Last week, Muzzammil Hassan apparently beheaded his wife, Aasiya Zubair. Although the reasons for this heinous act currently remain unclear, there was a history of domestic violence.
God rest her soul.
Mr. Hassan was co-founder, with his wife, of Bridges TV, a station dedicated to improving the image of Muslims in the US. His work was well-known and admired, and the case has shocked American Muslims. Although their private life was private, it was assumed that a couple who lived and worked together for eight years did not have more than average amount of spousal disagreement.
As a community the depravity of this act has put two things in sharp relief:
- We have begun to lose our sense of humanity. We are becoming the beast we are named.
- Domestic Violence hits everyone.
Immediately after the news broke, my first thought was crisis management. What does this event mean for the Muslim-American community? How will Muslims be perceived? As a Muslim, my first thought should have been to pray for the soul of the departed. Then I should have thought of the immediate concern, is there a family that needs to be cared for? What can we do to help? Instead, I became the Pan from Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, who, called “beast” often enough, becomes one. I forgot my humanity. I’m sure I’m not the only one. The last few days have been spent trying to figure out how to help the four children left behind; the two oldest are from a previous marriage and will have some financial support, but the two youngest, 4 and 6, have no one.
I cannot fathom the anger, the rage that would result in a beheading. According to my TV, crimes of passion tend to be the most violent, but a beheading is just such a foreign concept, in any context, that it is inconceivable. Yet it happened. I believed that it would be described as an expression of innate Muslim values, as though only Muslims are capable of such a crime. Although there is no monopoly on violence, there is a discourse that projects violence as being only a Muslim trait. A typical Orientalist fantasy that holds that the “Other” is inherently violent no matter what the reality may be. Thankfully, aside from some of the fringe sites, the media has been responsible in reporting this as a case of domestic violence.
Horrible things are done to women every day, every minute, everywhere, by all kinds of people. It’s not as though we are not aware of violence against women in the Muslim community. We are and we are trying to do something about it. But a moment like this shows how immediate the need is. The reality is that every community suffers from forms of domestic violence. It’s not about religion; it’s about power and control. We don’t know why Aasiya Zubair was slaughtered. We do know that in difficult economic times, men tend to act out more, in an attempt to exercise control. We are seeing an increase in domestic violence issues, and this case is one of a larger pattern, that has nothing to do with religion.
The challenge now, is how to respond as a religious community. Immediately, we must help the children who are now effectively fatherless and orphaned. I will post details here as they become available. Next, we must work more actively understand domestic violence and to spread the message of groups working on domestic violence issues. Lastly, we have to remember our humanity.
NB: There is a FaceBook that is related to this story. In Memory of Aasiya Zubair: A Pledge to End Domestic Violence.
Tags: domestic violence, muslims, television
Yes, this is going to be a big story. It's not really a good example of Muslims being different, because we all know that domestic violence is common in many communities, and also that women are at particular risk of being murdered when they try to leave a violent relationship, which was the case here. The beheading does make it a little special though!
It's not true, though that "domestic violence has nothing to do with religion." Religion has disseminated the idea that women belong to men, are inferior to men, and should obey men since the year dot. Adam and Eve? Now in modern times progressives and feminists--still a minority of the faithful -- want to do away with these messages, and that's good. It bothers me though when they argue that "religion," as a social practice and a set of texts -- has been innocent of sexism all along.
Like for 1500 years and more the best Muslim, Christian, Jewish minds just didn't understand their faith, and now finally we moderns have figured it out. Even today --when one-quarter of american believers are Southern Baptists, who explicitly believe that wives should obey their husbands, how can you say religion has nothing to do with dv?
If you take an ideology which puts women under men's power and then call on men to be kind and good protectors, which is the basic picture of the major faiths, you still have an ideology that places women at men's mercy.
Katha
In Russian Orthodox weddings, the bride's father used to give the groom a whip to chastise her with. These were very religious ceremonies. i think it's safe to say that if the church disapproved of dv, the whip would not have been part of the wedding, a holy sacrament.
So? If you tipped over the samovar in Catherine the Great's drawing room, she'd have you thrown in a dungeon, tortured properly, then conscripted into the army or exiled to Siberia.
But, nothing a little whipping wouldn't have improved.
Dear Katha, thank you for the comments, and I think at important point that needs clarification. The point being the relationship religious thought and religious causality in questions questions of violence.
You mention the story of Adam and Eve, and it seems like a good place to begin. Dr. Amina Wadud has shown in her seminal work, "Qur'an and Women," that the Adam and Eve story is different in the Muslim tradition. They are co-created and co-sinners; the idea that Eve is the one at fault for the fall is an import from Christian theology. I am not arguing that Islam is better, but that structures of patriarchy and sexism are unique to each tradition. These structures are conditioned by cultural norms and cultural borrowings. If you accept this premise, than I think it becomes harder to argue "religion" as a broad category can be responsible for anything. Even a close reading of Marx makes a you realize that his oft-quoted quip on religion is about the uses and abuses of religious traditions, not a metaphysical condemnation of the category of religion.
My intent in the above article is talk about the Islamic religious tradition. You can take me to task for the soft use of my language. However, I would now like to continue to discuss your point in that framework.
Although I understand your frustration about how we "moderns" have discovered the true meaning of religion, I think it's also telling as to how we understand religious history. This period is not the first modern period. Every generation grapples with questions of what it means to be modern. Many of the debates we see in the Islamic tradition, such as living as a minority, inter-faith relations, gender equity, are not new questions, although the formulations may be more particular to our time. If there was no Muslim-majority land for the first 300 hundred years of the Arab expansion, we must realize the question of minority status has been dealt with, we've just forgotten. Mughal India provides another example. India and Indonesia both provide examples of inter-faith living as well.
The question of women in power, one of the markers of liberated thinking on women, exists from the earliest periods of Muslim history. Aisha, the Prophet's wife, led an army. The Prophet's daughter Fatima, was an important political kingmaker after her father's death. The medieval Fatimid dynasty takes its name from her, because she was seen as the source of legitimacy. The 12th century Sulayhid queen, Sayyida Hurra, ruled Yaman for an extended period. Of the five most populous Muslim countries in the world, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Turkey, all have had at least one female head of state. The point is that the debates are not new and modern in the sense of being newborn, but their form is very contemporary.
continued
What you do see is that the tradition is dynamic. In the same way I cannot say Islam is a religion of peace or a religion of violence in a categorical sense, I cannot say Islam is sexist or feminist. It is what it's adherents make of it, and if a believer can justify an action based on the religion, then it exists in the religion. This is a different than saying it exists in the religious tradition as a commandment. There are certain actions for which it becomes difficult to find justification in a systematic sense, but which you can find if you are reading out of the text in order to find justification.
Verse 4:34 of the Qur'an - the "wife-beating" verse - is a good example of this. Laleh Bakthiar's translation of the Qur'an was in part inspired by what she perceived as a patriarchal rendition of the verse. (I give further, although still brief, background at: http://tinyurl.com/b5zzae BTW, the comment thread is really worth reading).
Is there an ideology at play? Yes. Are there patriarchal and misogynistic readings of the text? Yes. Can you read the opposite ideology out of the same texts? Yes. Are there feminist readings of the same texts? Yes. Because the texts in practice are what we make of them, I am uncomfortable with the broad characterization that religion is the problem.
With respect to the article, my specific point was that religion doesn't seem to be at play in this instance.
Regards,
Hussein
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