Celestina, I fully share your rage. Tell it, sister.
There are many Muslim scholars nowadays who are re-examining the sources of Islamic law and showing how these repressive rules cannot be supported by the sources. Demonstrating how the repression came from tendentious interpretation by certain power elites under certain historical conditions, and they seem to have become hallowed by the passage of time as though they were carved in stone, but in fact are just the interpretations of fallible humans. Therefore, they can and should be revised.
For example, the part about two women’s testimony came in the context of witnessing written business contracts. That’s all it talked about. Not witnessing in criminal cases, or other kinds of civil cases, or anything else. The context said, “If one of them forgets something, the other can remind her.” It was meant to make things easier on women, not repress them. But interpretation has taken this provision way outside its original scope and made it into an oppressive rule to deny women’s rights. BZZZ Wrong!
Counter to that, consider another verse in the Qur’an in which a woman can clear herself of an adultery accusation in which her husband swears five times that she’s guilty and she swears five times that she’s innocent. Then she’s cleared of all charges. Here, one woman’s testimony outweighs that of a man. Why didn’t they generalize that? These questions are being asked.
Also, hansel, that hadith you quoted about women’s alleged inferiority has come under withering criticism and re-examination that shows it is probably phony. Internal evidence shows it cannot be authentic. I don’t have the details in front of me, but I’ve seen it argued and picked apart point by point.
One of the Islamic legal scholars who has been doing this re-examination of Islamic law to free it of repressive interpretations is Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at UCLA. He has been attacked and threatened by the repressive elements in society, so he needs everyone’s support. Remember Khaled Abou El Fadl—he knows what he’s talking about.
The media only report on these issues when they get out of hand, and then you just get little sound bites that say “Shari`ah means cutting off hands,” and you miss the whole debate going on about how it got to be that way, and the current drive to revise it. The media have been ignoring all this debate and re-examination and questioning. They only report the sensationalistic stories.
I just love the SDMB. I come in the Pit cussin’ and complainin’, and folks come in here and try to be reasonable. [giggle] Anyways, I understand the whole 3/5 of a human business had to do with representation, but what I still find illogical is the presumption on the parts of those who were wheeling and dealing to come up with that particular fraction to ascribe to folks who were and still are 100% human. And they didn’t even have the decency to ask the enslaved how they felt about being considered 3/5 human! The further problem with viewing human beings as property and as 3/5 human is that although the 3/5 number was done so the books would look nice and neat in terms of representation, folks started to internalize that shit even more. Having it written down somewhere official only made things worse for enslaved folks because folks who should have known better really believed that enslaved Black Americans weren’t completely human, and that belief helped perpetuate even more hell for Blacks. Folks had no qualms at all at victimizing Blacks because they felt Blacks were beneath them, and that number made things official. I guess I’ve rambled on to say that although folks thought they had good reason for the 3/5 number at the time, in reality, the repercussions of placing that number officially on the books far outweighed whatever the original intentions were. And the original intentions weren’t really all that good neither.