Muslim prayer (illustration)
Muslim prayer (illustration)Flash 90

A Bahraini cleric recently claimed that Jews and Christians, out of envy for the "beautiful close-knit fabric" of the Muslim family, were trying to destroy the Muslim family by propagating equality between the sexes.

The cleric, Adel Hasan Al-Hamad, made the remarks in a recent Friday sermon in Qatar, which was televised on the Saudi 4Shabab TV channel and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

According to Al-Hamad, only a "brainless lunatic" would say that men and women are equal.

“This nation, which was honored by Allah with this great religion, has a beautiful and comprehensive law, encompassing all aspects of life. So beautiful is the Sharia that the Jews and the Christians envy us, and strive to drag us away from it,” he claimed.

“The problem arises when we are not aware of their envy, and we blindly follow the envious conduct and the conspiracies of the Jews. We are making a grave mistake. I’d like to give you an example of something for which the Jews and Christians envy us, and which they try to destroy: the family. The beautiful, close-knit fabric of the [Muslim] family does not exist among the Jews and the Christians,” continued Al-Hamad.

“You alone have it – well-organized families whose members know their rights and duties, in which the wife respects her husband, in which the husband fulfills his responsibilities toward his wife and children, in which the children honor their father and mothers, and in which people do not forsake their mothers until they die.

“You cannot find such a thing among the Jews or the Christians. You cannot find among them a family in the true sense of the word. They have girlfriends, who give them children, and twenty years later they are still wondering whether to marry them or not. They have mothers but they don’t know where they are. He sends his mother a greeting card if she is in a retirement home, and is very happy because at least her son remembered her, even if she has not seen him for a long time,” he said.

“They want you to be like them – lost, scattered, strangers to one another. Children are estranged from their fathers and do not know their mothers. Wives do not respect their husbands, and men are not aware of their rights. Ultimately, the family is lost. This is how envious they are. How do they strive to achieve this? Their envy has led them to take several measures to destroy the Muslim family in Muslim countries,” claimed Al-Hamad.

Jews and the Christians, he said, “wish to diminish your value, oh men. They came up with the call for ‘equality between the sexes,’ which means that you should be on a par with women. It means that men and women should have the same rights and duties. This is something that only a brainless lunatic would say.”

As shown by MEMRI over the years, Muslims often make ridiculous, baseless claims against Jews or Israel.

Examples of this include a claim that Egypt’s presidential candidate, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, is Jewish; blaming the Israeli Mossad for the Arab Spring revolutions; and accusing Israel of producing jeans, which were then sold to Arabs, containing magnets that cause infertility in Arab women.