On the surface, the Bible and Islam appear to have similar family values. Like Christianity, Islam expects for children to obey their parents and men to be the providers for the family. Both religions prohibit sex outside marriage.
But as we have already seen on the issue of adultery, the underlying reality is very different. Christianity and Islam have starkly contrasting priorities and goals, with the result that the understanding of the family—and of the roles of men, women, and children—in the Muslim world and the West are not at all the same.
The Bible talks about modesty for women, but Islam has taken this concept to an extreme. In Islam, modesty is taken so far that it robs women of their identity and isolates them from normal human interaction.
Muslims pride themselves on their strong family loyalty, which is very noticeable, especially in comparison with the average secular Western family. But in the Muslim world loyalty and obedience to the family is not an option, but a legal obligation—reinforced by the Islamic values of honor, pride, shame, and submission. Violations of family loyalty are harshly punished, in many cases by honor killing.
Islamic culture and law are tolerant of domestic violence, even in public. While many Muslims are unaware that sharia law clearly states that parents and grandparents cannot be prosecuted for killing their offspring, that law poisons their family relationships.
One of the cultural differences I noticed when I moved to the U.S. was parents knocking at the door of their children’s bedrooms before entering. Such family etiquette is rarely used in Muslim culture, which has little respect for boundaries and privacy between family members.
It is not uncommon for Muslim parents to pick spouses for their children, both male and female, but especially for females. If a daughter rebels against her parents’ choice, the results are family strife, domestic violence, and in some cases honor killing.
The Islamic doctrine of “loyalty and enmity” takes Muslim family loyalty to a whole new level that is very different from Biblical family loyalty. Muslims who violate family loyalty are often shunned, threatened, and coerced. Their rebellion against family ties is a serious breach of Islamic law.
Relationships in the West, whether between family members or friends, are very different from the coercive relationships in Islamic society. In the West, both friendships and family relationships are not based on blind loyalty, but on mutual respect, because people have freedom about how close they want to be to other people. There is also no strong cultural taboo against befriending people of different religions. And there is no gender segregation at weddings, family gatherings, and at parties.
Family relationships and friendships are less complicated in America. They are based on love, which is the heart of the teachings of the Bible, but not of the Koran. They are not determined by a fixed hierarchy that defines whom to be “with” and whom to be “against.”
Family Values vs. Jihad Values
The Christian family is the best testimony for the world of Biblical values. Men and women with Biblical values make their priorities God, family, church, country, and work. In Islam, after believing in Allah, the number one priority for a Muslim believer is not family; it is jihad. That changes the whole dynamic of the family—its functions and priorities, and the roles of each member.
As we have seen, Muhammad and Allah value the jihadist more than any one else. The number one goal of Islam is expanding the power and domination of Islam to cover the whole world through the establishment of an Islamic government called the caliphate. As we have also seen, Islamic preachers describe jihad as worship.
So a Muslim man’s devotion and loyalty must be first and foremost to the establishment and expansion of Islam, not to his wife and family. Until Islam conquers the whole world, anything and everything, including sacred family relationships and the life of the jihadist himself, must be sacrificed if necessary.
One hadith shows the Islamic perspective on jihad and family: “Somebody asked, ‘O Allah’s Messenger! Who is the best among the people?’ Allah’s Messenger replied, ‘A believer who performs Jihad with his life and wealth.’ They asked, ‘Who is next?’ He replied, ‘A believer who stays in one of the mountain paths worshipping Allah and leaving the people safe from his mischief’” (Bukhari, p. 391, vol. 1). Notice that Muhammad gave men two choices, either to fight or hide in a mountain away from other human beings. He did not say if you don’t fight then go home and take care of your wife and children. Muhammad has no other job for men besides fighting. He has no advice or encouragement for the ordinary hardworking man of integrity who wants to serve his God, his family, and his community. The Islamic paradise, unfortunately, was not created for such a man, the good, loyal, and loving husband and father.
One Man and One Woman vs. One Man and a Harem
In fact such a man of integrity and devotion to family, wife, and children is a major threat to Islam. The last thing Muhammad wanted was a happily married and devoted husband of one woman, a committed father to his children who loves his life on earth. A man like that will not want to do jihad, to get killed while killing Allah’s enemies. He will not be seduced by the juvenile fantasy Muhammad promised of an obscenely lustful Islamic Paradise. He will not be lured by the rewards the Prophet offered—up to four wives in this life, plus sex slaves taken in jihadist wars, plus, after death, sexual orgies with big-breasted virgins (houris), beautiful little boys “like pearls,” and enhanced sexual powers.
Islam wants a gang of fighters ready to sacrifice everything for jihad: the family, the sacred bonds of love, and even the joy of life on earth. It is common belief that women are the sacrificial lamb of Islam, but men are the first target of the use and abuse of humanity by Islam. Jihad destroys a man’s happiness and his life in exchange for promises in the afterlife; Islam then destroys the woman and the wife, her natural priorities, security, and dignity; it destroys children, who are often orphaned and are sometimes even strapped with explosives and sent to kill Allah’s enemies. Everyone is sacrificed by Allah.
The Purpose of Children in Islam
In several hadiths, Muhammad stresses that his fighters should “Marry women who are prolific” so that the Muslims will outnumber their enemies (Bukhari 11:2045).
The Islamic value of breeding for the sake of jihad is still preached today by Islamic leaders. PLO chairman Yasser Arafat once boasted, “The womb of the Arab woman, is my strongest weapon.” Houari Boumedienne, the ruler of Algeria, said in 1974, “One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there are friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.” The Ayatollah Khomeini called for Muslims to produce more fighters: “An Islamic Regime must be serious in every field . . . including the field of breeding). More Muslims means more power. More Muslims means more soldiers.”1
The Koran advises Muslims not to let their children get in the way of more important things, like jihad: “And know that your possessions and your children are a test, and that with Allah is immense reward” (8:28).
According to Islamic scholar Allama Ibne Hajar, every Muslim should make the intention that he would offer his sons to be jihadists: “If a person holds this intention, while having sexual intercourse with his wife, that if he is given a male child he would make him Mujahid, he would gain the reward for his intention even if it does not occur.”2
Sacrificing the Family at the Altar of Jihad
When I first read the above recommendation from the Allama (all-knowing, in Arabic) I did not know whether to laugh or cry. His advice is ridiculous, but it is tragic how Islam sacrifices the family—including my own—for jihad.
By making jihad the single most sacred act of worship, Muhammad made Islam an expansionist genocidal ideology rather than a religion. The jihadist is rewarded with Allah’s Paradise for wreaking havoc on people on earth. By commanding fathers to prepare sons for jihad even before conception, Islam has established its priorities.
Family ties are naturally tricky; relatives often clash with one another. The way the Bible handles the challenges of family life is to place love at the center of family relations. With love, even for one’s enemies, the Bible has elevated human society to a level never seen before in human history.
But unfortunately family love is not a priority for Islam. In fact, as we have seen, Islam commands believers to withhold their love and friendship and even to disown family members who are not Muslim.
The Koran does not stop at this commandment to shun and disown non-Muslim family members, but also threatens, wait until you see what Allah will do to you after you die if you don’t obey: “If your fathers, and your sons, and your brethren, and your wives . . . are dearer to you than Allah and His messenger . . . then wait till Allah brings His command to pass” (9:24).
The duty to shun non-Muslim family members has deeply corrupted Islamic family relations—because it is not applied just to those who actually reject Islam. Muslim family members often judge other Muslim family members harshly as being not good Muslims. Those who do not meet that standard are subject to being shunned and disowned. A woman who refuses to marry the person the family has picked for her, for example, is often disowned, as is a man who does not want to go to jihad.
Biblical family values are by their very nature a threat to Islam. Muslims often envy the citizens of the West, wondering, How come Western governments value the lives of their citizens but ours don’t? and Why do women in the West enjoy the loyalty of their husbands and respect in the political system? The answer is Biblical values.
The way Islamic culture handles this threat is by lying to Muslims. The defenders of Islam claim that it honors women and that Western women are loose and sex-crazed. They have created and spread the myth that Islam honors women, even that Muslim women are treated better than Christian and Jewish women. Muslim women are supposedly more respected because they are protected under their garb and in their homes.
Protecting Family “Honor,” Not the Family
Honor, not love, is the central concept in Islamic family values. Honor supersedes family trust. Islamic honor values are the cause of friction, distrust, and disputes in Muslim family relations. Islamic society judges on appearances rather than on the content of people’s character—and it judges very harshly, leading men to feel extremely vulnerable and insecure, especially about how their female family members appear to others. A Muslim man’s honor and self-esteem are thus at the mercy of how his female family members behave and dress. And Muslim society tells men that the proper way to react to women’s “misbehavior” is through aggression and domestic violence. From early childhood on, the Muslim little boy is brought up to regard women who are not covered as sluts who are asking for it. In fact this kind of brainwashing of little boys goes on in Islamic schools even in the West.
Family relations—especially between fathers and daughters—are strained because of the father’s fear and shame if his daughter should, God forbid, smile at a man in the street, have a boyfriend, or—the ultimate fear of the Muslim father—if his daughter should lose her virginity before she gets married.
Islamic law actually declares such women deserving of death when it protects parents and grandparents from being prosecuted if they kill them for disgracing the family honor.
Muslim men can have no respect or dignity in Muslim society unless they protect their honor, often by physical abuse of women in their family or even honor killing. In the movie The Stoning of Soraya M., which is based on a true story, the father and the son of an accused wife and mother threw the first stones.
The concept of honor applies not just to men but also to mothers, whose personal honor depends on the honor of their children, and vice versa. An Iraqi mother spat on her own son in public because he fought with the Iraqi Army against ISIS,3 and an ISIS member executed his own mother in public in the Syrian city of Raqqa because she had encouraged him to leave the group.4
It’s clear what Islamic priorities are regarding the family.
Looking back on my life under Islam, I don’t remember ever hearing even once an Islamic preacher giving a sermon against honor killing or beating women. But it is not just women who are ill served by Islam, but men and children as well. Families in the Muslim world will never be happy and healthy until men are freed from the immense pressure of Islamic shaming for honor.
Islamic Law and Women
One major difference that we have already seen between Biblical and Muslim marriage is that the Muslim marriage contract requires loyalty only from the wife to the husband, while the husband has no obligation under the Islamic law to remain loyal to one wife. Of course that does not mean that there are no loyal Muslim husbands. But those who choose to be loyal are under no legal or moral covenant to do so. In the Muslim marriage contract, the man is asked to give the names and addresses of wives number one, two, and three, if any. That means that in the marriage ceremony the groom gives no vows of loyalty to his bride.
Married Muslim women live under a number of humiliating laws:
1. Rebelliousness (disobedience in any form) on the part of the wife nullifies the husband’s obligation to support her and gives him permission keep her from leaving the home.
2. A husband has the right to beat his wife and does not have to say why to her family or police.
3. Divorce is only in the hands of the husband and is as easy as saying: “I divorce you”; it becomes effective even if the husband says he did not intend it.
4. There is no community property between husband and wife, and the husband’s property does not automatically go to the wife in case of the husband’s death.
5. In fact the wife is entitled to only a small portion of the husband’s estate, after the biggest share is given to male children, parents, and brothers.
6. A woman’s rights are half those of a man in inheritance and in many other matters.
7. The testimony of a woman in court has half the value of a man’s.
8. Marriage is a contract between buyer and seller, in which the man pays the woman’s family a dowry in exchange for sexual rights over her body.
9. A man is allowed to have sex with three additional wives, slave women, and women captured in battle; and if a married woman becomes a slave her marriage is annulled.
10. A woman loses custody of her children if she remarries.
11. To prove rape, a woman must have four male witnesses.
12. A rapist may only be required to pay a dowry.
13. A Muslim woman must cover every inch of her body, which is considered “awrah,” as shameful to show as a sexual organ.
14. A Muslim man will not be prosecuted for killing his wife if she is caught in the act of adultery. The opposite is not true.
15. The Koran also says to punish women “guilty of lewdness” by confining them to the house “until death takes them” (4:15) and “cutting off their inheritance” (4:19).
As you can see, Islamic laws promote the sadistic repression of women, depriving them of their humanity and dignity, and keeping them from being heard or seen. This is the system that the defenders of Islam claim protects and honors women. In reality, Islamic law leaves women extremely insecure and in a much weaker legal position than men. That harsh inequality creates and deepens hostilities between the sexes.
The Muslim wife also feels insecure about her children, their security, and future, in case her husband decides to get a second, third, and fourth wife and have other sets of children with them.
Islamic values have a corrupting impact on the husband even if he is basically a decent person. In times of trouble the Islamic sheikh will often advise a man to beat his wife, like the Koran says, or to get a second wife as a solution to marital problems—very different advice from the kind that the Christian man gets at his church.
As a child I remember being at the home of relatives and overhearing an argument between a married couple. The wife was begging the husband to “please have as many mistresses as you want but don’t marry on me.” That was a very sobering lesson in the realities of Islamic marriage.
I have personally seen women, among them my own family members and friends, suffering not only from the fear that their husbands would marry other women but also from physical and mental abuse at the hands of husbands and other male family members—all the result of a corrupt and oppressive legal system that no religion should ever advocate.
The difference between the status of women within the family in Islam and in the Bible is like night and day. The legal oppression of Muslim women speaks for itself. But that does not stop Muslim defenders from defying reality and telling the world that Islam honors women more than any other religion.
Why on earth would a religion that was birthed in the same Middle Eastern region as the Bible come along six hundred years after Christianity and reverse all the wholesome family values brought to the world by the Bible? The answer is that a man who is devoted to his wife and children in a monogamous marriage is a threat to jihad. Men who love their families as number one after God will not want to die in jihad in order to kill the enemies of Allah. So because jihad should be the Muslim’s number one priority after pledging loyalty to Allah and Muhammad, a Muslim man’s relationship with his wife and family had to be sabotaged. Muslim men must never be allowed to develop true love and loyalty to their wives. So marriage in Islam is essentially a relationship of ownership, in contrast to marriage in the Bible, where the man and woman become one flesh. That way the jihadist is free to leave for jihad anytime and is promised more women in Paradise if he dies. Thus Islam basically reduced the loving relationship of marriage to sexual slavery.
Sex Slavery Yes, Love No
One of the cartoons in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo that inflamed the anger of many Muslims depicted a Muslim man with four wives all dressed in black Islamic hijabs, one of them short and small—a child. In the back behind the women was an uncovered sex slave. And the Muslim man was pointing at a young Western couple sitting on a bench and saying about the couple in love, “This is immoral, this is against Islam.”
The cartoon’s commentary on Islamic values is sad but true. It is the truth that got Muslims offended, and it was exposing the truth that got the French cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo killed.
Islam has substituted love of jihad and martyrdom for love of family. And in order to make it easier for men to prioritize jihad over family, the Muslim man is allowed the use of women as sex slaves while discouraged and shamed for being devoted, loyal, and loving to one wife. Even in Heaven, Islam does not allow a man to reunite with his earthly wife or wives. Instead it promises men more promiscuity than on Earth; in heaven he gets seventy-two virgins.
Islam discourages men from falling in love but encourages them to treat women as sexual objects. Sex slaves are prizes to jihadists as part of the spoils of war. And as we have seen, even sex slavery is not the depth of depravity to which Muslim values on relationships sink: one fatwa went as far as to permit incest for the jihadists.5
ISIS advertised the return to open Islamic sexual slavery markets with this announcement: “Memo: Brothers wishing to buy slaves should register their names with the administrator of the battalion. Regarding brothers currently in service, if they want to be a part of the auction, they should be released within 10 days. If a brother is not registered, he is not allowed to be present at the slave market. Bids should be given in a sealed envelope and whoever wins, he is obligated to buy. Success comes from Allah.”6
Anything but Love
In Saudi Arabia and other sharia-compliant countries, celebrating Valentine’s Day is banned. Shops are prohibited from selling red flowers and other gifts dedicated to celebrating love between a man and a woman.
The expression of love even between spouses is considered offensive; it is often ridiculed and discouraged. Loving a woman is a threat to jihad, so it must be stamped out.
Islamic values and Biblical values about what being a man means are totally different. Islamic manhood means pride and honor, and that honor is directly linked to subjugating and controlling women. If Muslim society were to treat family happiness and the best interests of men, women, and children as priorities, the jihad would collapse and Islam’s political expansion would end. That is why the oppression of women and jihadist political Islam go hand in hand.
I spent my youth in Egypt, mostly in a miserable home atmosphere where pleasing society was more important than the internal life of a person. I never saw what true love meant, especially between a man and a woman. Movies in Egypt often showed how women are shamed, abused, and even killed for a love relationship with a man. Love was often associated with deep guilt and shame.
I grew up hearing the Arabic word “hurma” to describe women but never thought much of its meaning. It means “forbidden.” And it explains a lot about how women are viewed in Islamic society—as an untouchable alien piece of property.
Some Islamic sources describe women as “not human.”7 For fourteen hundred years, Arabic culture has not been able to settle on what to do with women: cover them, confine them to their homes, or treat them as less than human.
Such Islamic values have poisoned any chance of a healthy and loving relationship, a meeting of the mind and heart, between a man and a woman. It is a miracle that some Muslim marriages are happy and successful—despite Islam, not because of it.