During a news reading session sometime last month, I found an interesting article on Yahoo! News. Originally, I was not going to read it for I did not want to suffer through the Islamophobic comments at the end; reading them only serve to irritate me. But I decided to get over it and just read the thing.
It seems that anytime something bad happens involving Muslims and Islamic countries, most Westerners blame that event on Islam. That was certainly true in regards to this article. The article was about rising infanticide rates in Pakistan, and while the article reported about infanticide as a whole, the discussion in the comments section inevitably turned to one statement:
The death toll is far worse among girls, says manager Kazmi, with nine out of ten dead babies the charity finds being female.
As you can imagine, the hateful comments focused on this fact, that girls were far more often the target of infanticide. They brought to mind the well-known Qur’anic verse: ‘And they (women) have rights similar to those (of men) over them in kindness and men are a degree above them.’ (2:228), stressing those last few words. They argued that Islam abdicated the greater degree of men and the lesser degree of women, thus leading to the expendability of women, especially young female children.
However, they failed to mention the past. Infanticide has been around far longer than Islam. It is an unfortunate act that has probably been around just as long as man has. Prior to the lifetime of Muhammad salallahu alayhi wassalam, female infanticide was relatively common among the pagan Arabs. As soon as they were born, baby girls were buried quickly in order to lessen the shame and disappointment in the birth of a girl.
The Prophet salallahu alayhi wassalam revealed the wrongness of this practice. He showed that Islam condemns this selection of one gender over the other in relaying a verse that warned the crime of infanticide against innocent children would be revealed and questioned on the Day of Judgment: ‘…when the baby girl buried alive is asked for what sin she was killed, when the record of deeds are spread open, when the sky is stripped away, when Hell is made to blaze and Paradise brought near: then every soul will know what it has brought about.’ (81:8-14). And then there’s this excerpt from the Qur’an: ‘When one of them is given news of the birth of a baby girl, his face darkens and he is filled with gloom. In his shame he hides himself away from his people because of the bad news he has been given. Should he keep it and suffer in contempt or bury her in the dust? How ill they judge!’ (16:58-59). There are also a few hadiths speaking to the impermissibility of female infanticide, such as this one: ‘The Prophet said, “Allah has forbidden you to be undutiful to your mothers, to withhold what you should give, to demand what you do not deserve, or to bury your draughts alive.”’ (Bukhari)
Female infanticide was also common in other places in the past. During the Middle Ages in Europe, mothers would sometimes ‘accidentally’ roll over a baby to smother it in its sleep. Of course, even then more girl babies died than males as males were found to be more useful. Instances of roll-over infanticide could also be found among slaves. Thus, infanticide has been around for a long time and was not something brought about by Islam. Nor is it exclusive to the faith.
These Islamophobic comments also forgot to mention other cultures and countries. In almost any culture found in this world, males are considered to be more useful. What about China? There, where male children are desired to carry on the family name and care for parents when they grow old, female children are often killed, abandoned, or given to orphanages. These acts are compounded by the strict laws restricting so many children per couple. And what about India? The majority of infanticides there are also mainly female, and I am not talking about the Muslim population of India. It is also something that affects Hindu India.
And this is where Pakistan’s infanticide problem comes from. Unfortunately, the culture of Pakistan is mainly derived from India’s Hindu culture. Take weddings for example; the traditional Pakistani wedding is almost exactly like the traditional Hindu wedding, the only difference being the actual wedding ceremony and the walima (wedding dinner) that is present in Islam. Each include lots of dancing, loud music, and mixing of the sexes – all prohibited in Islam. The bride’s family spends copious amounts of money, often more than they can afford, to make the wedding as big as possible so that people might think highly of them; Islam opts for a middle road, and weddings should not be excessive, especially when it is just for show. In many instances, the bride’s family is forced to gather a large dowry, which if not a good enough amount for the groom’s family means the wedding could be called off. In Islam, it is the groom that pays the dowry; the bride or her family are not expected to pay anything towards it.
Weddings are only one example; media, celebrations, and more often reflect the Hindu culture rather than Islam. Of course saying every Pakistani person follows culture more than religion is wrong; some do indeed put religion before culture, as should all Muslims. But a majority does not and this is where the societal ills originate.
Yet, one needs to realize that infanticide is not something that’s necessarily tied simply to culture or the ‘higher degree’ of men. Ultimately, infanticide results from a lack of food or money. This is true all over the world, no matter where it occurs. Anybody who thinks Islam is to blame when it comes to female infanticide has received a lot of misinformation or is completely unaware of what happens in Muslim nations. Also, no one should blame a whole group for infanticide. Those who are responsible for it are those who do it. To say all Muslims practice infanticide based on what some Muslims do is of course stereotyping. So instead of playing the blame game, we should concentrate our time and energy into fixing the problem rather than wasting time in blaming the wrong people.
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Normally I include the link to the news story I use to write a post. However, Yahoo! News links do not stay live for very long, and there is not an archive that I know of, so I am not going to include the link. But, if you want to read the article, I do have a copy, so just comment/email me, and I will be sure to get it to you insha’Allah!
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