The Dark Sides of Religion (part 4/5): Patriarchies. Mixed technics on canvas 45 x 45 cm by Shaharee Vyaas.

The religions of the book – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – all have a male God and have scriptures and histories of interpreting those scriptures which are patriarchal. The characteristics of a Patriarchal System are Male Domination, Male Identification, Male Centeredness, and Obsession with Control.
Patriarchy examples include hiring practices that discriminate against women, exclusion of women from decision-making, institutional discrimination against women, and the relegation of women to the domestic sphere.
While the history of patriarchy in the Middle East is complex, male dominance evolved historically alongside the growth of Islamic nations. Over the next four decades, Christians will remain the largest religious group, but Islam will grow faster than any other major religion. If current trends continue, by 2050 the number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world. Feminist Gerda Lerner traces a “creation of patriarchy” in Islam through the continual repetition of male-dominated rituals and events in Islamic society overtime.
One of the main reasons that made Rushdie’s book the Satanic Verses so controversial is that those verses called for the worshipping of a female deity called Al-Lat, thus putting a time bomb under the existing patriarchal order. Muslim scholars are divided over the authenticity of those verses and their retraction, depending upon the sources they rely upon, measured against the majority of Muslim scholars who proclaim their prophet’s infallibility as a ground to determine those sources as blaspheming confabulations. Also non-Muslim scholars are divided over the historical veracity of the sources that mention the satanic verses.