Islamic laws (and apologies for the laws) warp a reader's mind and what Muslims can do about them.

Submitted by Prashant (India), May 20, 2022 at 04:47

Dear Dr Pipes, Reader Mohammad Asghar's writeup on Islamic Nikah prodded me to research Islamic laws on marriages more than I had researched ever before. I was surprised by the kinds of marriages and sexual relationships that a man can have with women in Islam. Most modern and ancient societies accepted the monogamous commitment-based marriage between a man and a woman as sufficient. Even in this simple form most societies find marriages to be a complex institution. I wonder how difficult will a Muslim society get when so many different kinds of marital relationships between men and women are allowed. Thousands of Internet pages are present justifying and apologizing for all kinds for Muslim marriages. Making sense of all those justification surely warps the reader's mind.

After spending a few good hours on Islamic marriages, I thought that perhaps the society at that time was very complicated and Muhammad had no choice but to accommodate all sorts of things that were going around. With that in my mind, I researched the Jewish marriages. I found a few docs and what I read made perfect sense to me. If not all things were perfect, none were outrageous either. Muhammad managed to destroy all Meccan Pagans so I cannot say if the Pagans mores of that time were as complicated as what Muhammad and his sharia-partners authored. I think between the then Jews and Christians, Muhammad had two good examples to follow but he messed both of them up. To be precise, Muhammad eliminated the idea of commitment, love, and divinity from the marriage and created a mishmash of difficult alternatives.

What went wrong? I think what complicates the Islamic discussion of marriage is two folds:

First, Muslims are obligated to defend Islam at all costs. They cannot just say that they had some strange things in the past but now they have replaced all of that by a simple love and commitment based monogamous relationship as marriage. But doing things simply like everyone else is way too unislamic for Muslims so Muslims get into an endless spiral of providing hundreds of defenses for questionable practices.

The second fold is more interesting. Muhammad and his Sharia partners were not following any time-tested principles when they designed Islam. In fact, Muhammad invented things as he needed them (don't blame me for saying this. Even, Muhammad's dearest wife Aisha said something to this effect). The things that Muhammad devised for himself were sometimes immoral and wrong and other times they were in contradiction with each other. And, they all these mutually contradictory things were frozen in time. Poor Muslims are left to justify them all simultaneously! No wonder a simple document described the central ideas of a Jewish marriage to me while Muslims need thousands of Internet pages to justify what they have.

I write these things for Muslims. I invite our Muslim friends to compare various types of marriages in Islam with marriages in other religions. Not everything is perfect outside of Islam but also there is very little that will warp your mind. In our modern world, Islam has become an unmanageable mess. Muslims need to research what they have and compare it with whatever else is available. It will be a bit disconcerting in the beginning but in the end it will all end well.

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