Some years back I was very confused and failed to understand why Islamists and Leftists were so friendly to each other in non-Muslim, non-Leftist democratic countries like India, where both Muslims and Leftists were in minority. I did not know how Allah-dependent Islamists could be friends of Allah-less Leftists? Then I discovered that in the Islamist-Leftist friendship, Allah was irrelevant. It was the totalitarianism of Islamic and Leftist ideologies that brought the two diverse groups together. Both the ideologies ruthlessly control body and mind of the people those have infected. The control mechanism is structured and asserted by designated classes, – Ulema or Party members.
My next confusion was with the attitude and behavior of some Muslim women of India like Rana Ayyub, Arfa Khanum Sherwani, Saba Naqvi, Sheila Rashid and Zainab Sikander et al. While they enjoy a free and un-Islamic public lifestyle, why they remain the most vocal Islamists in India? Then I read the book A God who hates written by Wafa Sultan (First published in 2009 from USA), and could understand the psychology of said group of Indian Muslim women. The book is autobiographical, which made Wafa Sultan “The courageous woman who inflamed the Muslim world…..”
Wafa Sultan was born and brought-up in a Syrian Arab Muslim family. Her maternal grandmother’s sufferings in the hands of her grandfather jolted her from within in childhood. Her mother too lived a completely passive and subdued life. The social system in her Muslim Arab society, which denied the moral and emotional space for women’s lives, disturbed her a lot. Her going back again and again to the ogre called Allah was symbolic of her resentment towards Allah and the fear oriented and oppressive Islam. Her finding of inspiration for life from the Statue of Liberty was a means of liberation from that ogre, fear and oppression.
As a medical student in Syria, Wafa saw many cases of sexual abuse of girls in her Arab Muslim community by their fathers, brothers, uncles or any close male family member. The apparent conservatism and show-off of morality in the Islamic society was actually masking a culture of petrified and barbaric sexual assault on girls. Girls were treated as means of sexual enjoyment by male members of the families with the knowledge of elder women. Men took all decisions of their women’s lives. The propaganda of woman’s empowerment by Islam was completely fraud.
Wafa also narrated multiple cases of brutalities on women by male members and was surprised to find that even women in her society were against fellow women and supported those brutalities on their cohort. During those days Wafa had bitter arguments with a male family friend who used to quote from Quran and Sayings of Prophet to justify the restricted, passive and humiliating role of women under Islam. If that was the picture of Arab Muslim society in twentieth century, one would shudder at the thought of what the situation was 1400 years back.
Wafa Sultan’s migration to USA in 1989 at the age of 31 years, leaving behind the violence and cruelty in the name of Islam in Syria, catapulted her to the free world. The concept and practice of individual liberty, secularism, pluralism, women’s liberation, freedom of expression she found in USA overwhelmed her, which she embraced very dearly. She became consciously able to distinguish between the open USA society and close Muslim society of her country very intensely. She left Islam and became a bitter critic of the desert barbaric cult.
Wafa Sultan observed that Muslims continued to live in raiding mentality which had come from the raids of their Prophet. She cited examples about her Muslim acquaintances in USA, who had migrated there to escape from Islamic violence in their own countries. They earned and lived a descent life in USA. But still they hated USA from the core of heart and even talked and did silly things to do symbolic harm to USA. In absence of actual physical raiding against non-Muslims people of USA, they resorted to mental and verbal raiding. The ultimate objective of this mentality was to cause harm to the non-Muslim community. But those same immigrant Muslims in USA, without blinking their eyes, were all praises about USA in presence of local people.
In her book A God Who Hates, Wafa Sultan wrote, “No one can be a true Muslim and a true American simultaneously”. She told the most obvious fact which people wanted to sweep under the carpet. Sultan further wrote, “The trouble with Islam is deeply rooted in its teachings. Islam is not only a religion. Islam is also a political ideology that preaches violence and applies its agenda by force”. Wafa’s observations about Islam demolished the argument put across by Muslim apologists, “Islam is perfect but Muslims are not”.
Wafa Sultan mocked the Muslim apologists who claim that Muhammad did all raids as defensive response. She argued that had those raids of Muhammad been defensive, why the Quranic commandments of war booty came? What was the need and morality in collecting war booty from a defensive raid? No man who murders anybody for self defense will steal the wallet, gold ring and wrist watch etc. of the murdered person. [From Battle of Badr (624 AD), early Islam grew on Maal-e-Ghanimat (war booty). The Maal included men, women sex-slaves, animal, money and material. Maal-e-Ghanimat was sanctified by Quran and later justified in Jihad for converting, enslaving and annihilating the Kafir. So, what started as means of desert piracy became a mechanism for spreading and imposing Islam on defeated non-Muslims.]
In case of Rana Ayyub, Arfa Khanum Sherwani, Saba Naqvi, Sheila Rashid and Zainab Sikander et al, it can be said that in Hindu majority India, they are fortunate to grow-up and live a life which is liberal, open, fair and not Sharia-based. They would have tested the real Islam had they been in Arab countries or in Afghanistan. Co-wives, Mehram, Burqa, Children production, sexual abuse during childhood and banishment from male dominated world at physical, mental and intellectual levels would have made them understand what paradise India is for Muslim women like them. Even whatever little women’s liberation one finds in Pakistan and Bangladesh has come from Hindu culture.
But ironically this group of Indian Muslim women has been staunchly Islamist and hates Hindutva, which made them what they are today. They grow up in the freedom of Hindu majority India and use that same freedom to abuse Hindus. Drawing a parallel from the observation of Wafa Sultan it can be said that, no one can be a true Muslim and a true Indian simultaneously. Rana Ayyub, Arfa Khanum Sherwani, Saba Naqvi, Sheila Rashid and Zainab Sikander et al are proving that. They are also classic victims of ‘raiding mentality’ and use different social platforms to cause harm to Hindu Kafir of India through words. Additionally, they don’t need any pretension to cover-up their hatred for Hindus. They may refer to Indian Constitution to support their free and open public life style along with Indian males, but this Constitution was also framed and adopted by Hindu majority India and not by any Sharia following or Muslim majority country.
