Aside from destructively dismissing the reality that Muslim women are oppressed at all, the excruciatingly fatuous tendencies of patriarchy apologists include resorting to name-dropping famed scholars, as well as an egotistical inclination to believe that these apologists are correct in their often oppressive interpretations simply due to being part of the visible majority, a sentiment whose source is a hadith that is quoted frequently to claim that the ummah will never agree on error. However, asserting that these oppressive interpretations are agreed upon by a majority silenced by tyrannous dictators is in itself erroneous and disingenuous. Additionally, to presume that the hadith is referring to oneself in using the word ummah–the community of believers–when the Qur’an attests that only God knows who is a true believer, is nothing short of immodesty and poetic bigotry. This is particularly true considering these are the same Muslims who claim that the majority will not enter Heaven.

It may be a result of my inferior female suck-at-math-because-I-have-a-uterus type intelligence, but I observe that simultaneously claiming the ummah will never agree on error and that the majority will go to Hell don’t quite add up.

Needless to say, the (visible) majority is wrong. Women in Saudi are not allowed to drive, which is clearly unIslamic. Women can’t vote, which is clearly unIslamic. Women are killed for being raped, which is clearly unIslamic. I hope I needn’t delineate further; there are injustices everywhere. And yet these are the interpretations of the supposed majority. In the US Muslims insist that women cannot lead prayer, which is also clearly unIslamic; there is refusal to see that the difference is solely where one draws the line, and that these infringements of rights are in fact exactly the same. There are religious leaders who know this and, fearful of losing credibility, are silenced and pressured by violent extremists and misinformed mobs. The hadith that the ummah will not agree on error is quoted repeatedly, without any true consideration to what this means.

Such a conspicuous attempt to shame believers into compliance so that a privileged few can appoint their decisions the will of the majority is not only an almost laughably pretentious tactic but a direct deterrence from the respectable Islamic tradition of argument. Rather than vigilantly challenge the influence of the patriarchal paradigm by which these interpretations were produced and embedded into “Islamic” tradition, we are expected to succumb to a sense of defeat prompted by formidable ostracism and properly resort to vacuous name-dropping. Consequently, the clearly compassionate message of Islam is drowned in inconsistencies, logical fallacies, and petty whose-phallus-is-bigger competitions.

Compassion itself is denied to be compassion, with all too familiar duplicity. Previously mentioned: stating God knows best with a sense of contempt for the questioner and thinly veiled pride in one’s learned self suggesting that oneself knows best, and shit like this. Similarly, the argument is made that we cannot be compassionate because God knows what we don’t, and a seemingly harsh punishment is really a compassionate one we can’t possibly understand.

What a mendacious, lazy excuse disguised as religious virtue!

Have We not given him two eyes,
and a tongue and a pair of lips,
and shown him the two ways of good and evil?
But he would not try to ascend the steep uphill road. (Qur’an 90:8)

Oppression is not up for debate. Oppression is always unIslamic, close to shirk.