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Why Moslem women are veiled
William Muir, in The Life of Mahomet, gives a fascinating explanation of why the Koran commands the veiling of women. It’s because the Moslems are so free and easy about marriage and divorce, with a man being able to marry several women and to divorce them at will, and also co-habit with any number of female slaves, that it adds up to virtual free love, at least from the man’s point of view. Given this extraordinary amatory license, if women were not covered up, people would be divorcing and remarrying like crazy, as happened when Muhammad saw the wife of his adopted son semi-uncovered, conceived a lust for her, and married her following his adopted son’s prompt divorce of her when he heard of the Prophet’s desires. Most significantly, the very Sura (33) in which Allah—so conveniently for Muhammad—abrogates traditional Arab law and permits him to marry his adopted son’s ex-wife, is the same Sura in which Allah announces the rules concerning the veil. Muir suggests that Muhammad realized from his own experience that if women were not covered up, marriage (given the ease of divorce) would quickly fall apart and sexual chaos would ensue. The lesson is that the law ordering the covering of women does not, as is widely thought, stem from Moslem men’s supposed overwrought fear of women’s sexual power: it stems from the need to put breaks on the licentiousness of Islam itself, which in turn is a direct outcome of Muhammad’s own licentiousness. Or, as Jim Kalb put it when I shared these thoughts with him, “If the stability of marriage doesn’t come from the marital bond, it has to come from some other kind of bonds.” Which leads to a further thought. The ideal of Western culture is a balance between the individual and the collective, between freedom and order. As Henry Bamford Parkes said in Gods and Men: The Origins of Western Culture, order consistent with freedom requires that people voluntarily affirm and choose the good. But Islam, particularly in the sexual realm, has neither true freedom nor true order. It has organized licentiousness (multiple marriages, ease of divorce) combined with tyrannical suppression. Which, mutatis mutandis, sounds pretty much like modern liberalism.
[See pp. 300-06 of Muir’s one-volume 1878 edition. Muir’s original four-volume edition is available online, with the relevant passages here, at pages 228-37.] Email entry |