Inadequacy of the laws ordained by Allah in the Koran

 

We have seen earlier that Sayyid Qutb in his article Allah’s Law and the Law of Ignorance (Islamic Voice, April 2009) asserts that every Muslim should blindly follow the law Allah has revealed in the Koran without any alteration or modification. Ordinary people may be tempted to compromise with Allah’s law in view of a certain circumstances, or events, or due to willingness of his neighbours, or in fear of the enemy. But, to be a good Muslim, he must always adhere to Allah’s law alone. So he writes,

“What can one say in justification of setting Allah’s law aside and substituting for it a law of ignorance placing in the process his own desires or those of a particular community or generation above Allah’s law? …What is his justification: circumstances? events? people’s unwillingness? Fear of the enemy? Were not all these known to Allah when He commanded Muslims to implement His Law and follow His way of life? …Or does he justify his attitude by claiming that Allah’s law does not cater for new needs and new situations? Were not these needs and situations known to Allah when He made this very stern warning?

So, according to Sayyid Qutb, the law Allah revealed in the Koran some 1,400 years ago is still adequate to tackle any situation, any problem even today, because Allah has taken care of every possibility that may arise anywhere in the world at any time. Hence, a Muslim should never feel it necessary to follow jahiliya law, the law of ignorance, created by man.

But history tells us a completely different thing. During lifetime of the Prophet, Arabia was a land of semi-civilized pastoral and nomadic people; hence Allah’s law, revealed in the Koran, was adequate for solving any problem arising out of the simple Arabian society. But after Muhammad's death, particularly during the reign of the second caliph Umar, Muslims had conquered many countries, including Egypt and Syria, advanced in civilization with a complex and well-organized sociopolitical system. Particularly the economic problems like inheritance, wills and testaments, loans, payment of loans, bankruptcy, partnership in business, mortgaging of property etc., which were mostly unknown in Arabia, could not be solved with the help of Allah’s law. So it became necessary to find out whether such situation arose in Arabia during the Prophet’s lifetime and how  he could have solved such problems. This need inspired the Arabs to collect hadith or Prophet’s tradition, which started during the reign of pious Umayyad, Umar II (717–720). Eventually, some 1465 editions of the Hadith were compiled; of these compilations, only six were considered faultless by the Muslim world. And out of the six, two of them—one compiled by Bukhari and the other by Muslim—were considered absolutely flawless (Sahih Hayen) or truthful twins.

From the above discussions, it becomes evident that the law of Allah, contained in the Koran, was inadequate for the civilized world even during the Prophet's time. Therefore, the law of Allah is, no doubt, much more inadequate for the civilized world of our time. Most of all, the civilized world would identify the divine law of Allah as extremely cruel, ridiculous and unethical. Let us consider the Allah’s law regarding divorce. Allah says that if the husband utters the word “talaq” (I divorce you) thrice, the divorce would be at once operative, irrespective of time and space (M Hidayatullah, Principles of Mehamedan Law, Tripathy, 1980, p. 324), without having to provide any financial support to the divorced wife. This law is derived from the following Quranic verses:

“Divorce must be pronounced twice and then (a woman) must be retained in honour or released in kindness. And it is not lawful for you that ye take from women aught of that which ye have given them; except (in the case) when both fear that they may not be able to keep within the limits (imposed by) Allah. And if ye fear that they may not be able to keep the limits of Allah, in that case it is no sin for either of them if the woman ransom herself. These are the limits (imposed by) Allah. Transgress them not. For whoso transgresseth Allah's limits: such are wrong-doers” (2: 229).

“And if he hath divorced her (the third time), then she is not lawful unto him thereafter until she hath wedded another husband. Then if he (the other husband) divorce her it is no sin for both of them that they come together again if they consider that they are able to observe the limits of Allah. These are the limits of Allah. He manifesteth them for people who have knowledge” (2: 230).

Every civilized government would condemn it as an uncivilized law, coming from an uncivilized law-giver.

Allah’s Law, the Seed of Muslim Backwardness

In the Quranic two verses cited above, Allah clearly says that if a husband utters the word “talaq” thrice, even in an abnormal condition (say drunk) or at the point of rage, he must not be allowed to take his wife back. To get his wife back, she must be married to another man (called Mostahel) and if the latter divorces her having consummated the marriage, then only her original husband may get her back by remarrying. On commenting on this law of Allah, Sir William Muir wrote,

“Many lovers or gallants cause less shame to a woman than one Mostahel. … In order to regain his wife, a man hires (at no considerable rate) some peasants, whom he chooses from the ugliests that can be found in the streets. … It must not be forgotten that, all the immorality of speech and action connected with this shameful institution and the outrage done to the female virtue (not necessarily for any fault of the wretched wife, but the passion and thoughtlessness of the husband himself) has solely out of the verse (2:230) quoted above” (Life of Mehomet, Voice of India, p-337).

The question naturally arises: Why scholars like Sayyid Qutb insists that Muslims strictly adhere to the outdated barbaric law of Allah and never approve the civilized manmade law? The reader should notice that,

• Allah’s law enable Muslim men like Sayyid Qutb to keep their womenfolk indoor like slaves, to cover with head-to-toe black robes when outside, treat them as domestic animals or simple sex objects and machines for the procreation of children.

• Allah’s law allows these uncivilized people to keep four wives at a time and as many sex-slaves as they like.

• Allah’s law also allows them to refresh their harem by divorcing their old and aged wives by simple oral talaq and kick them out of the house like domestic animals and induct new ones keeping the number always within four, and hence without transgressing the law of Allah.

Hazrat Hassan, the son of Ali and the Prophet's grandson, whose death anniversary the Shiite Muslim mourn on the festival of Muharram, is said to have married more than a hundred wives, using the said trick, without transgressing the Alla’s law. There are so many other benefits these people enjoy through Allah’s law, e.g. beating and raping their wives, raping other women—in most cases the near relatives without facing conviction, marrying child-brides, indulging in prostitution in the name of temporary marriage or Mutah, and so on and so forth.

Most importantly, Allah’s law is necessary to keep ordinary Muslims in the darkness of ignorance, segregated in a closed compartment where the light of modern science, reason and wisdom cannot penetrate. Ordinary Muslims are condemned to the prison of ignorance and backwardness for the vested interest of a few. They should keep beard, pray five times a day, fast for a month and never become enlightened. They should become mujahideen, wage jihad against the kafirs and turn a dar-ul-harb into a dar-ul-Islam for the benefit of a few elites. They must not think, they should only carry out the orders of Allah. They should not seek the truth beyond the truth Allah had revealed 1400 years ago and forcibly propagate and implement it. They are to be led by the imams, mullahs and maulabhis, as a flock of sheep is led by the shepherds. Therefore, they must adhere to Allah’s laws, never follow civilized laws of the modern world and remain condemned to backward. The Muslims of India are no worse victim of this.

A few more examples of oppressive law of Allah

One should also consider the law that Allah has revealed regarding the rape of a woman. It is well known that, according to Allah’s law, if a woman brings allegation of rape against a man, she should bring four male eye-witnesses. If she fails to do so, her allegation of rape would be treated as her own frank confession of having illicit sex with a man and she should be convicted of committing or fornication or adultery that calls for a penalty of a hundred lashes or stoning to death, respectively. It's like Allah simply saying: “O women of the faith, if a man of your faith rapes you, you must endure that without any protest. If you do protest, you will be murdered by stoning.”

None but a Muslim would claim this law of Allah divine and civilized. Every non-Muslim would say that, through this law, Allah has given clean chit to Muslim men to rape any women they like. As  says a Bangladeshi Human Rights activist,

“This law of Allah has made it impossible to prosecute rapists in Muslim countries where courts deliver judgment according to Shariah law or law ordained by Allah. Whenever in such a country a woman admits having been raped, she risks to be prosecuted for having sex outside marriage - an offence punishable by 100 lashes or death by stoning (Koran, 24:2)”.

On 27 October last year (2008), the entire world was shocked to know that a 13 year old girl in Somalia, Aisha Duhulowa, a victim of gang rape, was stoned to death. Despite a UN condemnation the incident (issued on October 30, 2008), dozens of men took part in stoning Aisha Duhulowa to death in a stadium in the southern city of Kismayo in front of 1,000 onlookers. She was screaming and begging for mercy, but when some family members attempted to intervene, shots were fired by the Islamic militia and a baby was killed (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=11224565).

While commenting on the incident, journalist Hasan Mahmud (hasan.mahmud@hotmail.com) wrote, “There is a traceable dynamic in Sharia Law that is bound to lead to this barbarity. And unless we abandon these laws we will never be able to emerge from this barbarity. It was a blunder that Muslim jurists included rape in the Hudood section of Sharia Law that deals with murder, bodily harm, apostasy, drinking, defamation, theft, adultery and highway robbery. But anyone who tried to change these laws ended up banging their heads against the wall. Mawdudi, the founding father of modern Political Islam, claims that even if all the world’s Muslims together wanted to make the slightest change in these laws, they would not be allowed to do so.” (Islamic Law and Constitution, p. 140.)

The Shariah law is applied in Islamic countries from Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan up to Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria with varying strictness. Local Sharia courts in Bangladesh regularly punish raped minor girls and women by flogging and beating them with shoes. State instituted Sharia courts in Pakistan have punished thousands of raped women with long-term imprisonment. “One may think that Allah cannot ordain such barbaric law and such horrific barbarity cannot be the real Sharia law. But; that it is a misapplication of the law by ignorant clergy.. Sadly, neither is true”, Mr Hasan Mahmud added.

According to a report appeared in Cape Times, France, on 5 February 2008, two Iranian sisters, Zohre (27) and Azar Kabiri (28) from Khadam Abad, a suburb of the city of Karaj, were convicted of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. The ruling by the Shariah court said that the two sisters were found guilty of adultery, a capital crime in Iran, after the husband of one of the pair presented video evidence showing them in the company of other men while he was away. While commenting on the verdict, lawyer Jabbar Solati said, "Branch 23 of the supreme court has confirmed the stoning sentence. The two sisters had initially been tried for "illegal relations" and received 99 lashes for the same offence”. (http://www.religionnewsblog.com/20534/islamic-barbarism-2; see also http://iranhr.net/spip.php?article196)

“I was a teacher and loved my job but my husband did not let me work and he was always suspicious of me and thought our differences were because I had an affair,” said Zohre. “To make sure I planted a camera in the house. I found out that she and her sister brought over men after I left and had relationships with them,” said the husband. The sisters admitted that they were in the video presented by the husband, but argued that there was no adultery as none of the footage showed them engaged in a sexual act with other men.

The Iranian government signed a moratorium with the EU in December 2002, according to which Iran was supposed to stop the stoning punishment. But since then at least two people have been punished by stoning to death. "Mahboobeh" was stoned to death in the city of Mashad in May 2006, and Jafar Kiyani was stoned to death in a village outside Takestaan in July 2007. According to another report appeared, dated 7 January 2006, an Iranian court sentenced a teenage rape victim to death by hanging after she confessed that she had unintentionally killed a man, who had tried to rape both her and her niece. The state-run daily Etemaad reported that 18-year-old Nazanin confessed to stabbing one of three men who had attacked the pair along with their boyfriends while they were spending some time in a park west of the Iranian capital in March 2005.

In Pakistan, it is reported that three out of four women in prison, convicted under Hudud laws, are rape victims. Because rape is equated with zina (fornication) under Hudud law, rape victims are required to produce four pious male witnesses. It is of course nearly impossible for the victims of rape to produce the four male witnesses to prove their allegation. Therefore, 75 percent of the victims of rape in Pakistan—on account of their police report of rape, which is taken as a confession of illicit sex on their part—face charges of Zina and Incest and are duly found guilty (http://www.muslimaccess.com/articles/Women/rape_zina_in_islam.asp).

In Muslim countries, when a girl gets raped, in most of the cases by a near relation, the family considers it to be a shame brought to the family by the unfortunate girl, and the family members murder the girl as an act of honour killing. A Muslim man in Iran cut off his 7-year-old daughter’s head, because he suspected she had been raped by her uncle. Women, who are raped in Muslim countries, often end up being punished while the rapists go free, as mentioned above. Such incidents occur in Muslim countries in a daily basis, and narrate all such cruelty and barbaric incidents would require several volumes.

In his article Allah’s Law and the Law of Ignorance, Sayyid Qutb writes: “Who can claim that he can give people better law than that of Allah? …Can he say that he knows the nature of mankind better than their creator? Can he say that he is more compassionate and sympathetic to mankind than their Lord? Can he say that he knows their interest better than the God of mankind?” But all these incidents narrated above reflect that, Allah, who has ordained such barbaric law, can never be the God Almighty; he is obviously not a God, who is compassionate and sympathetic to mankind. On the contrary, Allah is a mindless demon, extraordinarily unkind and cruel to the womenfolk.

In fact, in the language of the Quran, Allah is a cruel tyrant, a barbaric commander of mass-murder and violence. Allah commands the Islamic Umma, the biggest criminal gang on earth, to establish himself as the sole God of the world (not of the universe) through armed jihad, involving terror and bloodshed, by the mujahidin.
 

In the eye of Allah, women are subhuman

The despotic Allah has ordained another law in the Koran that has enabled Muslims to mount any kind of cruelty and torture to their womenfolk. The revelation says,

”Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So, good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them. Lo! Allah is ever High, Exalted, Great” (4:34).

A few examples may be cited to expose how the servants of Allah make use of this divine law. Over 90 percent of Pakistani wives, for instance, have been struck, beaten, or abused sexually for offenses like cooking an unsatisfactory meal, or for failing to give birth to a male child. In 2001, in Gujar Khan, Pakistan, Zahida Perveen’s husband attacked her, gouged out both her eyes, cut off her nose, and her ears. He wrongly suspected her of adultery. Acid has been found a very good new weapon for blinding and disfiguring women. In Bangladesh, wives, daughters, girls are punished by having acid thrown on them, permanently disfiguring them. Although the government has prohibited the sale of corrosive liquids, they are easily found on the market.

In explaining the legality of wife-beating, says a cleric:

"In fact, man is the absolute master in the house.. Beating one’s wife is definitely allowed in Islam. It should not be as severe as beating your slave. That’s all. You can beat your wife (lovingly!!) pretty good. Make it count!! Just do not break her bones! If you do, she may be able to leave and get a divorce. So, bruising, blue marks, red marks, etc are all okay. Just don’t go too violently in beating her so as to break her bones. In fact, it is preferred to use a stick or a whip to beat your wife with (easier than using your hand, that's for sure!!). This is what I deduced from an honest reading of the Qur’an and the Hadith about wife beating.”

Arab Human Development Report 2002

The reader may recall that this author in his article, Muslims: Shackled People Enslaved by the Koran, has described that to investigate the reasons of backwardness of the Arab world, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) appointed an inquiry committee consisting of Arab intellectuals and scholars in 2001. The committee said in its year-long investigative report, called the “Arab Human Development Report 2002”, that suppression of women was one of the major reasons of backwardness of the Muslim world. “One thing that every outsider knows about the Arab world is that it does not treat its womenfolk as full citizens and this suppression of women is another vital reason that makes the Arab world backward”, the Report said. The report considered it as an awful wastage in saying: “How can a community prosper if it stifles half of its production potential?” The Report lamented: “Their participation in social, economic and political fields is still negligible in comparison to women of other parts of the world”.

Commenting on this aspect of Muslim society in India, former President of India Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam once wrote, “As we all know, birds have two wings. Unless both the wings grow equally, the bird cannot fly. Similarly, the society has two wings—man and woman. Both have to be developed equally. Then the society will fly”. It is important to note here that, when a verdict of the Supreme Court in mid-2003 upheld the necessity of enforcing ‘common civil code’ in India, which could liberate India's Muslim women from the shameful gender discrimination like polygamy and oral divorce, President Kalam indirectly supported the opposition of fanatic mullahs by keeping silence, perhaps not to earn their displeasure.

Mr. Clovis Maksoud, an Egyptian scholar involved in preparing the Arab Human Development Report, blamed no historical event like Western imperialism, devastation caused by the Second World War or any other outside intervention for the present backwardness of the Arab world, and the Islamic world at large. He indirectly raised his finger at the creed of Islam itself for the said backwardness of the Arab world. “The most delicate issue of all, again carefully skirted by the authors of the report, is the part Islam plays in delaying and impeding the Arab world’s advance towards every receding renaissance that its intellectuals crave”, said a British commentator. Most experts on Middle East and Arab world are convinced that pervasive Islamisation of the society has played havoc and is entirely responsible for stifling constructive Arab thought and progress. On other words, strict following of the Allah’s law is the cause of the backwardness of the Arab and wider Muslim societies and communities. So people like Sayyid Qutb, who advise Muslims to follow the law of Allah blindly, are a hindrance to Muslims' progress and prosperity.

The reader should take note of the point that the Sachar Committee Report could not say what the authors of the Arab Human Development Report 2002 had said. The reason is not difficult to comprehend: it was motivated not by an honest intent, but by vested political interest, namely  the current secular alliance government's appeasement of Muslims to secure the Muslim votes for maintaining a hold on political power. The Sachar Committee, therefore, maintained silent about the truth not to earn displeasure of Muslims, which would risk losing their votes.
 

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| Part 1  |  Part 2  |  Part 3  |  Part 4  |  Part 5  |  Part 6  |  Part 7 |

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(To be continued)