Hannah Shah and the Imam’s Daughter
I have recently read this particular book which takes us inside a Muslim family and deals with the horrors experienced by the author. It is not a pleasant story and it crosses the world of radical Islam and sexual pathologies. Yet we learn a great deal when we see the inside of a dysfunctional family in extremis.
I will spare you the pathological aspects and encourage you to read the book to understand the full trauma and history. Far more important to ourselves are the insights revealed about Islam that we have gathered from this eye witness.
Education in this Islamic culture and we are speaking of the tribal areas of Pakistan, consists of mastering the Koran to the point of reading it pitch perfect while memorizing the text in the original Arabic. The child is not taught to understand Arabic at all.
It is as if a child is taught to memorize the New Testament in Latin while never understanding a word. Obviously they are taught basic letters and sounds but it appears not much else.
Actual interpretation is done by their teachers as this drill is conducted. But get this. The teacher is a product of the same system and is transmitting an oral tradition as to the meaning of the material. He himself is unable to read the text with understanding. At least that is what clearly arose in the Urdu speaking tribal lands.
Thus we can say that every Imam sets himself up as an imitation of Mohammed with no real training and a propensity to promote traditional tribal mores. What is more, he is using what was taught him by his own teachers and it is an oral tradition rather than a written tradition. We cannot rely on the text to yank these folks back onto the proper road. It is no surprise then that pathological Islam has arisen as would also happen in our own culture if the same conditions applied.
Effectively a child remains almost illiterate for two reasons. He is not getting the same attention in his own language, while perhaps half to all of his learning time is spent in memorization of material he cannot understand. Yet this appears to be the norm in Pakistan
Of course, Arabic speaking populations actually are working in a language they understand and a better outcome can be expected.
I also presume much of the middle class Islamic world is shaking a lot of this off, but it feels as if it will need generations of effort to correct the problem.
We can all begin to appreciate what the Reformation accomplished when they made the bible available in common tongues and began the effort to educate children to the point that they could read and debate the material themselves. We can also understand why it was so bloody.
