country, were sent home.
Females over eight years old could not be educated. Taliban men threw acid in the faces of young girls on the streets, convincing them it was unhealthy to go to school. Over 2,000 female teachers were assassinated during the first years of Taliban rule—and over 15,000 were so frightened by the fate of their sisters they abandoned the profession. This was a typical act: a Taliban commander killed nine teachers and burned down a school “because it had been used to teach Communism.”

Women who did not cover their heads and bodies with the huge sack called the burkha were beaten in the streets by the Taliban Vice and Virtue squads. If an ankle was accidentally exposed, beatings and floggings corrected that lustful act. For those who could not afford the $30 burkha, life became an actual prison. They couldn’t appear on balconies of homes. They couldn’t go outside. If they did go outside wearing a burkha, they were often hit by bicycles and cars because they only had about 30 percent vision through the claustrophobic mesh of the headpiece. They couldn’t wear high heels because the “exotic” sounds excited men. Women had tips of fingers cut off for wearing nail polish. No stranger should hear a woman’s voice. Over 80 percent of Afghan marriages are still forced on women.

The Taliban allowed women doctors to continue to practice—but only on women. They had difficulty getting to work because all buses were segregated by sex. They were forbidden to ride bicycles or motorcycles. They worked basically as physician assistants under the “guidance” of an all-male medical service.

Men were also forced to conform to Taliban rules: no Western clothing, prayer five times daily, had to grow long beards and could not use toothpaste because the Taliban provided a natural root—for a price! The Taliban banned such pleasures as TV, kite-flying, dancing, music, marbles, homing pigeons, chess and cigarettes.

Afghan women, who still average nine births in their baby-producing years, have a greater chance of dying in childbirth than anyone except females in very poor African countries. Afghan women under Taliban rule cannot be treated by a male doctor unless they have a male chaperone with them. And the doctor must diagnose and recommend treatment without touching the female’s body!

“Wondrous Treatment of Women in Islam”

This is the title of a critical article that reviews, as it says, “The barbaric nature of Islam in the cruel treatment of women.” It reveals “facts” that seem so cruel I hope some scholarly Muslim will respond and say they are not true. I have read parts of the Koran and it seems to have about the same believability level as the Bible.

Some major points:

::When the Prophet Mohammad was 25, he married his employer, Khadija Bibi, 15 years his senior. She died when he was 49. Between the ages of 49 and 63 the Prophet married at least 11 times, once to a six-year-old girl.

::Men are in charge of women because Allah “made the one….to excel the other.” The Koran states that men are superior to women. Some agents of Islam instruct that a man should control his women through brutal violence and fear.

::If women are guilty of lewdness they should be confined until death. If two men commit sodomy or some common indecency, punish them both. But if they repent, let them be. Allah is forgiving and merciful. (I guess women cannot repent for their actions.) A verse in the Koran says: “I have not left any calamity more hurtful to man than women.” (Reminds me of certain Bible verses promoted by evangelicals, Baptists and Roman Catholics.)

::Mohammad: “The majority of those who entered the fire of Hell were women.” ( I wonder of Muslims think most women are evil by nature and should end up in Hell.)

Iman Gazzali, an Islamic thinker in the 11th century, summed up the following Godly punishments for women because of Eve’s transgressions in the Garden of Eden: menstruation, childbirth, pregnancy, marrying a stranger, lack of control of her person, a smaller share of any inheritance, the inability to divorce, the limit of one husband, must stay secluded in the house, must keep head covered in house, legal testimony is worth half that of a man, can’t leave house unless accompanied by male relative, if husband dies must wait four months and ten days to remarry, if husband divorces her, she must wait three months or three menstrual periods to remarry. Most of these rules still seem to exist today. I would like to hear from a moderate Muslim on these rules. Similar rules are in “Christian” theology.

Maureen Dowd in “Modern” Riyadh

Dowd attended the first mixed exhibition of art ever held in Saudi Arabia, which bans any showing of skin, fun or romance. In fact, most of the Saudis at the show were surprised that the Vice and Virtue Police didn’t show up. The crowd was saying:”Are we in Saudi Arabia?” Some women were in burkhas, some in dresses, some pantsuits and some were uncovered. Saudi men showed up and actually talked to women they were not married to. Are times in Muslim countries a-changin’? Women are still called “Dogs” by men—with no punishment by the Vice and Virtue Police, of course.

Saudi women cannot buy a car or drive it. A Saudi woman who secretly hired a cook because her husband demanded home-cooked meals was soon divorced by him. Some Saudi women yell back at the vice police when they are told to cover their heads: “You shouldn’t be looking at me in the first place!” It’s true. Men are not supposed to look at women other than their wives. Young Saudi women want to go to restaurants with both male and female friends -– and they want to drive themselves there. French Foreign Minister Bernard Koucher recently sat at a news conference between a female Saudi surgeon and female journalist. He said: “It was bizarre to sit between a surgeon who operates and a journalist who teaches—but neither are permitted to drive!”

The Status of Women in Christian and Jewish Cultures

Israeli women fight next to men on the battlefield. They have been elected prime minister. Israeli society is in a continuing evolution of human rights, trying to blend the best of the modern with the best of the traditional. Is this why Israel is so far ahead of the Arab and Muslim countries in culture, education, and government?

Centuries ago, Jews and Arabs had the same confining rules concerning women. But Jesus Christ is credited with changing the status of Jewish women. Contrary to Mohammad, He generally treated men and women as equals. He ignored all of the old “impurity” laws, talked to “foreign” women, and taught women students in direct violation of Jewish laws. Although he selected 12 men as his “apostles,” he had many women as “disciples.” Half of his closest followers were women. Some theologians say that Jesus did not select women as “apostles” because it would have interfered with his teachings, and Jewish law prohibited unmarried women from traveling with men.

We have to remember the American Taliban is active and growing in this country. Before American women got the privilege of voting in 1920 (although they “were created equal”), women protesting that fact were locked up in insane asylums, force-fed during their hunger strikes and kept from bathrooms when locked up in jails. In 1917, authorities tried to have Alice Paul, the leader of the women’s right-to-vote movement, declared insane so she could be permanently institutionalized. A male psychiatrist at the time determined she was sane and added these words—“Courage in women is often taken for insanity.”

We still have the American Taliban trying and succeeding in passing “Stupid Women Laws” regarding abortion in such Taliban states as Colorado, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Missouri, South Dakota, North Dakota and the entire South, all male-dominated legislatures. Since when are legislatures licensed to practice ob-gyn? We still have U.S. Roman Catholic bishop-mullahs rejecting women as priests and girls on altars. I have never understood why Roman Catholic bishops, believing that life begins at conception, are not kept busy presiding at funerals for Catholic miscarriages and checking the dress of “modern” nuns.

We still have state departments of education such as the one in Texas trying to turn American schools into Christian madrasas similar to the Muslim madrasas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Much of what we do in both the Muslim and Christian religions borders on “obsessive passion” or the “totally crazy” category as expressed by Salman Ahmand.

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