Are Muslim Men Weak? I Think Not

I was listening to a rebroadcast of the Diane Rehm Show on NPR this morning as I was heading back home after dropping off BeezleBub for a weekend with a friend of his.

The first hour's topic was Muslims, the Veil, and the West, which covered the custom of Muslim women wearing head scarves or full veils. While some claim it is a religious requirement, the guests all quoted a number of respected Muslim scholars who said that nowhere in the Qu'ran does it say any such thing.

But one point was brought up by a caller and one of the guests about the imam in Australia making the statement about unveiled Muslim women being nothing more than 'uncovered meat'

If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem.

This is what one could call a fallacious argument by bad analogy. First, that women are nothing more than uncovered meat. Second, that Muslim men are animals. Neither is true.

If Muslim men have no control over their passions, their emotions, or their vices, then they are truly weaker than men elsewhere. That's something I find very hard to believe. Yet here you have a Muslim cleric saying exactly that. And if it were so, then Islam would be doomed because it means that Muslim men would always give in to their baser instincts and would, indeed, become nothing more than animals. While there are some that do act in such a savage manner – like those in Al Qaeda and members of certain extremist Muslim militias - they are a minority.