FIRST, let us agree on some basic principles.
Taking young children away from their parents for no reason is wrong.
Claiming that children are orphans when they are not is wrong.
Abusing children is wrong.
Neglecting the care of children is wrong.
Sexually violating children is wrong.
In all the furore about Global Ikhwan (GI), most people have focused on, one, their businesses and, two, their “deviant” faith. They have wrung their hands over how GI has been allowed to morph from Al-Arqam to Rufaqa Corp to GI without anyone even blinking. Even though almost nobody was fooled that these were only Al-Arqam in another guise.
In 2011 there suddenly emerged an Obedient Wives Club, which claimed to promote harmonious families by teaching wives how to be submissive to their husbands. Not that this was a particularly original idea; from time immemorial, many husbands have not been comfortable with wives who are outgoing, smart, and sometimes talk back. The mindset that happiness in marriage depends on the wives being literally dumb and agreeable to anything their husbands say or do is quite prevalent, regardless of membership in the OWC. Nothing new there.
The main thing that the OWC was advocating however was that when they talk about submissive wives, they also meant multiple wives for the one husband. Indeed, at the same time as the establishment of the OWC, there also emerged the Polygamy Club, both claiming that they were global organisations with branches all over the world.
Furthermore, they had ideas about how wives could serve their husbands, besides by acting dumb. In a 115-page tome, they outlined how wives can have happy marriages by acting like “first class prostitutes” to their husbands. This manual for “Islamic sex” (which confusingly was touted as a way of fighting Jewish people) was almost immediately banned by the authorities because apparently it was obscene. If anyone is experiencing cognitive dissonance seeing the words “Islamic”, “sex” and “obscene” in one sentence, I don’t blame you.
All this is just to illustrate that these people have been at it for a very long time. They have not been shy about saying what they are either. Everyone knew about their attitudes towards women, even as the women themselves proudly claimed to be very modern because they were businesswomen and professionals.
Nor were the contradictions subtle. I was once on a radio programme with one of the women from the OWC. She was a dentist who completely believed in total obedience to her husband, regardless of whatever nonsensical decisions he might make. After a little prodding she admitted that she was the first of three wives. (Which made me think that she hadn’t read her own manual.)
But what struck me most was that, despite supposedly “Islamic” appearances, she knew almost nothing about the Quran or the Sunnah. At one point, she claimed that women need to be obedient to men because Eve was created from Adam’s rib, without realising that this story of creation is not in the Quran but in the Old Testament of the Bible. She mentioned that the Prophet Mohamad had 11 wives, but when it was pointed out that for 25 years he had only one wife, Khadijah, she claimed that it was because Allah had not yet told the Prophet that polygamy was allowed. This is nothing but sheer ignorance. Men in the society that the Prophet lived in at the time were very polygamous. The Quran, in fact, imposed limits on polygamy and further recommended that if a man feared he would not be able to deal justly with his wives, then he should marry only one.
It all boils down to say that these GI folks aren’t keen on equality for women and expect us to be silent sexpots whose only role in life is to please men and have their babies. Lots of babies, because I doubt if they use contraception either. It’s therefore a short hop from viewing women as sex objects to viewing children as, at best, inconveniences, to, at worst, toys to be sexually violated themselves. After all, the head of GI himself admitted that “one or two” may have been sodomised but what’s that in the general hundreds-of-children scheme of things? Obviously, his lawyer couldn’t zip his mouth in time.
But what makes me truly angry is that not a single religious person, or even any person in authority, has clearly said that abusing children is unIslamic. Children are human beings with their own rights. Why can’t someone just say that Islam, a faith that promotes justice and mercy above all, does not allow the abuse of children? Is it because we think of children as lesser persons? Is that why it has been so difficult to get rid of child marriage, which is another form of child abuse?
Let me give you a nasty analogy: we have watched for nearly a year the Israelis killing, starving, and maiming Palestinian children. We know it is because they have dehumanised Palestinians to such an extent that they no longer see children as worthy of saving, because, to quote one Israeli politician, “They will only grow up to be terrorists”. The numbers of children who have died or who have had limbs amputated or who have been orphaned are repeated so often that after a while, they become just numbers. They have erased the humanity of those children.
When we talk about the hundreds of children abused by GI, we are doing the same as what is happening to children in Gaza. We don’t need to know their names, but we must remember that these children have suffered both mental and physical abuse. We need to always put them at the forefront of our minds, and not just talk about what businesses GI had or how far they have deviated from the faith, nor should we obsess over all the salacious details. We need to show compassion for the victims above all and do everything we can to never allow any child to be harmed ever again, regardless of who they are.
Marina Mahathir wonders why nobody has thought of matching the DNA of these children to the adults, and then charging those parents for neglect and abuse. The views expressed here are solely her own.
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