Coercive misogyny
Muslim father faces jail for psychologically abusing his daughters in the first case of its kind.
Salamat Khan, 63, exerted such domineering control over his household that his children felt like they were “living in a prison”.
His daughters felt as if they were living in a prison, not his children. His son joined in the psychological abuse of the daughters. Is there some sort of pattern here? To do with what kind of people abuse and what kind are the abusers? I have a feeling there is but I can’t quite pin it down.
The father-of-nine had already married off three of his daughters to selected husbands, but “cast out” two of his daughters, when they married men that he did not “approve of”.
As a result, Khan claimed the sisters were “dead to the family” and tried to stop two other unmarried daughters leading a Westernised lifestyle.
Khan was found guilty and will be sentenced next week.
Three of Khan’s daughters wed in Pakistan in arranged marriages, but two others married Muslim men who were not “arranged” for them.
Khan then refused to let his other two daughters – Madina, 21, and Maryha, 24 – go out in the evenings, or meet their friends, and forced them to cook and clean for him in their “traditional” Islamic household.
In other words he imprisoned and enslaved them.
Giving evidence to the court, Madina Khan said that her role was “staying at home, cooking and cleaning”, that she was forbidden from socialising with friends outside of college and that she was “scared” of her father.
She claimed that her “aggressive” brother had threatened to kill her more than once and on the night the police were called “this time I thought he was going to do something”. She added: “He was enraged. It’s been like living in a prison”.
Her mother added that Salamat Khan and her son “make the decisions” and she was encouraged not to contact her rebel daughters.
It’s almost as if religion tells men it’s ok to hate women.
Or it’s almost as if men invented patriarchal religion so that they could claim that a higher authority was insisting that they treat women abominably, to justify (at least in their own minds) their woman-hating.
Which is why I wasn’t as surprised as some when the atheist movement started demonstrating so much misogyny and sexual harassment. It isn’t a condition laid down by God, but a construct reverse-engineered into God, just like homophobia and ridiculous dietary and sexual laws.
All the laws “laid down by God” are laws designed to control other human beings. If you can control their most basic urges (like food), you can certainly control them in other ways. And it works after a fashion for a time, but only imperfectly, since a lot of religious people follow the laws they agree with and/or like (misogyny being a commonly accepted one) and ignore the rest.
iknklast, that is something that always bothered me about the claims by the Atheist+ crowd. There seemed to be a naive assumption that atheism should mean rejection of all the biblical nonsense, and they were so shocked to discover sexism, racism, and so-on within the atheist community. They just seemed to overlook the fact that the gods were made by men to make those men’s wishes more easily enforced.