I know I'm preaching to the choir, since people who follow me already have a healthy scepticism towards Islamic apologetics. But:
Devout women will excuse and embrace anything they believe comes from their god / prophet. They're far from an objective source.
Devout women will excuse and embrace anything they believe comes from their god / prophet. They're far from an objective source.
If you want to know what Mohammed really thought of women, read the Quran. We can't be 100% sure, but those surahs may well represent his actual writings / sermons / rants. By contrast, all the sanitising stuff from later sources was written by other people, generations after.
In the Quran, you'll find the following: divinely ordained wife-beating, the rape of captive women (men are allowed sex slaves; women aren't), polygyny but not polyandry, women's testimony derided because Mohammed thought they were intellectually inferior to men.
Apologists have had 1,400 years to cobble together their arguments and make them sound convincing to someone who doesn't know much about Islam. Here are some quick ways to cut through most of them:
1) Don't accept external "context" stories. There's no evidence those are true.
1) Don't accept external "context" stories. There's no evidence those are true.
2) When they talk about how much worse things supposedly were for women in pre-Islamic Arabia, note that their understanding of the so-called "Age of Ignorance" comes from Muslim sources -- who had every incentive to make their enemies look bad, and themselves look superior.
When analysing Nazi Germany, we wouldn't say, "Wow! This Nazi propaganda makes the Jews look really bad. Guess the Nazis were right to persecute them after all!" Apply the same scepticism when Muslim sources depict Mohammed's enemies. You're only seeing one side of the story.
3) A "good" verse or two in one surah doesn't magically excuse bad ones elsewhere. Like a pro-wrestler, Mohammed cut many promos over the years, in different situations. Sometimes he was more of a heel, at other times more of a face, depending on his objectives.
We wouldn't point to one of Shawn Michaels' face promos and say, "See! He's really a good guy! He didn't mean all that lousy stuff he said in this heel promo a couple of years earlier / later!" Hold Mohammed and the Quran to the same standard.
4) When they celebrate the alleged benefits of the hijab, niqab, burqa, chador, abaya (etc.), when they say it's a choice, ask why men never choose them to reap those same wonderful advantages.
5) If they claim the Arabic doesn't really say (e.g.) men should hit their arrogant wives, ask what makes their understanding of the language so much better than that of every major translation out there. Those all got it wrong, but the apologists somehow know Arabic better?
It's one thing for reformist women to reject the misogyny in the Quran and Hadith, to dispense with the myth of their divine authority, and say Islam should do better in the present age. "Reform" that junks the toxic myths is the kind I can get behind (screw Islamic orthodoxy).
But trying to uphold and sanitise all that trash gets us nowhere. It merely enables the status quo, with all the harm that inflicts on women. Just ask apostate women (e.g. @ConfessionsExMu @MurtadMilli) what it's like to endure that.
