In my last post, I explained what the specific social causes were that motivated me to identify as a culturally religious Muslim. It is hard to tell how much of the history of Islam I was presented with is actually factual. Both Muslims and anti-Islam activists are pushing a particular agenda when presenting a history of Islam, the one to support Islam's claim of being the best model of morality and the other to portray Islamic history as cruel and barbaric. Both sides exaggerate to stress the accuracy of their presupposed position, and it is difficult to look back and find what parts are exaggerated and what parts are factual. This post will deal with why I no longer choose to identify with Islam, and some of the problems I have with it.
One factor was a growing realization that my values and beliefs about the way society should function were not based in religion, but were based on my democratic socialism. As I became more confident in my own ability to decide using logic and rationalism what makes things moral, I became less dependent on religion to provide a moral compass. This was a difficult process, having been raised from birth to believe that I was evil. (My parents both suffered psychotic breaks from reality and were convinced that I was the incarnation of Satan, as evidenced by behaviors caused by my bipolar disorder, which has been severe since early childhood.)
I developed beliefs about how society should ideally be run, and was presented with a historical narrative that said this was how Islamic society had been run in by-gone eras. There were things in the narrative that troubled me, but I believed it was simply because I did not understand them well enough, or was not moral enough to have their goodness become understandable. So I embraced this version of Islamic history that had been presented to me and worked to restore this vision of Islamic society.
One of the things that troubled me about Islamic ideology was the belief in hell. Although I know that some Muslims do not believe in an eternal hell, others do, and I find the concept of eternal hell immoral; why should a human being who cannot even fully comprehend the concept of infinity be punished for an infinite amount of time for crimes committed during a finite existence?
Also, I believe that most people try to live a moral life to the best of their knowledge and ability. Some people, due to psychological conditions, are unable to control their impulses to behave in ways that are detrimental to others, or do not understand that their actions are harmful to others. Islam does teach that the mentally ill are not to be punished for crimes outside their ability to control or understanding, but this seems like a small comfort when most criminals are not considered mentally ill, even when they clearly are.
Most of the punishments mandated by Islamic law are either slight improvements on or exactly the same as existing legal codes indigenous to the area, or are more harsh. Physical, permanently damaging punishments, like flogging, amputation, and capital punishment are particularly cruel and immoral. Surely a moral code that was meant to be superior to all others for all time could have conceived of more humane punishments, such as community service, rehabilitation, mental health treatment, and, for the worst offenders, isolation from society (incarceration). Why couldn't a petty thief be given a job to pay back those he defrauded? And while we're at it, why couldn't a supremely wise and moral being give us a way to effectively treat psychopathy, something that does not exist to this day?
Another thing is the difficulty in determining what actually constitutes Islamic law. Very little legal code exists in the Qur'an itself, so most jurisprudence comes from the hadith. Everyone agrees that not all hadith are authentic, but no one can agree on which ones are inauthentic. Even if we assume that everyone had a perfect memory and none of the people who transmitted the authentic hadith had misheard or mis-remembered even in the slightest (which we now know is pretty much scientifically impossible), there is still the fact that none of the collections were compiled until decades or centuries later, and some inauthentic ones slipped in.
Even the Qur'an itself is of questionable historicity. It is known that it was not compiled until the time of Uthman. Although I do not believe the anti-Islam propaganda that Uthman intentionally banned and destroyed passages he didn't agree with, there is still the point that there were an unknown number passages that were claimed to be authentic parts of the original Qur'an that did not make it in to the final product, because they were not vouchsafed by the mandated number of sources deemed reliable. The fact that we know such criteria existed means that there were passages that did not meet the criteria, and we do not know what those said.
Of the ones that did make the cut, most of the narratives to explain their historical and socio-political significance in the time and place of their writing sprung up much later. Thrown together the way they are, they often seem disjointed, jumbled, and even contradictory. The claim that you must be an expert in ancient Arabic to fully understand the Qur'an is perplexing to me. Even Orthodox Jews do not make this claim about their texts (although they do commonly complain about Christian mistranslations--a complete list of words that get mistranslated by Christians, with their real meanings, can be found in Rambam's Guide for the Perplexed, Volume 1). Surely, if an all-knowing God wanted to give a supremely wise message to all humanity for all time, he would do it in a language that could be easily understood and learned. Or better yet, why couldn't an all-powerful God simply give us all the direct knowledge of what he wants from us?
And there are things that are immoral that are not forbidden in the Qur'an. The Qur'an does order people not to force their slave girls into prostitution; but it does not forbid the owning of slaves. Although it does advocate freeing slaves, and nearly 40,000 slaves are said to have been freed by either Mohammad or his family and companions, the owning of slaves is still allowed, and men are allowed to have sexual relations with their female slaves.
There is also the subject of consent to sexual intercourse. Neither a wife nor a female slave has the right to deny intercourse to her husband or master. Although in theory a woman had the right to deny a marriage proposal, in actual fact, this right has not always been given; and even if it is, there is nothing to tell a woman before marriage if her husband will want more sex with her than she is comfortable with. A slave girl does not even have this meager right. A woman may put in her marriage contract that she does not permit her husband to take a second wife; however, this often is ignored, or women are forced to accept other wives through blackmail and threats, and slave girls are not legally counted as wives.
Although initially, Islam did encourage men to marry women who had been divorced or widowed, this is now no longer in style. A woman's virginity is often viewed as a commodity, and men wish to "own" it, and if a woman is "damaged goods", they will refuse to marry her, or at the very least make it known to her that she is "worth less" in dowry than an "intact" woman. This problem is not in any way exclusive to Islam; I have seen it in Jewish and fundamentalist Christian men as well. What most people fail to realize is that the intact condition of the hymen is not necessarily a guarantee of virginity; hymens can be restored surgically, and can be damaged through normal (non-sexual) activities or missing entirely. And this demand for virginity is not reciprocated; a man may be promiscuous before (and sometimes even after) marriage if he wishes, without consequence, but a woman is not to explore her sexuality.
[Although the topic of sexuality does not directly affect me, as I am an anti-sexual/sex averse asexual, it does impact society, and the treatment of people in society. As a member of human society which I must accept will probably always be primarily full of sexual people, I must campaign for ethical treatment of the other people in human society.]
There is also the treatment of prisoners of war. Although this is not an issue that affects modern society as much as it did ancient societies, if Islam is truly meant to be a moral code for all time, it must be mentioned. Prisoners of war were often executed after capture or enslaved. Neither of these are particularly good pieces of moral guidance. After someone is in your custody, killing them becomes an act of unnecessary aggression. Slavery is also not a good way to treat people, and once people were slaves, there come up the problems listed above of sexual abuse.
This is not a complete compendium of things I found immoral in Muslim law and history, but it is a sampling of some of the things that I found the most troubling.
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