Know Your Religion

Note: A version of this article was first posted on the Foreign Policy Blogs Network on 27th January, 2012 and can be found here.

A year ago I stumbled onto an interesting website; after relatinged a short story, it asked the reader to guess the religious context in which the tale was set. The questions varied from the way women dressed (burqa-esque fully clad) to the practice of allowing men multiple wives. When I finished taking the quiz and looked up the answers, I realized how pre-programmed my perceptions were. As a Muslim, I was willing to accept that all listed societal vices were somehow traceable to acts of Muslims (albeit not in line with the true teachings of Islam); but what I was not expecting was for these to be stories from Christian and Jewish neighborhoods.

We are too quick to judge and hold other religious beliefs in contempt. Take for example a story of a group of men who have declared it against their religious sensitivities to allow girls to leave their homes wearing short sleeved shirts. Or segregated buses, banning women from appearing on billboards and pepper-spraying girls who appear in public with boys. These are all tales from Jewish communities in Israel, but could very well have been stories from my home town of Lahore, Pakistan. If I have learnt anything, it is that inane acts are done in the name of religion every day and almost never do they rightly follow the tenants of that religion.

A popular belief is that religions have been interpreted or created to help men maintain power while disallowing the female population a voice. This is exactly what Dov Linzer, an Orthodox rabbi, said whilst writing in the NY Times: “It seems, then, that a religious tenet that begins with men’s sexual thoughts ends with men controlling women’s bodies.” During her tenure as Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Mier was asked to set a curfew on women to control the increasing cases of rape. She refused, saying: “It’s the men who are attacking the women. If there is to be a curfew, let the men stay home.

In 2010, Nicholas Kristof printed a “Religion and Sex Quiz” that taught me that abortion was in fact not mentioned in the Bible, regardless of what the Republicans say. My personal favorite asinine rules are created within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Some months ago clerics banned women from touching bananas and cucumbers to avoid “sexual thoughts”. Previously, Saudi cleric Sheik Abdel Mohsen Obeikan issued a fatwa, or Islamic ruling, calling on women to give breast milk to their male colleagues or men they come into regular contact with so as to avoid illicit mixing between the sexes (these men were now foster children and, therefore, social interaction would be deemed devoid of sexual context).

Disparity between what is pronounced as religion, and what it actually is, exist in all faiths mostly because we are all too willing to take someone else’s word for what is divinely ordained. As the Nigerian saying goes: “Not to know is a bad thing, to wish not to know is worse.”