It's often interesting to read some of the criticisms leveled against Islam because, at times, those exact same criticisms could be made against Christianity as well. For some strange reason, though, those critics - often Christians themselves - fail to notice anything like that. I wonder why?

Egbert F. Bhatty writes for The Washington Dispatch by Paul M Weyrich about how Islam requires women to be obedient and allows men to beat women if they are not obedient:

[I]t is quite apparent that Mr Weyrich is unaware that a woman is beaten every 9 seconds in America, the most Christian society on the earth today. ... Whence this violence against women in America, the stronghold of Christianity? Gloria Durka writing in Religious Education 86 [1994]: 337 [“Facing Ourselves, Facing The Unfamiliar] points to studies that show that “members of most U.S. religious denominations…..see no connection between the belief system of their church and family violence.”

And, yet, we are all aware that the Christian religious tradition teaches male dominance and female submission. See, for example, Ephesians 5:22 and 5:24; Colossians 3:18; and 1 Peter 3:1. Not long ago, before secular law came to their rescue, women in Christian countries were the property of their husbands. As such they could be killed by their husband or sold in the market. Disobedient wives could be drowned, bridled, or flogged.

Bhatty's article has errors - for example, an oblique reference to the myth that the "rule of thumb" comes from the idea that women couldn't be beaten with anything thicker than a man's thumb. Nevertheless, the basic point remains quite accurate: the Christian West has not had a very good history for treating women very well and still has a long way to go in order to achieve the ideals it would apply to Islamic societies. This does not invalidate criticism of Islam and Muslim nations, but it should force Christian critics to be careful in what they say and to keep in mind that their own religion isn't always much better.

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• Religious Right
• Recent Books on Islam
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