I just know I’m going to get grief for this, but long-time readers know I have a mischievous streak that causes me to always sympathize with an obvious villain. I was pleased to see the obviously gallant Michael Avramovich, in his recent Mere Comments post, doesn’t just invite Muslims to be “partners for social justice” or some liberal crap like that; he invites them to leave their false religion and embrace Jesus Christ as their Saviour. The dude talks like a Christian. However, we must be careful that it is Christ Himself we promote to the infidel and not our contingent cultural norms, rightly though we cling to them ourselves.
Avramovich is outraged at Muslim cultures’ supposed permissiveness towards domestic violence. The Koran says that a husband may punish a disobedient wife by swatting her with a toothbrush-size stick, which a millenium-and-a-half later has led to the following:
one-half of ever-married Egyptian women agree that a husband is justified in beating his wife for at least one of the following reasons: She goes out without telling him (40 percent), neglects the children (40 percent), argues with him (37 percent), refuses to have sex with him (34 percent), or burns food (19 percent). Seventeen percent of the women surveyed agreed that a husband is justified in beating his wife for all five reasons.
And yet the Muslims say they don’t endorse spousal abuse! Surely this is a case of the sinister “taqiyya” in action. Well, wait. It depends a lot on what these Egyptian girls understand by the word “beating”. Here’s a question for you: what is your position on spanking? Is corporal punishment of children a human rights abuse that should be outlawed? Not being a liberal twit, I assume your answer is “no”. Well, then, does that mean that you endorse child abuse, since you’re okay with using “violence” against children? In the context of children, most people realize that there’s a difference between swatting a kid on the behind as a calm, measured disciplinary action and flying into a rage and breaking his arm. Now, suppose we had a custom of spanking our wives when they’re disobedient, which is worse than flicking them with toothbrushes. “Outrageous”, you say? Well, if corporal punishment is such a uniquely horrible form of punishment, shouldn’t we reserve it for adults rather than for children? “But it’s demeaning because it’s a punishment for children”, you say? Well, as soon as we start applying it to adults, that will cease to be a problem. Now, I personally don’t use corporal punishment of any kind on my wife or daughter, but I wouldn’t say that the natural law absolutely forbids it. Of course, some brutal men go much further than toothbrush swatting or spanking, but such abuse is condemned by Islam as much as by Christianity. It could be that those Egyptian gals really think it’s okay for them to be thrashed to within an inch of their life for burning the food, but I doubt it. Cultural context is everything.