Oh look, I’ve gained my first troll on Substack. In my years of mocking bigots as Daily Racist over in that cesspit that is Xitter, I’ve suffered my unfair share of fools, but damn, this one is as tedious as he is batshit.
*For those unfamiliar with my shtick, I used to be a pious Muslim, am now a full-blown atheist, but know enough about the religion to feel compelled to clear up the cobwebs of miscomprehension that shroud it. I’m neither fearful of unearthing unsavoury elements that the devout may find blasphemous, nor so anti-Islam that I’m actively twisting quotes to discredit it. As someone who neither resents the religion nor is on any mission to prove it is without its fault, I feel well placed to offer an unbiased, balanced verdict on accusations levelled against it. Even have some fun while doing so. But then you can always trust a troll to pop up and leave a turd that stinks up the whole place.
So, let’s break down this barking loon’s claims.
It’s clear not many people actually know what Jihad means. We know what militant nutters like ISIS think it means – the Muslim version of the Crusades, only in this instance, killing in the name of Prophet M instead of Jesus H Christ. Islamophobic meme makers who scour the web for out-of-context quotes to paint the Qur’an as the Muslim equivalent to the Hebrew Bible’s bloodthirsty Book of Joshua – a theological justification for the violent appropriation of another group’s land – are just as off-the-mark.
Jihad, according the Holy Q (which is what matters here*), refers to a spiritual struggle. At a time when Islam was still in its infancy, and new converts were being castigated and killed for their beliefs, Jihad helped them hold their shit together. Fight the inner demons that kowtow to doubts, but yes, also to take a stand against external enemies if they mean to take away your faith, even if that means using force.
Most Muslims abide by the first part of this tenet – the call for self-improvement that every self-help book bases its principles around. In regards to the second part, the Holy Q makes its stance pretty clear from the outset:
“Fight in the cause of God only against those who wage war against you, but do not cross the limits, for God detests transgressors” (Surah 2:190)
But then it goes and spoils it all by saying something violent like: “Kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush” (Surah 9: 5), although it is quickly followed by, “Yet if they repent, offer prayers, and act charitably, let them go their way.”
To reiterate: the Holy Q was revealed at a time when Muslims were at war. How to protect oneself by any means necessary is another mainstay of self-help books, and the justification is just as pseudo-psychobabble:
“Fighting has been made obligatory for you though you hate it. Sometimes, you can dislike something which is good for you and like something which is bad for you. God knows and you don’t.” (Surah 2:216)
So, to answer our Clarence, the main weapon of Jihad is willpower and faith to strengthen one’s resolve, and then, when it comes to war, well, that’s when you whip out the sword. But rape? Where did that come from?
Clarence, like all hate-fuelled bigots, won’t read the Holy Q, but gets his information from rabid Islamophobic sites like this:
Let’s look at Surah 4:24, shall we?
“Married women are forbidden, except female captives in your possession. They are lawful to you, as long as you seek them with your wealth in a legal marriage, not in fornication. Give those you have consummated marriage with their due dowries. It is permissible to be mutually gracious regarding the set dowry.”
So, you can have sex with your captives, but only after you marry them, and pay them a dowry that she’s happy with. Now, this isn’t by any means an act of feminism – it’s fair to assume these captive women didn’t want to marry the men who just chopped their dads’ heads off for any amount of money – but it isn’t quite the rape and leave them for dead thing that it’s painted as being.
Women taken and wed as the spoils of war, I’ll give you that, Clarence, but rape as a weapon of Jihad, that part is bollocks.
*For the record, the Hadith does have its share of dodgy quotes when it comes to violating heathen women, but as I’ve repeatedly asserted, given that it was written two hundred years after the Prophet’s death by a bunch of beardy incels much like our Clarence, I for one don’t give a toss about what they have to say.
Given that he had 12 wives in his lifetime, it’s fair to say Prophet M had a fondness for women (I wrote about this in length in the The Four Perfect Women in Islam article). He was married to Khadijah for 25 years after she plucked him from obscurity and guided him through his struggles, in a relationship that was, by all accounts, monogamous. After her death, he took a string of wives, many of them widows with children, the justification being they were outcasts and this way he could provide them with financial stability and status. They were all revered as ‘Mothers of the Believers’. His third wife, Aisha, the only virgin he bedded, was indeed a child, just as Isaac took a child bride in Rebecca in the Bible, Krishna with Rukmini in the Bhagavad Gita. Yup it’s statutory rape by today’s standards, but hell, to this day child marriage is legal in 80% of US states. We’ll never know how those young girls felt about the union, but as with Priscilla and Elvis, Aisha spent the years after his death spreading his message and regaling tales of how wonderful he was, many of these accounts featuring prominently in the Hadith.
Ah, the Hadith again. The Internet happily spews out turd-nuggets such as this:
The actual text goes like this:
The waiting period, or idda, for a slave girl was two months and five days. There’s no question his men could violate them to their heart’s content after that, but at a time when soldiers the world over were brutally raping any woman behind any door they broke down, this grace period at least allowed for the testosterone-fuelled marauders to calm the fuck down before entering her chambers. I’m not out to be an apologist for the brutal actions of violent, bloodthirsty, uneducated horny men. But as their Commander-in-Chief, the Prophet ordained for them to hold back, which shows something close to offering them dignity. It was 630 AD. Women were having a pretty shit time of it all-round.
But, to answer Clarence, the Prophet himself didn’t engage in such carnal savagery. Certainly, he was a military strategist, and no doubt shed his share of blood in wars, but he did repeatedly preach peace and forgiveness, his focus set on winning over hearts and minds rather than ripping them out of their bodies. As Surah al-Anfal 8:67 goes: “It does not behove a Prophet that he should have captives until he first subdues the land.”
While it’s a stretch to call Prophet M a feminist, he forbade the prevailing custom of the time to bury new-born girls as they were seen as surplus mouths, and gave women the right to say no. At a time when no one offered a platform for women’ voices to be heard, he gave them the right to vote. His last words to his companions before he passed were allegedly: “Treat women with kindness, treat women with kindness!”
Fair to say that covers “don’t rape them”.
Sure, militant terrorists like ISIS and Boko Haram have committed horrific rapes in their twisted version of Jihad, but tedious as it is to point this out, they don’t represent the values and mindset of 1.8 billion Muslims. It’s like saying Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple, who were responsible for the Jonestown massacre, represented the views of 2.38 billion Christians…
Well, if the Islamic God was derived from the Jewish God, then so was your precious American Christian one. And in any case, the first God known to man was actually a Goddess, the Sumerian deity Inanna, aka Ishtar in Akkadian mythology. Then some man came along and said, nah, mate, a woman creating life just doesn’t make sense to me…
Bottom line: Men don’t rape because they’re ordained to do so by the church, caliphate or generals. It’s because they’re men and men have been raping women all the way back since the day Satan sowed his seed in Eve…
Goodness, gracious me! The TROLLS! Keep on keepin on, Bro!
I actually blocked one person for the first time on Substack. I didn’t think that time would come. Unfortunately the trolls have moved here too. I love your image of a troll mindlessly typing away 😆