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Confronting the Obstacles

To every gathering of Muslim women, Maria* added a smile. She came to Islam early, marrying a Muslim man and accepting the religion at 13 years old. She embraced it wholeheartedly, learning from the sisters as she went along. By age nineteen, she became the mother of a much-beloved baby boy. She and her son attended Jumu'ah prayers every Friday.

When the women decided to gather in one another's homes two Saturdays a month, Maria made an effort to come to each meeting. By this time, her son was nearly two years old, and Maria was separated from her husband and living with her non-Muslim mother. Often, the talk turned to the difficulties of marriage. Maria listened, sympathized, and smiled. One day, the sisters decided to organize a retreat to discuss family issues.

At the retreat, Maria and the 15 or so other women talked, laughed, and shared a potluck brunch. They began to discuss the topic of marriage. Maria had a question. She wanted to know how a woman knows when her divorce is final. As the women focused on Maria's question, she told them her horror story of suffering, abuse, being divorced, taken back, divorced again, lied to, and finally stalked by her husband. He told her the divorce was final one day, and the next day that it was not final, and that it was her Islamic duty to obey him in everything. She remained Muslim, but did not know enough of her new religion to assert her rights. Her tires had been slashed, her home watched, her peace threatened, and she was afraid.

The sisters were shocked. They should not have been.

According to a survey of the 63 Muslim community workers, leaders, and individuals done in 1993 by the North American Council for Muslim Women, domestic violence (including everything from hitting to incest) against Muslim women and children occurred in ten percent of the population of Muslims. If verbal and psychological abuse were added to this, the figure would rise considerably. By comparison, seven percent of American women in general were physically abused, and 37% were verbally or emotionally abused in 1993, according to the Family Violence Prevention Fund. A comprehensive study in 1993 by the Commonwealth Fund found that in one year alone nearly four million American women suffered abuse at the hands of their husbands or male friends, and that a woman is abused every nine seconds. The Family Violence Prevention Fund also reports that 34% of men and women have directly witnessed an act of domestic violence. This number is higher than the combined numbers of adults who have witnessed robberies or muggings!

Maria continued to attend the sisters' meetings as the sisters began to focus on the problem of domestic violence in their community. She was not the only victim. The sisters protested to their Imam when they discovered that a community leader involved with their children had used violence against his wife. It became obvious to them that some community education was in order. Meanwhile, Maria's ex-husband had begun to frequent another Muslim community in the area, but continued to alternately harass her and then to entice her to continue her relationship with him. He began to use their son as a way to gain access to her, and he continued to disturb her sense of security and to assess his control over her.

Authoritarian Family Structures Lead to Abuse and Violence

An authoritarian family structure predisposes many Muslims in America to be abused in some way and possibly to become the victims of violence. Generally, husband's dominance's in the family structure, the more likely wife and child abuse become. In the most abusive homes, the father believes and socializes his wife and children to believe that whatever he wants the family to do is the same as what Allah wants them to do. He, in effect, makes himself into something of a god.

Of the eight to ten million Muslims in America, more than half are African-American, a small but growing number are European American, and the rest are immigrants (first, second, or third generation) from Middle Eastern, Southwest Asian, and other countries.

African American Muslim families suffer from the influence of the overwhelming incidences of abuse and violence in the general society and from the historical experience of slavery, which encouraged fractured families. While African-Americans who have been Muslim for many years are as self-directed as any community, new Muslim families who are searching for stability and morality often look to the immigrant communities for leadership and mentoring. Unfortunately, the most negative behavioral common denominator between the African-American and the immigrant Muslim communities is a socialization process which presents the parents, particularly the father, as having the last word on everything, and teaches children to be unquestioningly obedient as part of their devotion to faith.

The overwhelming majority of immigrant Muslims come from repressive countries where political power is held by officials who secure or maintain their leadership through unethical, un-Islamic, and sometimes brutal means. These tyrannical governments tend to produce extended families and societies where only the man at the top can pronounce what is right or wrong, what is acceptable or unacceptable, and who is good or bad. Muslim American immigrants fleeing oppressive governments may not yet have realized that their own family dynamics are a microcosm of the tyranny and despotism they so actively oppose, and mistakenly think a tyrannical family structure is an Islamic one. The atmosphere in too many of these families is repressive, non-communicative, top-down, and male-dominated, where the leadership title that is worn is primary and which never allows or plans for asking why or how the family functions.

Surprisingly, in the homes of most Muslims, focusing on the rules and desires of the parents almost always takes precedence over any focus on Allah. Most Muslim parents do not give their children any Qur'anic proof behind their opinions, do not allow themselves to be questioned, and no not invite discussion or reflection on ideas even though Allah continuously instructs Muslims to think and to reflect. Parents rarely see the connection between parents (instead of Allah) as the focus of the family structure, and shirk associating partners with Allah.

• Ending Domestic Violence in Muslim Families
• Ending the Violence: Where Do Muslims Begin?
• What, Exactly, Constitutes Abuse or Violence?