Twenty-five years ago this week, the Indian Parliament passed a law ending the “Shah Bano affair”: a classic case study of the lunacy of allowing religious considerations to influence government policy, with a bizarre twist at the end.

Shah Bano was not the sort of person you’d expect to touch off a government crisis. Born in 1916 to an Indian Muslim family of modest means, she married Mohammad Ahmed Khan at the age of 16, and bore him several children. She then committed the serious blunder of growing old. Mohammed surveyed the field, found a more attractive soul mate, and kicked 59 year old Shah Bano out of his house.

Actually, there was a little more to it than that. He first completed the Muslim sharia legal requirements for a lawful divorce, which are quite appealing to those interested in streamlining red tape. All he had to do was to tell Shah Bano “I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you,” and the deed was done. (Muslim women, of course, are not allowed to divorce their husbands in this manner.)

Muslim sharia also dictates that a husband who follows this procedure must provide for the support of the evicted spouse. First, he must restore the “bride price” originally paid at the time of marriage. In Shah Bano’s case, this was a sum equivalent to about $66 US dollars. He also had to provide for her maintenance – for a period of three months, or until a divorced spouse who is pregnant gives birth.

So how exactly was 59 year old Shah Bano, who had never held a job other than managing Mohammed’s household and raising his children, supposed to feed, clothe, and shelter herself after burning through three months and $66 bucks? That was not an issue of concern in the sharia. Perhaps the 9^th century Arabs who developed it intended to incentivize women to be less grouchy and to age more slowly, so their husbands wouldn’t want to divorce them. The bigger question is, why in the world would late-20^th century India, purportedly a civilized country, allow such a travesty to occur?

The answer extends back to 1937, when the British were in “divide and conquer” mode in their efforts to main control over an increasingly restive India. A “Shariat law” was enacted, providing that Muslims in India would be governed by Islamic religious laws in matters relating to the family; Hindus would continue to be governed by Hindu religious law. Nothing could have been better calculated to divide neighbor against neighbor than to impose different sets of rules on one than another. The Shariat law was an important step along the road that led to the separation of Pakistan from India, at the cost of over a million lives (so far).

India finally achieved independence in 1947, under the leadership of the brilliant Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru was a confirmed secularist – one of the greatest the world has ever seen:

The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organized religion, in India and elsewhere has filled me with horror, and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seems to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition and exploitation, and the preservation of vested interests.

Heard any American politicians talking like that lately?

After the religious bloodbath of partition, Nehru was intent on restoring harmony between India’s Hindu majority and its still sizable Muslim minority, who comprised over 20% of the population. He stood nearly alone on this; the Hindu religious leaders and their political cronies remained bitter about the 1947 massacre, and were convinced that Indian Muslims were a “fifth column” seeking to undermine the new state for the benefit of Pakistan, who deserved treatment as pariahs. When Nehru insisted that Indian Muslims be given full rights and status, a rival Hindu chauvinist politician bitterly joked that “There is only one genuinely nationalist Muslim in India – Jawaharlal.” This led to intense Muslim voter loyalty to Nehru’s Congress Party as their chief protector, just as American minorities have been drawn to the Democratic Party for the last 80 years.

Nehru was equally intent on dragging India backwards into the 20^th century, by giving it a modern legal system and a focus on science. By the time of his death, in fact, India had a space program and the second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers in the world. Nehru’s hand could also be seen in Article 44 of India’s 1950 constitution, which mandated that “The state shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.” Thus, there would be no more separate marriage, inheritance, and other personal laws dividing India’s Hindus, Muslims, and Christians.

Nehru then proceeded to carry out the constitution by drawing up a modern, balanced law of marriage and divorce, guided by principles of what makes sense in the real world rather than by what some God expert said a thousand years ago. Here, though, Nehru suffered a rare defeat. Immensely popular, a brilliant builder of coalitions, Nehru could not overcome the opposition of modern day God experts who resented government intrusion on their turf. The best he could cobble together was a bill that, while thoroughly modern and rational, only applied to Hindus. The Hindu opposition parties opposed all change, and the Muslims within his Congress party refused to go along with anything that irked the imams. So Nehru reluctantly settled for a Hindu-only reform, ending polygamy (among other things) for the vast majority of Indians, in the hope that someday it would become universal as the Constitution required. But “someday” never came, so into the streets Shah Bano went.

At that point, lawyers got involved on her behalf. There was no question that Mohammed was on solid legal ground from a marriage law standpoint, but in scouring the statute books one of them noticed Article 125 of the Indian Code of Criminal Procedure, requiring a husband to provide 500 rupees a month maintenance to an indigent wife – including a divorced wife who has not remarried. So which law controls – sharia, or the criminal code? India’s legal system fretted over this for nearly a decade, before the Supreme Court finally decided that Shah Bano was entitled to her 500 rupees a month.

To hear the howl that went up from India’s Muslim politicians, you’d think the court had ordered a systematic extermination campaign. Nehru would undoubtedly have been delighted with a result that not only brought uniformity to Indian law but protected millions of Indian women. But his grandson Rajiv Gandhi, then serving as prime minister, was not. Rajiv inherited none of his grandfather’s backbone, and saw nothing other than the unhappiness of the Muslim politicians who formed part of his Congress party. So, principle and Constitution be damned, he rammed a “Muslim Women Act” through Parliament the following year, reversing the Shah Bano decision and making life vastly easier for footloose Muslim husbands (though not quite as easy as Mohammed Ahmed Khan wanted it). So much so, in fact, that some Hindu men now complain of discrimination, and seek to overturn Nehru’s modern law.

And now for the promised bizarre twist. You might expect Shah Bano to have been gratified with her court victory, and proud of her role in improving the lives of her fellow Muslim ex-wives. Nope. Someone got to her, and let her know what a dim view God took of anyone who threatened his sharia. I’ll wildly speculate, without any evidence to back it up, that the same someone made certain promises about cash payments to take care of her future needs. In any event, during the uproar following the Supreme Court decision, she suddenly announced that she had changed her mind, that she didn’t want to go against God, and that she’d reject her hard-won 500 rupees a month, immeasurably easing the way for passage of Rajiv’s “Muslim Women Act” the following year.

Self-preservation is a tough one to knock but the impact Shah Bano’s reversal has had on the thousands of Muslim ex-spouses of India is indeed shameful.
Luis Granados

By now you’ve probably seen both versions of the picture. The original photo, from the White House Situation Room, shows President Obama, his Secretary of State, the director of counter-terrorism for the National Security Council and other high officials watching intently as the raid to nab Osama bin Laden unfolds. Then there is the doctored version, in which the Secretary of State and the director of counter-terrorism are neatly airbrushed out of the picture, replaced by shadows. Why? Because it appeared in Di Tzeitung, a Brooklyn newspaper published by Orthodox Jews, who have a long history of erasing women from the category of full personhood.

The newspaper quickly asserted a constitutional right to commit whatever fraud it chooses, on the grounds that it is doing so in the name of religion, where truth is of no value. “Because of laws of modesty, we are not allowed to publish pictures of women,” the paper brashly announced. Then it went on the offensive: “The allegations that religious Jews denigrate women or do not respect women in public office is a malicious slander and libel.”

Always a sucker for a dare, I’ll take that bait. I hereby allege that “religious Jews denigrate women,” and have always done so. If Di Tzeitung wants to call that malicious slander and libel, I invite readers to examine the facts.

Not all Jews think alike, of course, any more than all Christians, Muslims, or Mormons do. There are plenty of religious Jews who don’t denigrate women. But there are plenty who do, and those who do are far closer to the mainstream of 3,000 years of Jewish tradition than those who don’t.

Exhibit number one is the counterfeit picture itself. I’m fond of a little immodesty from time to time, and this isn’t it. Ms. Clinton is fully clothed in a conservative suit, and Ms. Tomason is barely visible at all. Di Tzeitung is saying that it is impossible for a depiction of a woman to be anything but immodest – even though it is possible for a picture of a man to be perfectly ok. This treats women differently from men, diminishing their rights to be depicted in any form, and thereby denigrates them.

Shabby Jewish treatment of women goes all the way back to the Torah; it is Eve, after all, who gets blamed for Adam’s lust. Deuteronomy shows God treating wives like tradable chattels; when a man dies without a son, his brother automatically inherits the widow as a wife without bothering to ascertain her views. (This law is still enforced by the Israeli government today.) Jewish law forbade women from acting as judges, or even offering evidence in court, while barring daughters from receiving any inheritance from a man who had sons. As 1^st century Jewish historian Josephus put it: “The woman, says the law, is in all things inferior to the man. Let her accordingly be submissive.” Islam, which split off from Judaism in the 7^th century, was downright feminist by comparison: women’s testimony counted half as much as a man’s in court, and daughters could inherit half as much as sons.

After the destruction of Jerusalem in the 2^nd century, Judaism entered the Talmudic age, in which the position of women grew even worse, starting with the command of the rabbis at Yavneh for men to thank God during morning prayer for not making them slaves, women, or Gentiles. The Talmud teaches in various spots that “Women are light-minded,” that they are “gluttonous, eavesdroppers, lazy and jealous,” “querulous and garrulous,” and “addicted to witchcraft.”

Jewish polygamy was permitted and officially practiced nearly to the dawn of the Enlightenment. Jewish law also had an elaborate set of rules governing concubinage, which was a great deal for men who could afford it. Virginity was required for brides; if the groom discovered otherwise on his wedding night, “Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father’s house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.” After marriage, the Talmud is most specific in defining the frequency and preferred techniques of sexual intercourse. If a wife did not live up to her husband’s expectations, a list of her failings would be read aloud in the synagogue, and she could be divorced unless she corrected her mistakes.

Even in modern times, Jewish law treats women as less than fully human. Israel does not recognize civil marriage; God experts are granted complete control over marriage and divorce. In a 1969 case, a husband was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for committing six indecent assaults and three rapes. For some reason, this exhausted the patience of his wife, who sued for divorce. However, since the man refused, the couple remained married; the wife had no recourse under the religious law mandated in Israel. A former Israeli Minister of Religion explained that: “We have a legal system which has always sustained the people. It may contain within it some thorn that occasionally pricks the individual. We are not concerned with this or that individual, but with the totality of the people.”

Jewish law remains obsessed with the phenomenon of menstruation. The Talmud prescribes that:

A menstruant must not cut her fingernails, lest a husband or child accidentally step on or touch the clippings and, as a result, develop boils and die; a priest whose mother, wife, or any other female member of the household is menstruating, may not bless the people, lest his blessing become a curse; a sage who partakes of food prepared by a menstruant will forget his learning; a menstruant’s spit, breath, and speech cause impurity in others.

In Orthodox congregations even today, during menstrual periods, husband and wife may not touch each other, even by means of an intermediate object, nor pass objects between them. They may not share a bed nor sit together on a seat. The husband may not eat directly from his wife’s leftovers (though she may eat his); he may not see parts of his wife’s body that are usually covered, smell her perfume, gaze upon her clothing (whether or not it is being worn), listen to her singing, or discuss sexually exciting subjects with her. At the end of seven days, the wife must visit a ritual bath after nightfall, where she must remove all foreign objects from her body, comb her hair, blow her nose, and wash herself thoroughly, before spreading her legs for inspection to make sure she’s acceptable again.* We’re not talking about the dark ages here: we’re talking about 21^st century Israel and Brooklyn, USA.

Judaism is not the only religion that denigrates women – they all do, to a greater or lesser extent. The great conundrum is that in all parts of the world, throughout history, women still tend to be more religious than men, any way you choose to measure it. So why do women put up with this kind of garbage? Beats me. Maybe somebody ought to write a book about it …

Luis Granados

Last week, we started to examine the recent claim that Auschwitz was the “school of holiness” for Pope John Paul II, starting with the Catholic Church’s role in the persecution of Polish Jews and carrying through to the falsehoods spread by the Vatican about young Karol Wojtyla’s efforts on behalf of Jews during World War II.

When that war ended, persecution of Poland’s remaining Jews did not.  Cardinal Hlond was furious that the Jewish problem persisted: “Yet again they are holding important positions.  Yet again they wish to impose a regime alien to the Polish nation.”  Some Jews even had the audacity to ask for their stolen homes back.  A pogrom in Kielce in 1946 left 49 Jews dead; nearly 100,000 more fled the country, many to Palestine, where they created a new set of problems that has yet to end.  Karol Wojtyla, who became a priest that year, said not a word about all this, then or ever.

Wojtyla’s go-with-the-flow attitude earned him a bishop’s miter in 1958; his diocese included the former extermination camp at Auschwitz, where we are now told he learned his holiness.  The bishopric gave him a seat at the Second Vatican Council in 1962.  One of the most emotional topics at that Council was a revision of the Church’s longstanding attitude toward the Jews.  After lengthy and heated debate, the Council issued the famous declaration of “Nostra Aetate,” that today’s Jews should not be blamed for the killing of Jesus, and that anti-Semitism in all its forms has no place in the Church.

What did the bishop whose diocese included the world’s most potent symbol of anti-Semitism have to say?  A great deal: he spoke seven times at the Council, and submitted four different written statements.  None of them, however, had anything whatsoever to do with Nostra Aetate or the Church’s posture toward the Jews.  I guess the holiness he learned at Auschwitz is a private thing.

A few years later Wojtyla, by now a cardinal, published a book he called Sources of Renewal, describing the work of the Council for the benefit of the faithful.  Most of the work, that is.  He censored out part of it, including the key conclusion of Nostra Aetate that “the Church … decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”  Why tick people off?

In 1968, “Prague Spring” erupted just to the south, and communist governments throughout eastern Europe were terrified that the breath of freedom from Dubček’s Czechoslovakia might threaten their own hold on power. The Polish communists knew exactly what to do: blame the Jews. Yet another crackdown ensued, this one so severe that 34,000 of the country’s remaining 37,000 Jews packed up and left.  Tadeusz Mazowiecki, one of Poland’s leading intellectuals and Wojtyla’s lifelong friend, visited Krakow to raise the issue with him. “I had a conversation with Cardinal Wojtyla about the anti-Semitic issue and asked him to make a stand. He agreed that it was a matter that needed to be reflected upon, that the Church should indeed make a stand.” If you guessed that Wojtyla ultimately said nothing at all, you’d be right. Read the rest of this entry &raquo

I’m no public relations maven, but it seems to me that if I were in charge of PR for the Catholic Church I would take a dim view of one of the articles published recently on the Vatican’s Zenit website, in connection with the beatification of Pope John Paul II. It quotes a Father Deselaers as saying that “Auschwitz was the school of holiness of John Paul II, which was immediately perceived by the people, because here Wojtyła understood totally what ‘faith’ means for the man of today.” In fact, my strategy would be that the further under the rug we can sweep the whole history of Catholic-Jewish relations in Poland, especially the part played by John Paul II, the better.

Minorities tend to be treated worse in places where they are numerous than in places where they are scarce. In early 20^th century America, for example, segregation was much more of an issue in the south, where there were lots of black people, than in the north, where there were not. Due to a variety of historical reasons, Poland wound up with the greatest concentration of Jews in early 20^th century Europe – and the greatest level of popular anti-Semitism, fueled by the teaching of the Church.

This phenomenon expressed itself shortly after the end of World War I, when Poland returned to independent nationhood after over a century of partition status. To celebrate, Poles began butchering Jews all over the country. Eighty were killed in Vilna, 70 more in Lvov, and in the province where the future Pope was born, 500 were slaughtered. The killers were egged on by a letter from the Polish bishops: “The real goal of bolshevism is the conquest of the whole world. The race that directs it came to dominate it through their gold and their banks. Today the ancestral imperialist impulse that flows through its veins drives it to crush the people under the yoke of its domination.” Every Pole knew just which race the bishops were referring to.

Author David Kertzer explores in detail how Pope Benedict XV asked his man on the scene, Msgr. Achille Ratti, to report back to him on what was going on in Europe’s newest Catholic-dominated country. Ratti’s answer: nothing was going on at all. “The Jews there are incredibly numerous (approximately three hundred thousand!) and they could not be more detested. But they are not being bothered, much less persecuted.” This was despite the fact that:

One of the most evil and strongest influences that is felt here, perhaps the strongest and the most evil, is that of the Jews. Not only do they differ visibly from Poles owing to their racial characteristics (shortness of stature, large nose, prominent ears, bags under their eyes, etc.) … They differ also because of their religion and the strong consciousness and pretension they have of forming a separate nationality. … It is certain that the Jews constitute a major cause of weakness in the Polish state. Having the banks, the press, and many important offices in their hands, and backed by their international organization, they seek the formation of a Judaic Poland.

Two years later, Ratti was crowned Pope Pius XI, and spent his pontificate encouraging the spread of anti-Semitic dictatorships in places like Poland, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Spain.

In 1923, a frustrated Father Jozef Kruszynski wrote “If the world is to be rid of the Jewish scourge, it would be necessary to exterminate them, down to the last one.” Was he just an out-of-control wing nut? Maybe. If so, why was he two years later named head of the Catholic University of Lublin? Read the rest of this entry &raquo

In my last post we saw how William Jennings Bryan’s campaign for an anti-evolution amendment to the federal Constitution led to the 1925 prosecution of high school teacher John Scopes.

Bryan immediately volunteered his services to the prosecution, even though he had little experience as a litigator. “The contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to the death,” said Bryan. “If evolution wins in Dayton, Christianity goes – not suddenly of course, but gradually – for the two cannot stand together. … In an open fight the truth will triumph.”

The prospect of an “open fight” enticed Clarence Darrow, a confirmed agnostic, to volunteer for the defense. As Darrow put it, “Scopes isn’t on trial; civilization is on trial. The prosecution is opening the doors for a reign of bigotry equal to anything in the Middle Ages. No man’s belief will be safe if they win.”

Zealots of every stripe descended on Dayton, as did hundreds of representatives of the international press. There was no question that Scopes had taught his students Darwinian evolution – he proudly admitted it. But Darrow had a couple of tricks up his sleeve. First, he thought he could exploit an inconsistency in the wording of the statute, which prohibited teaching “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” The first part of the sentence, at least, made it a crime to teach against the Bible – but many theologians, disagreeing with Bryan, found no necessary contradiction between evolution and the text of Genesis. Darrow lined up theologian expert witnesses to testify to that point. Depending on how you interpret the word “and,” that might have sufficed. Read the rest of this entry &raquo