When Will We Ever Learn?

Yet another Muslim cleric has managed to alienate his community from the greater society in which it prospers. This time the cleric, Sheikh Taj el-Din Al Hilali, referred to women who do not wear the hijab as "uncovered meat".

He was giving a sermon in Sydney, Australia when he made his offensive remarks. Basically he was saying that women who do not cover up, and sway provocatively, were the ones to blame if they get raped.

"If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park and the cats come and eat it whose fault is it? The cats or the uncovered meat?"

So he recommended that women should cover up or stay inside. This defense of rape isn't something new, nor is it necessarily uniquely Muslim. This excuse for rape has been put forward by lawyers, defendants, and even a few judges over the years, and women have fought long and hard campaigning against it. But to have it put forward by a so-called spiritual leader in a sermon is outrageous.

The attitude that women are somehow to blame when they are the victims of sexual assault is completely ludicrous. But it is an attitude that has been around for a very long time and the struggle to expel it still goes on.

The myths that somehow women "ask for it" by dressing sexily, or that when they say "no" they really mean "yes", or that most rapes are committed by sex-crazed strangers, are still widely believed. But they are just that...myths.

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Now some people in Australia are saying that this cleric, who has apologized for his remarks, should be deported back to Egypt. I think that the opinions expressed by this cleric are uneducated and harmful, but they are opinions that are expressed everyday by a large number of people, secular and religious, all around the world.

Rape is a violent, criminal act. There may be reasons why men commit this horrendous crime, but there is certainly no excuse. Sheikh Taj el-Din Al Hilali was wrong to make his remarks, of that there is no doubt, and to deliver them as part of a sermon designed to influence and guide his congregation is shocking.

He needs educating...perhaps we all do.