The Islamic Rat Girl

A tweet I saw was funny but ultimately horrifying:

Since it’s Year of the Rat, I just wanted to pay my respects to rat girl, the girl who every Muslim kid growing up was told had turned into a rat because she threw out the Quran. My scripture teacher told us about it and literally no adult questioned this. Thanks rat girl pic.twitter.com/BmEnPbkVi2

— putting the pal in palestinian (@jennineak) January 31, 2020

The thread showed that this was, and maybe still is, a widespread assertion used by Muslim teachers and parents:

This story is actually all over the place, and treated seriously in many Muslim websites. The main variant:

A girl was listening to music loudly, her mother happened to be reading the Quran, she asked her to turn the music down so she can carry on reading the Quran. The girl got pisst off and went to kick the Quran, her mother threw herself between her foot and the Quran, she ended up kicking her mother. She then stormed up to her room, where she put her music on and locked the door.
Later that day her mother realised that she had been up there for quite along a time, and the music was still blasting, she decided to call her down to eat. So, the mother went up to call her daughter but there was no answer. The mother got worried, she got her husband to break open the door, and they found the daughter in a state where she could be described as half monkey, half snake, lizard and very ugly like a ghost. She appeared to b a mixture of monkey, lizard and human, she couldn’t speak either.

The photo is actually part of a 2003 sculpture by Patricia Piccinini who was very upset at this hoax.

It is sort of horrifying that this story is told as truth (with mosques even handing out flyers with the grotesque picture, as one tweeter noted.) Kids were truly traumatized.

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