Defending Muslim Women from Beatings
From MEMRI. Specifically, a columnist in _Al-Sharq Al-Awsat_ states that the last thing that Muslims need is for any of them actually to defend the practice of a husband striking his wife physically. Interestingly, the Koran does prescribe wife-beating. Surah 4:14 does in fact state, "And [as to] those on whose part you fear disobedience, admonish them, expel them from the bed, and beat them." This is no "conspiracy theory."

Understand this: Wife-beating is unacceptable and inexcusable. The Bible even tells husband and wife both not to expel one another from the marriage bed, unless they both agree to such prolonged abstinence as a form of fasting. [I Corinthians 7:1-7] The Bible admonishes a woman to defer and even to submit to her husband, but also constrains the husband to treat his wife in a loving manner. That is not a matter of "equality," but of simple decency, and of the proper model of the relationship between Christ and His church.

What's troubling about this "reformist" column is that its author makes the same kinds of arguments in support of reform that we hear today in Christian circles as arguments for women in elderships, deaconships, and even bishoprics, recognition and even blessing of homosexual unions, winking and nodding at adultery, and much other extra-biblical "reform" that is nothing less than a taking of a pick-ax at the foundations of the church. Indeed, that is all that reformist voices in Islam are left with. This is not even a matter of the fundamental documents having been written for a now-superseded culture. In the first place, you have many voices in Islam wanting to get "back to the Koran" in every particular, including the one above. In the second, the desert tribal culture that is the background of the Koran survives to this day. (Many who have traveled in the Middle East report a sensation of having stepped through Irwin Allen's Time Tunnel to a time twelve or thirteen hundred years past.) And in the third, wife-beating was never acceptable by any objective standard whatsoever. More to the point, the entire Koran is a pack of lies from beginning to end.

I would ask all who read this the same thing that a deacon at my present church asked me: Why should we base our trust of another religion on the departure, by that religion's so-called adherents, from their own fundamental documents? It's absurd--and yet it is the foreign policy of the United States today.::Submitted for your itching ears [2 Timothy 4:2-4] files.