A Cultural Shift
We’ve noted that, practically, the loudest people on the block live in a cultural paradigm that bears little resemblance to much of our recent past. The technological era has created abundance for those few people who form the majority of popular discourse, and for whom there exist real existential problems. To begin with, the traditional values based on over twenty thousand years of known history are deemed as misogynistic and patriarchal, even though a big part of that history was also matriarchal and feminist. However, the matriarchal societies just didn’t fare very well in the face of patriarchy. When you put an army of women against an army of men all bearing the same weapons, the army of men will always win. That’s, in effect, what has always happened and what is still happening. The more feminine a society becomes, the weaker the army, the less militarily successful they are, and the more likely they will be defeated despite technology. Aside from destroying the entire world in a nuclear war, the fact is that in the final analysis, armies still need to put boots on the ground and fight gun battles. Russia is militarily powerful, not only because they have sophisticated weapons, but because they have men. Hence, we are watching in real-time patriarchy trump matriarchy, as it has and always will. While the United States recruits women to fight its wars, others recruit men. When it comes down to strength, the armies of men will always win. However, none of these things happens in a vacuum.
It wasn’t until very recently that women in the West won the right to vote, and the political arena became a place where politicians vied to appeal to emotional sentiment as opposed to reason. It isn’t surprising that in the political West, people with the lowest intelligence become leaders because they have the nicest things to say. That’s because the voices of men in those parts of the world are silenced and, in fact, outlawed, cancelled and sentenced. When society has all but collapsed, and people can engage in sexual relations without a juristic definition, there must exist a level of personal accountability regarding the behaviour of the individual Muslim in these countries. For many Muslim women who are financially capable of looking after themselves and who feel relatively safe in civil society, a man is not needed for much of what men were needed for in the past. Nor do these Muslims exist in tribes or widely extended families. They are, in essence, the same as their non-Muslim counterparts culturally, existing in a disjointed form as individuals who made the individual decision to be Muslim, and so they must apply an individualistic model when deciding on marriage. When chaos reigns, it is not upon the individual to establish order in society; it is upon the individual to establish order within his life as best he can.
From this perspective, we have to see marriage as the lawful place in which people can have sex. In other words, absent everything else that marriage is, it finally boils down to sex. Herein lie the various socio-cultural and religious problems that Muslims face globally. In the past, men didn’t have access to women, because they were at home or in places where it was difficult to access them. Every man who was interested in any woman he saw would have to, by necessity, go to her father or male guardian to negotiate access to her. He would also have to make sure he has the financial means to wed her so that he could look after her and whatever children they may have. Often, it wasn’t down to his own money, but rather down to the collective wealth of the tribe that made marriage more accessible. That is the modern equivalent of the hunter who hunted for his family. However, in the modern context of the upper middle class people in modern European and wealthy Arab countries, women are increasingly financially independent and do not need to be looked after, at least financially. They are also capable of having free access to men and negotiating their own relationships. Often, these relationships are secret, illicit relationships that they engage in. More often than not, it isn’t merely that they have sexual desires they want to fulfil. Rather, it is that some women view marriage as a step towards taking away their independence. To maintain their independence, they can unfortunately not get married. However, they can’t live their entire lives without having sex, or they can, but they are unwilling to. So they have casual sexual relationships with men who are usually married or who similarly want to enjoy the freedom of being able to have several casual relationships. These are usually not young single people. They are normally already in their late twenties to their early forties. Most of the younger single people, who are in their late teens and early twenties, are still looking to fulfil the worldview of their parents. Which brings us to the question of age.
In the very recent past, girls as young as twelve were getting married in Europe. It was considered normal for girls who reached puberty to marry. Even when girls were getting married later, it wasn’t much later. Many of the older women in our societies still alive today testify to having gotten married at fourteen or fifteen. That being the case, fidelity, at least on the part of women, was basically guaranteed (with little exception). It’s not that people have gotten more sinful; it’s actually that people do not have sex early enough and do not have their needs fulfilled (in Muslim countries). Today, we expect our daughters and sons to marry closer to the age of thirty, and we expect that at that age they should still be virgins, when in fact none of our parents were virgins at that age, and most of our mothers were on to their fifth or sixth child by then. Then, when our children are independent and living on their own at that age, we expect them not to create a scandal, and we also expect them not to get married. So, without justifying it, what choice do they have but to die celibate or have an illicit relationship?
In many of our Muslim cultures, we expect that our older daughters should still be given a high dowry and still marry a man who is single, despite the fact that they are in their thirties and forties, having turned away every suitor who came to ask. We use our daughters as bargaining chips for financial gain and sell them off to the highest bidder, and if we demanded a bit too much and the gamble didn’t pan out, our daughters are left to hang out and dry. After that, we let our daughters do whatever they want, because no one wants to marry them anymore. All the suitors who came are already married! On the other hand, we demand such high dowries that we essentially rule out most men in society. In the end, we sit with a mostly single population of young, fertile people being driven to sin by their hormones. Finally, we force our children to marry their cousins, and we end up with delinquent grandchildren because we also married our own cousins, as did our parents and grandparents. After all, this is our tradition?
The only way for the new generation to have the freedom to choose their own partners is to partner up illegally, since marriage is in the hands of the parents, and the parents want their children to marry their first cousins. Also, the only way for a woman to be independent and still have a sex life is to have an illicit relationship for fear that a future husband will demand that she not have a career. So too, will men no longer want to invest ten years of their savings on a high dowry and wedding when they know too well that some of the very ‘innocent’ women are no longer that innocent. Who wants to work and save until they’re thirty only to marry a woman who was secretly around the block? Hence, the older men target the younger women, and the older women are the side chicks to the married men. That is the current sexual ecosystem, all intermingled with guilt, sin, reprisals and sometimes even death. Let us ask ourselves if that is what God and His Messenger (s) intended?
I still haven’t mentioned honour killings, child brides, and rape. Let me be clear, when a woman is forced to marry a man, and he sleeps with her on the night of the wedding while she lies dead still because the angels will curse her, that is called rape. When a six-year-old girl is married to a man who is sixty in Yemen, that’s called child abuse and sexual assault. How do you sexually enjoy a six-year-old without being mentally ill? And when daughters are killed because they have shamed their families, that is called murder. While we always decry that these things have nothing to do with Islam, we must admit that we have some of these things in Muslim societies. It is not merely an exaggeration of the West that would ordinarily try to exploit any of our weaknesses as an attempt to show that they are culturally and morally superior. The fact that the West is engaged in a media war against the Muslims doesn’t mean that we, the Muslims, should not engage in fixing the problems that afflict our people because of our abhorrent cultural practices of the past, which are now intermingled with new cultural practices inherited from a New World Order that aims to destroy the family unit. If we are to win this war, and it is a war, we need to fight the demons within (in the form of cultural barbarity) and the false narratives that have newly infiltrated our societies. The solution is not simply to return to the past, because we have some nasty things in our past, too. The solution is to move towards a future that is closer to what we find in the Qur’an and the Sunnah. And what is that exactly?
TO BE CONTINUED
How to Choose and Keep a Wife: A Practical Guide for Men (eBook)
How to Choose and Keep a Wife is a much needed and in demand marriage guide for men in a time when marriages are just not working. This book doesn’t aim to fix the problems of women, or the problems with society. Rather, this book gives men a step by step guide on how to properly vet a woman for marriage. It also gives men clear guidance on how to manage being married and staying married. While some might see this book as idealistic, there is something in it for everyone. It tackles the issues of marriage both from an idealistic and pragmatic approach. On the one hand, the author sets forth an ideal but also acknowledges the real likelihood that the ideal will not be accomplished and gives practical advice on how to manoeuvre in less idealistic circumstances. Even though the target audience for this book is single men or men who are married and are having a hard time, it would prove useful for women who are looking at being good wives.
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