The Sheik’s views of women (and men)

I received hostile comments when I recently posted that the veil and the hijab reflected repressive attitudes of Islam towards women. I was told that wearing these clothes was an act of free fashion choice by Muslim women. I didn’t accept this claim then and still don’t.

According to Australia’s most senior Muslim cleric, Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, women are abandoned meat that attracts male, voracious animals. Indeed the Lebanese-Muslim gang rapes of Australian women in Sydney were, according to the Sheik, partly the fault of the women concerned – they ‘sway(ed) suggestively’ and wore ‘makeup and immodest dress’.

‘If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat?’

‘The uncovered meat is the problem’.

‘If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred’.

Women are ‘weapons’ used by ‘Satan’ to control men.

‘It is said in the state of zina (adultery), the responsibility falls 90% of the time on the woman. Why? Because she possesses the weapon of enticement (igraa).’

What atrocious views of women and indeed of men. Lock the temptresses up in their rooms and men won't rape them. Pru Goward argues that this man should be deported and I have sympathy for this view. The Sheik has made statements like this in the past and evidently supports Jihad and terrorism.

A key question is how widespread these sickening views are. The response of Muslims in Australia to such statements is typically to suggest that the spokesperson has been ‘misinterpreted’ or has distorted Islamic teachings. There is always an excuse offered and never, it seems, a willingness to face up to what seems to be a real problem. It is, as I posted earlier, a deliberate blindness, an unwillingness to see what is obvious. The sick attitudes of men like the Sheik deserve unreserved condemnation. A quality blog discussion that centres on the record of this appalling man is here.