Women and Islam: Observations from Muslim Countries

Knight & Rose Show — Wintery Knight and Desert Rose

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Women and Islam: Observations from Muslim Countries

June 26, 2022

Knight & Rose ShowWintery Knight and Desert Rose

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss her observations of how women live in several Islamic countries, specifically discussing honor killings, education, health care, polygamy, consent, "temporary marriages", domestic violence, etc. Rose explains the "excellent pattern of conduct" in Islam. We discuss Islam's views of women, sex and marriage, referencing their most authoritative texts. We contrast Islam's teachings with the teachings of Christianity. We discuss whether these teachings are still practiced today.

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Show notes: https://winteryknight.com/2022/06/26/knight-and-rose-show-episode-11-women-and-islam/

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Transcript

Welcome to the Knight and Rose Show where we discuss practical ways of living out an authentic Christian worldview. Today's topic is Women and Islam. I'm Wintery Knight and I'm Desert Rose.

Welcome Rose. So today I wanted to talk to you about your experiences traveling in Muslim Countries. You've been to many Muslim Countries and I was wondering if you could tell us about what you observed about the status of women.

Yeah, sure. Well, one of the things that is pretty noticeable right away is that there is a strict separation of men and women and women are generally thought of and treated quite poorly. There is some variation depending on what country you're in as to how poorly they're treated and how low they're thought of.

But in Afghanistan in particular, this was probably where I noticed this the most. I met teenagers who had had many friends who had been killed, often by their own fathers or brothers. Honor killings.

Yep, exactly. Yes. Women of all ages and girls were terrified of being harassed by men in a variety of ways.

One girl in particular on this beautiful day asked me, she begged me in fact to just go outside with her for a walk because she can't walk outside when she's alone teaching, which she normally is when I'm not there. I saw women in absolute agony, like on the floor, writhing in pain, crying. Because they were sick.

Yeah, exactly. And when I suggested we take this one woman in particular to the doctor, I was told there are no female doctors. I said, "Well, yeah, obviously, let's take her to a male doctor." And they said, "Women can be seen by male doctors." So women aren't allowed an education and they're not allowed to see male doctors, so no healthcare for women.

I saw homes with a different wife and her children in every bedroom. Polygamy. Yeah, exactly.

And several of them told me about how they were fearful of being poisoned by the other wives because of all the jealousy. In fact, in Afghanistan, when on the rare occasions when I did interact with men who had had some exposure to Western culture and I was assured it was okay to interact with a bit, a little bit, when they realized I had an education and that the men on my project team valued my input, they actually started calling me sir because they had absolutely no grid for understanding a woman with an education of any kind. So I couldn't be a woman.

I obviously must have been a sir. Wow, that's really strange. So it's good to talk about your experiences, but do you have any statistics to kind of back up this kind of grim assessment of the status of women in Muslim majority countries? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, you could look at any number of studies and see that women are highly discriminated against by any objective measure, but I'll just give you one stat. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 11 out of the 12 countries with the highest levels of discrimination against women are Muslim majority countries. Yeah, the OECD is a pretty good resource.

So that's the kind of the status of things now, but what's responsible for it? Is it policy or is it something that goes further back? Yeah, this actually goes back 1400 years to the very beginning of Islam. In Quran 3321, Muhammad is called the excellent pattern of conduct for Muslims. Muslims are supposed to imitate him in everything that they do from the most significant and important things to the most inconsequential.

And this passage says in the Quran, there has certainly been for you in the messenger of Allah, an excellent pattern for anyone whose hope is in Allah and the last day and who remembers Allah often. And the Quran actually commands Muslims to obey Muhammad at least 20 different times. So he is the pattern of conduct.

Muhammad from 1400 years ago is who Muslims are looking to and imitating and it's from his teaching and his behavior that this conduct comes. Yeah, a while back, it was my birthday and I was thinking about what I should ask for from my pen pal Dina. And she said, "Well, do you have the Nabeel Qureshi books?" And I said, "No, I don't." And she said, "Oh, he's the greatest." And so she sent me all his books and related to your point, I remember he was talking about how he would always step into the restroom with his left foot first because that's what Muhammad would do.

Is it really that bad? Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a great example and very typical. So, Al-Ghazali is considered by many to be the greatest Muslim theologian ever to live.

And he said that Muslims are to imitate Muhammad so closely that they are even supposed to sit while putting on their trousers, stand while winding their turbans and begin with the right foot when they're putting on their shoes because this is the degree to which Muslims are to imitate Muhammad. Okay. So if we're seeing discrimination, poor treatment of women today, it's possible that this could go back to the founder of the dominant religion.

Yeah, that's exactly where it goes about. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Exactly. We have to look at the original sources. Okay.

So we just did two episodes on masculinity that came out, you know, by the time you guys are hearing this, they'll have been out for a few weeks. But I talked about the excellent pattern of conduct for Christian men. And that was basically to say that men should choose women who are interested in serving the boss and to that they would be interested in helping men to do that.

So that's what Christian men are supposed to do. They were supposed to look at women and judge them by their character, by their intelligence, by their wisdom, and basically partner up with the ones who can help us produce the best results for our common boss. Is it the same thing in Islam? Not at all.

Not even close. So according to Islam, women are actually stupid and immoral and would never be capable of partnering with their husband for the types of kingdom adventures that you and I discuss. In Muhammad's behavior and in what he taught others, it's clear that he saw women as inferior to men and having basically one role and that is they are there for sex for men, their sex objects and unworthy of the kind of respect and dignity due to an image-bearer of God, which I mean isn't all that shocking because Islam has no doctrine of humans having the image of God bearing the image of God.

So give me an example of the treatment of women that is kind of prescribed or demonstrated by Muhammad. Well, probably the most disturbing of all is that when Muhammad was in his 50s, he had a sexual relationship with a prepubescent nine-year-old girl named Aisha. According to the most trusted Muslim sources, Muhammad married Aisha when she was just six years old.

He was in his 50s again. Yeah. And he consummated the marriage when she was nine before she had even reached puberty.

Okay. Yeah. Well, we're going to have to, you know, obviously to substantiate all these, you know, claims are going to have to put the references and the show notes, but that's pretty shocking.

Yeah. Often when I teach on this, I will actually go through the verses so that people can see that this comes right from the Quran and the Hadith. With regard to Muhammad's life in particular, it comes from the Hadith because the Quran barely mentions Muhammad except to say, obey him and imitate him, but we don't have any information to imitate just from the Quran.

Right. Interesting. So what's the standard response to this from Muslim authorities and the Muslims that you met in Muslim majority countries? Well, most of the authorities I've talked to have been throughout the US.

I've met with Imams, leaders in the mosque. And when I asked him about Aisha, the common response I get is, well, some scholars think she was older and I'll say, well, based on what? And they'll say the Hadith and I'll tell them, but the most trusted Hadith say Aisha was nine when Muhammad consummated the marriage and they'll say, yeah, but she might've been older. And I'll say, yeah, but there's no evidence of this.

And they'll say, yeah, but she might've been older. And I'll say, I'll say, why do you think that? And they'll say, because of the Hadith, I'm like, but the Hadith say she was nine. And so, you know, that's, it's a lot of fun just going round and round in circles and getting nowhere like that.

I think they're banking on you not having read the Hadith and not being able to quote to them chapter and verse about what the rules really are. You know, I'm thinking about a situation, one story that I really like is about this theologian Wayne Grudem. Have you heard of him? Yeah, I love him.

Absolutely. I've read, I think probably every book he's written, he's phenomenal. He's been instrumental in my theological development.

Yeah, I was once working for a Christian guy who was a director of IT and he actually had his systematic theology and, you know, was just really, really proud of how owning it and everything. I think it's the most widely used systematic theology in evangelical seminaries. Anyway, the point is, is that this guy is some sort of arch Christian who can dig up verses for anything you could possibly think about.

He's an expert in Christianity and Christian doctrine and so on. So, I wanted to counter what you said about the nine-year-old with him and basically tell this story about his life just quickly. So, he has a wife and they were living in around a suburb of Chicago and working at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School or whatever that's like.

Seminary. Seminary, yeah. Yeah.

He was there and she was very sick because she had some kind of health condition that made her get sick all the time. So, they took a vacation to Phoenix, Arizona and she found out that that was much better for her. So, he decided to uproot himself from this established seminary and move to Phoenix, Arizona and go to work in, you know, this tiny little school instead, just basically giving up a lot of prestige in his career so that his wife would be happier and healthier.

Yeah, yeah. Dr. Grudem is absolutely outstanding and he not only knows the Christian scriptures, but he lives them out in his own life and that's a perfect example. I'm just giving that as an example for, you know, the Christian excellent pattern of conduct.

If you're, you know, how do women get treated? I know there's other little problems with treatment of women in Muhammad's life. Have you heard about his polygamy? Oh, absolutely, yeah. Was this something he taught to his followers and I mean, obviously, I guess he's the excellent man in conduct.

Yeah, so interestingly, Muhammad did make a lot of exceptions for himself or rather Allah made a lot of exceptions for Muhammad to have more and better and different things than other people were allowed in some regards. But Muhammad did say and the Quran says that most men are allowed to have three or four wives in Islam. Muhammad had at least nine at one time and there is good evidence to believe he had 13 at one time and that's in addition to sex slaves.

So wives plus sex slaves. So Muhammad's companions reported that Muhammad would regularly have intercourse with all of them on the same day he would go make the rounds. So each of them on the same calendar day? Yes, on the same day and his companions would talk about how does he have the strength to do that and they talked about how God had given Muhammad the strength of 30 men because of his endurance in the bedroom and actually grosser even well, not I don't know how it gets grosser than that but Muhammad would also talk about how he would only bathe one time and then have sex with all of those women.

So what do Muslim women say about, you know, being one out of nine and one out of four? What's the response to that? When I ask them about Muhammad having so many wives, a lot of times the response I'll get is that he married so many women because he was just such an amazing and generous person. You know, they'll tell me these women, these poor women needed someone to take care of them and oh, how wonderful Muhammad was willing to do the hard work of taking care of them. He was so generous and loving.

I will often ask them, would you share your husband with eight or ten other women if they were single and your husband was as generous and wonderful as Muhammad? And a lot of times the response I'll get is, well, it would be hard but I would need to understand. So yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, I just like I'm just thinking of all that.

I read a lot of literature, you know, and there's a in the Western canon, there's a there are a lot of books about male-female interactions even in the Bible. You know, there are stories about Abraham and Sarah and, you know, just looking after your wife, being kind to her and taking care of her. I'm just trying to think what kind of kindness is possible when there's no intimacy, you know, one flesh intimacy.

Just thinking about Jesus's definition of marriage about one man and one woman, one flesh and leaving your parents and starting out on a life alone, you know, together. It's just such a portrait of closeness and oneness of purpose and you're not supposed to, hurting your wife is like hurting your own body and treating your wife badly. It's like treating yourself badly.

Yeah, it's just really different. Yes, very, very different conception of what marriage is in Christianity versus Islam. In Islam, it's really just a business deal which is intended to meet the man's physical needs and reproduce so that there are lots and lots and lots of Muslims so that they can, you know, take over the world, which is the objective of Islam.

I wonder what the what Muhammad teaches about women's intelligence and character. What are his actual words about that? So, Muhammad taught that women are inferior to men in common sense and intelligence. He talked frequently about the deficiency of a woman's mind.

That's the way that a lot of these quotes from Muhammad are translated in the Hadith. And Muhammad would often point back to a Quran verse which commands that the testimony of two women is to be worth the testimony of one man. And then in the Hadith, we're told that Muhammad said the reason for that is because of the deficiency of a woman's mind.

So, women are lacking intelligence. There are several verses about women and their deficiencies in common sense and intelligence as well as morality. Yeah, I know a lot of women in Christianity make a big deal out of the description of the Proverbs 31 woman.

Is there anything like that in Islam where there's like at least a prescription for women to be good wives and mothers and intelligent and busy and so on? No, well, the closest thing to that I can think of is Muhammad praising Aisha, his child bride, as a better dish than his other wives in the bedroom. So, he would compare his wives to food that he liked to eat. But no, nothing even remotely like Proverbs 31 at all.

Yeah, you know what I'm talking about, like in Proverbs 31, there's a guy, he's married, there's a girl, the girl is amazing, she does all this stuff. She makes things with her hands. She clothes people, her children, she teaches them, she runs a business.

She yeah, she makes her husband proud so that the other men honor him at the city gate. Yeah, it's wonderful. Yeah, I love that chapter.

So, yeah, there's nothing like that. I mean, Muhammad talked about how women are also deficient in character. Women lack.

Give me like we're talking a lot. I know we're going to put this in the show notes. Give me some kind of citation here.

Sahih al-Wukhari 1052, for example, records Muhammad saying that he had seen the hell fire, so hell, and that most of the inhabitants of hell were women. And when according to the Hadith, when a woman asked why most of the people in hell are women, Muhammad said it's because of their ungratefulness to their husbands. Muhammad said, even if you're benevolent to a woman throughout her whole life, and then she sees just one undesirable thing in you, she will say, I've never had any good from you.

It sounds like Muhammad didn't really have the greatest relationship with his wives. This is how he described his interaction with women and specifically those you're married to. Wow, that's terrible.

One of the biggest aspects of modern feminism is the notion of consent. So, I was just wondering how does that consent? I don't see a whole lot of movement from feminists about criticizing Islam. So, I was just wondering, is Islam really, really good at consent? Do they definitely? That's going to be a no.

So, the excellent pattern of conduct taught that women should be available to men for whatever they wanted in any way they wanted and at any time they wanted without any consideration for the woman. And there's nothing mutual about this at all. The man, when the man's working or when he's walking down the street and he sees some other pretty woman or he gets excited or whatever, he's supposed to run home to his wives and tell her, "Stop whatever you're doing.

I'm in need." And she's supposed to just accommodate him however he wants. And in fact, the hadith described all the different positions that are available to men. And it basically is just disregard what the woman wants, plow her however you want.

So, the Qur'an teaches that women are a man's farmland, his plot of land to plow any way he pleases. Wow. That's so different from the New Testament teaching about the wife's body belongs to the husband and the husband's body belongs to the wife.

So, they're not allowed to deprive one another except by mutual consent. And it's just like... Yeah, it's very mutual to be concerned about the other person and their needs, not just for one person to demand what they want, when they want it, how they want it. And it's not just wives who are the farmland for men.

Also available to them are sex slaves. So, the Qur'an talks often about those whom your right hands possess. It's talking about women you've taken captive when you've been fighting.

So, that's the other thing that Muhammad did a ton of. Yeah, can you imagine if there were records of Jesus behaving this way that had any potential validity at all? I mean, people just go insane. But this is, yeah, the life of Muhammad, war and sex and... Yeah, people should look into that.

There's a lot... Like, if you... Even if you just get a summary of the Muslim religious text, it's really a lot of battling and conquests and just against peaceful neighbors. Like, just starting... Everybody's all freaking out about, you know, Russia invading Ukraine. Like, you should take a look at the history of Muhammad and his followers.

Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I grew up with this and my mom was always like, trying to explain Islam in like, the most nice way. It's just saying, "Oh, this is just like our version of Christianity." Yeah, that's not even close.

Not even close. So, in fact, I haven't even told you all of it. So, in addition to having several wives and having an unlimited number of sex slaves, Muhammad also told men that they can make a contract for what is translated as a temporary marriage or muta.

Temporary marriage. So, yeah. So, this goes back to Muhammad because he and his men were out on an expedition and they didn't think they could survive any longer without women to please them in the bedroom.

And so, they were thinking about castrating themselves and Muhammad said, "No, no, don't castrate yourselves. Let's come up with a better solution." So, he encouraged them to make a contract with any women in the area for a defined period of time. They could, you know, be married for an hour, a night, a week, or, you know, a month, whatever, as long as they paid the women for taking care of their needs for the established amount of time.

So, yeah, that's prostitution. That's not marriage. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you know, I've talked to my Muslim friends about this as well and they're like, "No, no, it's not prostitution. As long as it's done in the name of Allah, you know, you're just making the most of Allah's good gifts." So, you know, and that comes from the Quran.

Praise Allah. Don't say no to the good gifts He's given you. Wow.

I'm just thinking what my mom would say to this. She never told me about this. And I'm pretty sure if I tried this and told her this story, she would kill me because, yeah, I mean.

She must not be reading her Quran and Hadith very closely then because this is all over the place in the Muslim sources. And again, these are not just, you know, like my favorite sources or, you know, some deep buried sources that no one takes seriously. These are the most reliable and trusted Islamic sources, the Quran and the most trusted Hadith collections.

Yeah. And just again, to contrast with Christianity, I have to read a lot of books on marriage to defend natural marriage, like define it and defend it against things like no-fault divorce or which is the first redefinition of marriage and then same-sex marriage, which is the second redefinition of marriage and just explaining what the vision for it is, what the benefits of society are, what the benefits of children are. And one of the guys I read is this guy named Ryan T. Anderson.

He's a very good… Yeah, he's great. And he says… He talks about the marital norms of permanence and exclusivity. And when we say the word marriage, what we mean is permanence and exclusivity.

So I'm just contrasting permanence and exclusivity with this temporary, not exclusivity, you know? Right. I mean, it's just… It's not the same view of marriage and people need to say, "Is this view of marriage, does that capture what God intends for men and women?" I think that the Christian view of marriage is a lot more deep and romantic and intimate… Satisfying. Than this view.

Yeah. Honoring to God, honoring to his image bearers. Yeah.

Yeah. Men and women get a lot out of our definition of marriage. Okay.

So there's one other thing I want to say about this. So on my blog, I have written a lot about this kind of crime wave in Britain, in the UK, where the newspaper articles describe them as Asian men, but really it's men who immigrate from Muslim majority countries to the UK. And a lot of them band together and form these groups where they groom vulnerable white women for… To meet their physical needs.

Well, yeah. But they also… It's more than that. They actually rent them out to their friends to also degrade them.

Right. Exactly. So yeah, these guys… It's not just women, it's also little girls.

Yeah. Yeah. These are, yeah, 15, 14, you know, eight-year-old.

I've written a ton of stories about this. I'll link a few in the show notes. Cities like, I think, Rotterdam and… I'm going to forget all the names.

It's like six or seven of these cities. And so they put these guys on trial. And I remember one of them yelled out that they're being persecuted for being faithful to Islam.

His sentencing, he yelled that out. Yeah. So this is still practiced by Muslims throughout the world today.

I mean, just like you've written about. And like you mentioned, you know, in the UK and in the United States, not only in Muslim countries, but in Western nations that have taken on large numbers of Muslim immigrants. And so yeah, a Muslim man will hire a prostitute.

They just repeat a few words in Arabic. They spend the agreed-upon time together for payment. And you know, sometimes women do this.

They accept this out of desperation. Others are forced into it through human trafficking. And it destroys the lives of these girls.

They really have nowhere to go from there. Yeah. You say nowhere to go.

And what happens in a lot of these cases is you have to remember the UK is very feminized and politically correct. So they really champion non-judgment and compassion a lot more than the United States does, where we still make public judgments about morality. And we set moral boundaries.

So what happens is when these girls go to the police, the police are so politically correct. They're totally neutralized by fear of offending the wrong groups. What happens is the police don't do anything if the perpetrator is in one of these protected groups.

But on the other hand, they're very hard on other groups that are not the favored groups of the secular left. So yeah, a lot of these women talk about going to the police and being told to shut up and keep it quiet. And no police want to jeopardize their careers by going after the wrong kind of perpetrator.

I hope we never get to that point in America, but frankly, I think we're there even now to where certain people can't be. Certain people are allowed to riot and commit arson and violence and everything. And everybody just goes, "Isn't this wonderful?" I think that there is some politicization in at least federal law enforcement of that sort.

Anyway, yeah. So do you have any evidence about how widespread this kind of grooming and sex trafficking is? Yeah. So the BBC of all organizations actually made a documentary a couple of years ago called Iraq's Secret Sex Trade, in which reporters went undercover to expose Muslim clerics who made arrangements for adult men to have these short-term encounters with girls.

Clerics like ministers, pastors? Yes. Yes. Yep, exactly.

And these reporters would go undercover to a whole bunch of different clerics and they had no problem being set up with girls as young as nine years old. Not younger than nine years old? Not younger than nine years old. In fact, you can hear this one Muslim cleric when he's asked, "How young can I get them?" He says, "Nine years old, but no younger than this.

Nine is the youngest we can do." I bet I know where they got that number from. Exactly. It's the excellent pattern of conduct.

Right. Aisha. Yes.

Aisha. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Mohammed with Aisha. Yeah.

Yep. So any... Okay. So we had a lot of troubling teachings about women.

Do you have any more? Sure. So the Quran in chapter 4 verse 34 says, "Men are in charge of women because Allah has made the one superior to the other and because they spend of their property. So good women are obedient, guarding in secret what Allah has guarded.

As for those from whom you fear disobedience, give them a warning and banish them to separate beds." So that part sounds pretty good if you're married to a Muslim. But then it says, "And beat them." So not so good. Yeah.

That last part's not as good. Yeah. Not as good.

So yeah, if a man fears disobedience from his wife, he is encouraged to beat her. Okay. So we had a couple of quotations from the primary sources.

We'll definitely put more of those into the show notes so people can look it up and see for themselves. Thank you. So do you want to go ahead and give us a summary of all the things that you've said? Sure.

Well, based on the most trusted sources of Islam, we can safely say that no man has ever caused as much ongoing harm to women and girls as the so-called prophet of Islam did through his example and through his teachings. And I think a really good quote to kind of leave people with is from Sahih al-Uqari 5825. Aisha, the favored bride of Muhammad said this, "I have not seen any woman suffering as much as the believing woman." So the believing woman is a Muslim woman.

And then Aisha says, "Look, her skin is greener than her clothes." And that, of course, is from being beaten. So she was saying Muslim women suffer more than any other women. They're being beaten so badly that they've got bruises all over that they look green.

And this is happening still today in Muslim countries and really throughout the world. This is a far cry from the men that I see in the New Testament and their treatment of women. I'm just thinking of – I'm just running through the individual stories about Jesus and women.

And then Paul and how he talks about women in his epistles as supporters of his ministry. Yeah, I was just going to say, and even outside the New Testament, when I look at the men, the Christian men in my life, there have been so many exceptional men in my life throughout the decades who I'm just so incredibly thankful for who have self-sacrificially invested in me and given to me, supporting my ministry, praying for me, giving me books, encouraging me, offering me various opportunities to be a part of what God is doing to partner with them for ministry. And these are the men who are imitating Jesus.

And it is a far, far cry, as you say, from Islam. What's it like for you traveling in these countries like Afghanistan? Which countries have you been to and which ones were the worse? And how did you avoid getting into trouble in these countries? Well, some of the places I've been include Afghanistan, which I've mentioned, Egypt, Jordan, Burundi is a small country in Africa. It's actually by most measures the poorest country in the world, sometimes the second poorest, and it has a large Muslim population.

I've been to India, which has a very significant Muslim population. In the north? The Philippine, yep, yep, exactly. I've been to the Philippines, which has significant and growing and influential Muslim population, and several others.

I've spent a lot of time also ministering to Muslims in the refugee community in my area in the United States. How do you avoid getting into trouble in these places? I'm just thinking what it must be like to walk down the street. Yeah, well, I keep my head covered with a scarf.

I dress incredibly conservatively. And quite frankly, it's incredibly uncomfortable anyway. I've also been to Turkey.

I'm thinking of Turkey and just, you know, all these different places I've been. If I accidentally make eye contact with a Muslim man, it becomes immediately, extremely uncomfortable, if not dangerous. Yeah, I was told in Egypt that I didn't have to cover my head because Christians don't cover their heads in Egypt.

And it took about an hour of being in the country for me to decide that I was going to cover my head because it was so inappropriate the way men were treating me. In Afghanistan, I had an incident where I feared for my life for a couple of minutes. And it's a good thing that I'm really fast and in great shape and strong.

And I ran for my life and got some help from some local Christians. And that was just because I was not in a group for a matter of seconds. As soon as my group turned the corner and I went the other way.

Yeah, that's why that little girl asked or no, she wasn't that little bit. Yeah, teenager. Yeah, that's why that teenager asked you to go with her because if she's alone, she's going to be the subject of all this harassment.

Exactly. And I'm thankful for the internet, you know, where I can continue having a ministry to Muslims without having to travel as much. So that's been a blessing as well.

It's not easy. I'll tell you that it is not easy to be a woman in a Muslim country. Okay, that's a good summary, but I thought of another question.

So I write against feminism a lot on my blog and radical feminism, especially amongst the younger generation, just seeing things like the focus on hookup culture. Yeah, just a lot of things that I see as being not beneficial for women's long term happiness that they nevertheless seem to be very comfortable with. But it seems to me that if feminism were concerned with women's rights, and I mean like basic rights, like classical feminism rights, you know, freedom to own property, you know, freedom to work, and so on, it seems like they would be concerned about this rather than concerned about stuff that's clearly in their, you know, in their interests.

Like when I think about feminism, I think about that strange lady who spoke at the Democratic National Convention and was saying, "I want taxpayer funded contraceptives." I'm thinking of the women in these Muslim majority countries and whether they're looking for basically taxpayer funded promiscuity, or are they looking for something else? And how come the Western feminists don't concern themselves with the basic rights of women in other countries? Yeah, I mean, based on my experience, what the truly oppressed women of the world want is the freedom to go for a walk without being harmed, physically and otherwise, seriously harmed and injured and impregnated and such. They want the opportunity to get an education. They want the opportunity to be treated with a little bit of dignity.

It is so strange to me that Western feminists are so opposed to Christianity and yet are so silent about the status of women in Muslim majority countries. It really makes me question their sincerity. It just makes no sense.

It's insanity. Yeah, whether there's any kind of moral core to what they're saying, it seems like they're going for, like they really oppose Christians for trying to defend unborn children, and that seems to be their big issue. Whereas isn't there slavery still in Muslim countries today? Yes, yeah, there is.

Women being enslaved? Yeah, women and girls through trafficking and also children and the elderly as well as women. I was actually talking to a friend in Pakistan recently who was telling me that he was going to visit some of the slaves, some of the Christian slaves. And I said, "Which Christian slaves do you mean?" And he said, "Oh, you know, there are over 4 million Christians in slavery in Pakistan because Christians are not allowed to have decent jobs in Pakistan and the Christians are the street sweepers.

And sometimes if someone gets sick in the family or something unexpected happens, they have no choice but to die an agonizing death or borrow money. And when they borrow money, they have to borrow from Muslims. And these Muslims will say, "Well, you just need to come and work off your debt to me and I'll let you know when you can go free." And they will end up keeping these Christians for generations.

Even if they borrowed a few thousand dollars, the Muslims will cook the books and make it look like the Christians haven't worked as much as they have. And they'll just keep them in slavery. This friend sent me videos and I saw elderly who belonged laying on a couch watching television or something, reading a book, doing this hard physical labor of loading up the materials to make cement and falling over and little kids and the disabled, a man who couldn't even walk was made to make cement and things like that.

So, I've seen these things in videos and heard about them from people all over the world. So, that's just one example. Okay.

Well, we're coming up on time. So, I think we have to end it there. Maybe we'll come back to this another time.

So, if you guys listening, enjoy the show. Please like, comment, share, and subscribe. You can find the references for this episode on wintryknight.com. That's W-I-N-T-E-R-Y-K-N-I-G-H-T.com. We appreciate you taking the time to listen and we'll see you again in the next one.

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