The first time my husband asked me to marry him, I said no. I was 18 years old and a freshman in college and I thought I was a feminist.
Alhamdulillah, we did get married, but he had to ask again. I was 21 when we got married and alhamdulillah, marriage is one of the best things that Allah has blessed me with.
But when he brought up marriage the first time, do you know what image my mind immediately conjured up?
The image of a woman I’d worked with briefly at my high-school part-time job at a cafe. Let’s call her Hanan. Hanan was a 32-year-old Moroccan sister who worked at a cafe full time, which is where I’d met her. She had a crooked finger on her right hand, and one day she told me why. She had been married to a Latino convert whom she’d thought was fun and exciting and had agreed to marry. But after marriage, he turned out to be different from her expectations and had one day broken her finger. She got divorced and got so busy working trying to make money to support herself that she never had time to go to a doctor to set her finger, so it has long since healed but is now crooked. A horror story.
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An image of Hanan popped into my head when a fellow male college student asked me to marry him.
Do you think this is good? Or normal? Or healthy?
I don’t.
I was deep into my fake feminist phase back then, in my late high school and early college years. I thought marriage was a trap and a sure way for a woman to get abused. I thought men were basically monsters who only wanted one thing. I thought having kids was the best way to get shackled for life. I thought being a wife and mother was basically entering into a form of slavery.
Sick, sick thoughts.
Feminism had seeped into my thinking and warped it. Made me see men as inherently bad and suspect, guilty until proven innocent. In this way, feminism pits women against men and subverts the traditional gender roles, and destabilizes the family.
Alhamdulillah, I’ve long since snapped out of my feminist delusions and become a normal, balanced human being. I’ve realized how warped and twisted this men-are-the-enemy psychology really is.
But today, the general Muslim community has only gotten more steeped in this illness.
Someone asked me to share my opinion on a recent popular post on a page called The Ideal Muslimah, which advises Muslim women to be leery of marriage because of all the ways men are abusive. The advice given to women is to marry late, and to watch out for cheating, controlling, stingy, womanizing, authoritarian, gaslighting men. The overall aim of this piece is to encourage Muslimahs to marry late rather than early or opt for separation, divorce, and single life due to men’s abuse. This post got over two thousand likes. Two thousand Muslim women read it and agreed with it.
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This is what feminism does. The writer of the post specifically says that this isn’t feminist or liberal–but I’ve been there when I was younger and brainwashed by the feminist mentality.
What this mentality causes is the subtle yet sustained vilification of men and victimization of women.
Men = Villians and oppressors
Women = victims and sufferers
This is an extremely dangerous dichotomy to create in the minds of young Muslimahs. It’s also plain false.
Of course, some men are terrible human beings who have bad character and weak faith. But also some women are terrible human beings who have bad character and weak faith. There are men who take advantage of women and women who take advantage of men.
As I’ve gotten older and seen more of life, I’ve seen so many horror stories of men being abused, manipulated, and beaten down by women.
One particular story stands out. A man, let’s call him Tamer, married a woman and had 2 daughters with her. The wife had always been selfish, demanding, grasping woman, but for the sake of his daughters, Tamer put up with her. He reconciled himself to a sad marriage with an aggressive, abusive wife. He’ll tolerate his wife but at least he can pour all his love into his daughters.
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She stopped praying, took off her hijab, got a nose job. Then she openly left Islam altogether.
Then the wife started cheating on him, sleeping with other men. Multiple men. When he found out, she was brazen and unapologetic and insulted him to his face.
Then she filed for divorce. In court, she lied and claimed that he beat her and subjected her to physical and mental abuse. And let’s not forget “spiritual abuse!” And she also accused him, an Arab Muslim man, of being a terrorist. She put on a real show in the courtroom, complete with crocodile tears and sad eyes. She was an excellent actress.
Tamer stood there, watching her theatrical performance, stunned. He was dry-eyed. He wasn’t raised in his Arab household to cry in public.
The judge believed her because she fits perfectly into the mold of a hapless, oppressed Muslim woman and Tamer fit the bill as an abusive Muslim male.
After the divorce, she gouged him for money. He had owned a small blue-collar business that she forced him to shut down, and took almost all his savings, and forced him to pay for her premium divorce lawyer.
That’s all nothing compared to what she did to him with the kids. She got full custody of their 2 young daughters, who had been his entire world. She forbade him from seeing them for years. The older daughter was big enough to remember her loving father and she would often cry for him, asking why she can’t see him anymore. The mother blatantly lied, telling her that her dad didn’t love her and didn’t care about her, and never wanted to see her again. She watched with cold eyes as her little daughter cried her eyes out, crying herself to sleep every night for months, withdrawing more and more into herself.
Meanwhile, Tamer was crying himself to sleep every night, when he could sleep at all. Sleep eluded him most nights. His daughters had been ripped from his arms and there was nothing he could do about it. His ex-wife had deliberately snuffed out the only ray of hope in his life, the daughters she’d known he had lived for. Just to torment him further, his ex-wife called to gloat to him that she had baptized his daughters and that she takes them to church on Sunday with her new evangelical Christian husband Tommy.
For every Hanan out there, there is a Tamer. But the Tamers don’t cry in public, and they won’t share their story with you easily. The Hanans do. So we only see them and think Tamers don’t exist.
The truth is that marriage is a very important institution and that everyone, male and female, should aspire to be married for the sake of Allah. Before you choose a spouse, do your due diligence and have tawakkul on Allah.
Yes, a marriage can go south and both husbands and wives can turn out to be bad people. But there is risk in everything. What if I leave my house and get kidnapped? What if I cross the street and get hit by a bus? What if I drive my car and get in a head-on collision that turns into a multiple-car pileup?
May Allah rectify our affairs and bless our single Muslim men and women with righteous spouses, beautiful families, and harmonious homes, ameen.
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That was great article. It has been a while since i havent read such big article in one shot.
This reminds me of an Afghan woman I was friends with. After she came to the US, she became demanding and got him into a lot of debt while he was working Uber day and night. She would make a big stink when he wanted to send some money back to his parents in Afg. She got him to take out an expensive car loan for her in his name. When she got her green card and a good paying job at a tech company, she divorced him and took custody of their little girl. He hides it from everyone they’re divorced.
That’s horrifying.
I divorced my first wife shortly after she gave birth to our son. Her disposition toward me went from and I quote “You are so good to me, I’m so lucky I have you” to trying to use our son as a means to get whatever she wanted. I did not cave and I ended up issuing a single talaq after she continued to attempt to strong arm me into being a doormat. My new wife is now more than a decade younger than me, much more beautiful and pays no attention to the feminist ideology.
I think my comment didn’t get approved because I was saying it’s in the hands of men to protect the women from becoming a monster like Tamer’s wife above. Tamer’s wife is absolutely the monster and the wrong one. I think thought if Tamer wasn’t scared of being a “toxic male” he would have controlled her out of love. If we don’t control our women, others will, like government, corporate, feminist ideologies. All women have the potential to become this monster, it’s on the men to protect/control.
Monsters like Tamer’s wife are way more prevalent then Hanan. I have not yet met in over 30 years a Hanan, I only hear of hypothetical Hanan’s. I have met multiple Tamer’s though in real life in the west. Look at the Johnny Depp situation. Narratives keep us believing that there are more abusive men. When in fact there are more abusive women. Although, abusive women are the result of a simp male figure either the father or husband, some times brothers.
Even if you are the most alfa male , you risk going to jail by putting limits and a “redline” to such a witch, one simple invented story without proofs is enough to put you in jail for the rest of your existence.
The only solution is to not marry such witches and also to be warry of the laws in place where you live, if needed move out and travel abroad where the laws might not be against you for being born as a man.
It’s written in the Qur’an that devils can be evil human and jinn, and this includes evil women(human) too.
The real problem here is not that there are evil people out there, the real problem is the justice system that doesn’t provide real justice and protection it’s hugely influenced by feminissm.
In the west(soon also in muslim countries thanks to simps) it rewards specifically evil women towards their men.
Then people are asking why western men no longer like the idea of marriage?
I didn’t know brother DH tried to marry an 18 y.o. harvard freshman hehe, Alhamdulillah he succeeded 3 years later though. I also didn’t know that niqabis could be such feminists. May we all have spouses that adhere to the Quran and the sunnah as best as they can.
I just got off a marriage website today. I was literally insulted for my racial background by a Russian Muslima…I told her I am proud to be of Pakistani descent. Tatars like her are meanwhile sleeping with the kuffar that murdered their grandfatheres
And alhumdulillah we are the fifth most socially mobile group in the US.
This is not a 70 year old game my friends, this is the generational/civilization game. Don’t get caught up in the day to day noise. Play the long game.
Seeing how quickly mUslim female diasporas degenerated in Dar ul Harb
1) most shoudln’t be encouraged to leave dar ul islam
2) IT took slavery segregation crack to destroy the black female and family…it took one generation to destroy Western Muslims. During incarcerations, mass surveillance, our own women turned their back on us.
Hard truth is most Western Muslim diasporas should NOT exist, and I personally think this is Allah SWT knew hypergamy, and allowed only Muslim men to marry out
jazak Allah. may Allah reward you abundantly for this. as a teen muslim, I so much agree with you, sadly this is the mindset of many muslim girls today. may A guide us. ameen