Musleh Khan was hired by Toronto police to "bridge gaps" with the Muslim community. But the question is hardly ever asked whether those gaps should be bridged. Perhaps some gaps like this are best not bridged at all. Because on the other side of the bridge is a savage and medieval culture. And trying to bridge the gap means that we normalize its ugly abuses.
Musleh Khan is the new Muslim chaplain hired by the Toronto Police to bridge gaps between law enforcement and the Muslim community and to provide religious and moral support to Muslim officers. The police union is justifiably concerned about his comments, made in a 2013 webinar entitled “The Heart of the Home: The Rights and Responsibilities of a Wife.”
Those "responsibilities" include not leaving the house without getting her husband's permission. So in response the usual "taken out of context" card is being played.
But really what should the Toronto police have expected from a Muslim chaplain? These are the sorts of views that are normative within Islam. They are law in the holy cities of Islam in Saudi Arabia.
The larger question is do we want to bridge this gap or burn this bridge?
A woman should be “obedient” to her husband at all times and must not refrain from intimacy without a “valid excuse,” he says. The slideshow accompanying Khan’s lecture says sickness and obligatory fasting would qualify.
Islamic scholars say if a woman refuses “without a valid reason then she committed a major sin,” Khan says.
Wives should also seek permission from her husband before leaving the home because they are the guardians of the marital home, Khan says.
Does it get worse? Was Islam's founder a pedophile?
In a lecture given to the Muslim Students Association at the University of Saskatchewan in 2014, Khan praised Mohammed’s relationship with Aisha as that of a model husband, saying, “Aisha, she was young. So she didn’t really understand what marriage, what it took for a woman to be in a marriage. She didn’t really understand the maturity or the responsibility of being in a marriage.
In a question and answer session in a mosque in Ontario in 2015, Khan responded to a question asking why it was acceptable to marry a nine-year old by saying that different countries set the age of consent differently, and there is no universally accepted age of consent.
“So what is the real age to get married if it’s so different everywhere you go?” he asked rhetorically. “The answer it’s our prophet [Mohammad] peace and blessings be upon [who ruled] at the age of puberty.”
The reason there's a gap is because we have something called civilization. When we bridge that gap, we lose civilization.