Where are you going?

Bismillahir rahmanir raheem.

Surah 81, The Overturning, trans. Michael Sells
When the sun is overturned
When the stars fall away
When the mountains are moved
When the ten-month pregnant camels are abandoned
When the beasts of the wild are herded together
When the seas are boiled over
When the souls are coupled
When the girl-child buried alive
is asked what she did to deserve murder
When the pages are folded out
When the sky is flayed open
When Jahim is set ablaze
When the garden is brought near
Then a soul will know what it has prepared
I swear by the stars that slide,
stars streaming, stars that sweep along the sky
By the night as it slips away
By the morning when the fragrant air breathes
This is the word of a messenger ennobled,
empowered, ordained before the lord of the throne,
holding sway there, keeping trust
Your friend has not gone mad
He saw him on the horizon clear
He does not hoard for himself the unseen
This is not the word of a satan struck with stones

Where are you going?
This is a reminder to all beings
For those who wish to walk straight
Your only will is the will of God lord of all beings.

For my Muhammad and Qur’an course this semester, we recently had to read Approaching the Qur’an by Michael Sells, a Western scholar who is a convert to Islam. This is one of the few really intuitive, beautiful books that we’ve read in the class that actually has to do with what Muslims do, rather than what scholars think about Islam, so in that way it was a breath of fresh air. It is also the most beautiful translation I have ever seen of the Qur’an. The closest translation to Sells’ that I’ve seen is Ahmed Ali’s, which was the first translation of the Qur’an I was ever exposed to, but even the lyricism of Ali’s rendering in English cannot come close to the quality of Sells’ translation. Unfortunately, Sells has never done an entire translation (this particular book only covers the early Makkan surahs, the last thirty or so).

While in class I brought up this surah because we were discussing Sells’ interpretations of each surah. The verse that is perhaps the most poignant in the Qur’an to me is part of this surah, and Sells’ rendering of it nearly brought me to tears – “When the girl-child buried alive / is asked what she did to deserve murder.” Sells interprets this as such:

In The Overturning, one mark of the apocalypse will be the question addressed to young girls who were buried alive. In ancient bedouin society, male children were valued more than female children. A female child could become a financial burden, and the family’s honor was always vulnerable to attacks on her honor. As in other cultures, the disparity in social value led to practices such as infanticide. By placing the condemnation of this practice within the series of apocalyptic flashes, The Overturning makes it the epitome of human wrongdoing. (Sells 49)

Being familiar with the basic meaning of this verse (I don’t think anyone could mistake what it means) and with the rhetoric of Islam essentially being the first women’s rights movement and the way the Prophet addressed the wrongs of the Jahiliyya, I follow most of Sells’ interpretation…up until he says “The Overturning makes it the epitome of wrongdoing.” I agree with this wholeheartedly, but the question I raised in class is whether this is actually a reflection of how Muslims understand the Qur’an – in that, would most Muslims actually follow that thought through to that particular conclusion? Would anyone?

My professor’s response was that he believes most Muslims he knows understand it fully in this way. I asked then if this is so, why is there such a widespread, all-pervasive male child preference all over the world, which results in sex-selective abortion, neglect of female children, and yes, even female infanticide – even among Muslims? His initial response was, “I don’t see that happening in modern times.” I later emailed him many of the disturbing statistics I’m sure many of us are familiar with, some of which I will mention here.

Because proving that it’s a problem is not the focus of this post (I am beginning with the assumption that this is a widespread problem basically everywhere, which you can choose to agree or disagree with…on your own time) and because I honestly don’t have the energy or wish to, I’m not going to cite every statistic right now (some come from a book that I don’t have with me, as I am at work). If anyone really wishes to see where I’m getting this information, I will be happy to edit in more citations later or add them in the comments. I am not, however, willing to open this up as a debate as to whether male child preference is really a “problem,” or anything along those lines.

Consider this: the conservative estimate of the number of women missing from the world’s population is about 90 million. There are about 1 million women missing from Afghanistan, nearly 3 million in Bangladesh, around 40 million each in India and China, and almost 6 million in Pakistan (Hudson & den Boer, 2005). Three of those countries are predominantly Muslim, one has a large Muslim population, and the other has a minority, but visible, Muslim population. According to LearningPartnership.org, of 8000 fetuses aborted in a Bombay clinic, 7999 were female. In India, gender scanning was made illegal in 1994, but sex-selective abortion continues to be the primary method of getting rid of female children there. An advertising slogan of gender scanning ultrasound companies that predict sex is “600 rupees now, save 50,000 rupees later.”

This is not just something that happens to those poor brown people in those backward overpopulated countries/religions/cultures. Male child preference is something that exists even in the United States.

In the United States, “every year hundreds of women commit neonaticide [the killing of newborns] … Prosecutors sometimes don’t prosecute; juries rarely convict; those found guilty almost never go to jail. Barbara Kirwin, a forensic psychologist, reports that in nearly 300 cases of women charged with neonaticide in the United States and Britain, no woman spent more than a night in jail.” (Steven Pinker, “Why They Kill Their Newborns”, The New York Times, November 2, 1997.)

In the book that I don’t have with me, it discusses the fact that (in the United States) divorce rates are higher for families with only female children. When people claim they only want to have one child, their chance of sticking to that claim goes down when their first child is born female – most families will be more likely to have a second child in that case. I have experienced in my own family female (especially female biracial) children being neglected by both their male and female, white and black relatives, to the point of being denied even food and love, and have watched the government child welfare services refuse to do anything about it.

I know that this is not only a product of so-called “backward” “Third World” beliefs about gender. It’s a product of a lot of interacting factors, and the fact that it is so prevalent even in America, where we are supposed to have gender equality (*insert macabre laugh here*) and never talked about terrifies me. The fact that it took me hours to collect all these statistics to send to my professor terrifies me. It’s even hard to find a lot of information about it on the internet – the only countries people discuss are India and China. On the BBC page about female infanticide, it simply discusses the origins, the fact that most major religions forbid it, and a little bit about India and China. Nothing else. One would think this is a relic of the past. One would think that it’s an accident that most aborted fetuses are female (like the mass grave of dead baby girls found in a Christian missionary hospital in India).

One would think that because Islam gave women their rights in the 7th century, because female children are such a blessing to Muslim families, because Jannah is beneath the feet of the mother, because of the treasured lives of our mothers A’ishah, Sawda, Khadija, Hafsa, and the other wives of our Prophet, radiAllahu anhuma, because of his love for his daughter Fatimah, radiAllahu anha, one would think that Muslims would not be able to do this to their children. One would be wrong. As Muslims, with the living word of our God, who is a merciful God and who loves all of His Creation, a God who felt so strongly about the killing of female babies, the inequality of women, and male child preference that he revealed verses that wrench the heart such as verses 81:8-9, we need to speak out about this. It is our responsibility as Muslims to begin questioning why this is happening in our communities, to say – no, to yell, to scream, that this is happening and that it needs to stop. We should be weeping before our Lord that not only is this a reality 1400 years after it was outlawed in our faith, but that these girls’ and women’s lives are forgotten, that no one even points out what a tragedy this is anymore. We must, if we can, speak out about this issue among other communities as well.

The final words of this surah say, “Where are you going? / This is a reminder to all beings / For those who wish to walk straight / Your only will is the will of God lord of all beings.” This surah is a reminder to us of Jahannam, and of what actions are the epitome of wrongdoing in the eyes of our Lord, subhanahu wa ta’ala. We need to remember what path we are on. We need to look deeply in our hearts and ask ourselves where we are going.

And please, I beg you, overstand this: when I ask you to look deeply in yourself, when I ask you, “Where are you going?”, I am not making pronouncements about the Hellfire; I don’t have that kind of knowledge, and even if I did, I don’t believe that fear of hell is the right motivation to be good people. I am not talking about the end of the siratul mustaqeem. I am not asking about what your Lord will ask you on Judgment Day. This may in many ways be the topic of this surah, but I believe there’s another layer of meaning as well – where are we going in this life, in this dunya? The siratul mustaqeem is something we travel in this life. We are all different and our relationship with our Lord is different, but one of the things we share is our capacity to do good, our capacity to build our compassion for others. Where are you going?

If you think I am just talking about Islam or Muslims as perpetrators of this, stop for a minute and think about the fact that the majority of people perpetrating this are non-Muslims. Muslims do it, but so do Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, and every other religion and way of life. It happens in India and China and Pakistan, but it happens in the United States and Britain and Russia, too. This post is not just about the way in which many of the meanings of Islam may have been lost or perverted through the years. This is about something that not only Muslims, but everyone, is affected by. People perpetrate male child preference without even realizing they are doing it – I don’t think the effects on the divorce rate are a conscious decision on the part of the parents to divorce because they have female children! Yes, I’m addressing Muslims in many ways because this is something that I really came to see through reading this surah and because as Muslims I feel that we should be at the forefront of conquering this problem. But I think fighting this should be part and parcel of being able to look at oneself in the mirror – and that applies to everyone.

And if you feel left out, for the non-Muslims I know who read this blog, don’t. How can we call ourselves feminists, how can we say we care about women, when we are not holding each other accountable? When we are not telling our mothers and aunts and daughters that killing their children (because female infanticide is primarily carried out by women, especially in the US) is really not better than letting them live and fighting this injustice? When we are not demanding of our fathers and brothers and sons an acknowledgement of equal value? For non-Muslims, I ask you, too, where are you going? Why are you here? Why is it so easy for you to stand by and let someone else fight this battle? This is not just a Muslim problem. This is not just a feminist problem. This is not just a “Third World” problem. This is every single person in this world’s problem.