The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam by Ayaan Hirsi Ali Read Free Book Online Page A

denies it, his father too can deny it to the outside world. Children learn from their mothers that it pays to lie. If they don’t want to be punished they’ve got to come up with stories.
    This “virgins’ cage” has consequences for women, but also for men and children. The virgins’ cage is, in fact, a double cage. Women and girls are locked up in the inner cage, but surrounding this is a larger cage in which the entire Islamic culture has been imprisoned. Caging women in order to guard their virginity leads not only to frustration and violence for the individuals directly involved, but also to socioeconomic backwardness for the entire community. These caged women actually exert a harmful influence on children, especially young boys. Since most women in the Islamic world are excluded from education, and are purposely kept ignorant, when these same women bear and raise children, they can pass on only their limited knowledge, and so perpetrate a vicious cycle of ignorance from generation to generation.
    Even first-generation Muslim mothers in the West have no more than elementary education. Many are illiterate and know nothing of the society in which they have to find their way. With any luck, those who immigrated as children will become educated at a later age, but as long as the traditional sexual morality remains their parents’ guiding principle for raising them, their socioeconomic progress will be difficult, if not impossible.
    For many Muslims, the sexual morality of Islam has even more-far-reaching consequences. Unable to express openly the hatred they feel toward their husbands, some women direct it against their children. Of course, this does not apply to all women, for many of whom children are a consolation. But the relationship between parents and children almost never resembles what is usual in an individualistic society like the Netherlands.
    Of course, violence against women often occurs within Western families, too, but Westerners emphatically repudiate violence, while most Muslim families regard violence against women as something that women themselves provoke because they don’t follow the rules. The family and the social environment do not disapprove of it. They reason that if your husband hits you, it must be because you had it coming to you. Western neighbors, family members, and friends don’t believe that the mistreatment of women is an acceptable educational device.
    The Koran assigns great importance to values such as trust, truthfulness, and learning. Yet in just the few examples I have recounted above we can see how things actually stand in daily Islamic life—it is a dismal state of affairs. Mistrust is everywhere, and lies rule.
    In order to put Islam’s strict sexual morality into perspective, we need to examine and analyze its practical consequences. Relations between the sexes have to be described objectively and critically. Then, on the basis of the resulting data, proposals must be made for changing the way in which men and women relate to each other.
    The United Nations reports suggest that the systematic gathering of knowledge is not valued in the Arabic-Islamic countries. According to the Koran, the faithful must ceaselessly strive after knowledge, but the Koran also states that Allah is all-knowing and that the Koran is the source of all knowledge. It is impossible to reconcile these two positions. For Muslim children the study of biology and history can be very confusing. After all, history begins in a time before the Koran begins, and the theory of evolution contradicts the creation story in the Koran. Most mullahs advise Muslims who are confounded by this contradictory state of affairs that, when the Koran speaks of the “search for knowledge,” it means that a Muslim must keep on reading the Koran until, as a result of this dedicated reading, gateways to knowledge open by themselves.
    The values of the Koran are essentially unattainable for any human being. A great