The societal damage caused by sharia law can be witnessed today in the story of the Muslim man who forced his 16 year old son to marry and then rape a twelve year old girl - who was also his cousin.
This kind of thing demonstrates the contempt that some Muslims in Britain (about forty per cent, perhaps?) have for British law. "The 54-year-old organised a sham Muslim ceremony between his son, then 16, and the girl at his home in Woolwich, south-east London, in March last year." He knew that the ceremony was illegal under British law. But he didn't care.
Lest anyone think his act was un-Islamic, he was simply following the example of the "Prophet" Muhammad, who "married Aisha when she was a girl of six years of age, and he consummated that marriage when she was nine years old.” (Bukhari v.5, b.58, no.234, and many others) Muhammad is, according to the Qur'an, "a beautiful pattern of conduct" (33:21) who Muslims should strive to emulate in all aspects of their lives. And this is the result.
It should be obvious that all the while Britain's at least 85 sharia courts are left open (many of which are already sanctioning illegal acts), there is a danger that incidents like this will be repeated in a more formal setting. The only solution is to shut them all down. But the government won't do that. It would be "Islamophobia".
Little girls be damned.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091222/ap_on_re_as/as_pakistan_justice_by_amputation;_ylt=ApPo0knaRzd8EJPj7nWruVp0fNdF
ReplyDeletealso
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/28/iran-acid-attack-sharia-law
You might like to check out these links.
If the 'eye for an eye' sharia law punishment really was applied, as it is sometimes applied such as in Pakistan and Iran recently in these cases, we might find a lot of violence against women being stopped in the Islamic world.
The problem with Islamic societies is that they don't apply sharia law as they should, but selectively use it to maintain patriarchy. The clergy have a nasty partnership with patriarchal social values to maintain women as property and slaves. This is what keeps 'Islam' going the way it does.
Of course, abuse of religious values is not confined to the Muslim world. I don't wish to rehash the case against the Roman Catholic Church over the last fifteen hundred years; it's well known and generally acknowledged. It's been forced to clean up its act over the last two hundred owing to the advance of secular society and democratic values. It's last really vicious interference in civil society was in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and after, as it backed Franco's death squads as it eradicated all opposition to the Church until well into the 1960s. This, too, needs to be borne in mind.
We could take a leaf out of this book, too. Because religious organisations have played such a nasty role in ethnic cleansing, patriarchal oppression, torture and mass murder, secular liberal societies have been bending over backward to accommodate rights over responsibilities, and rehabilitation over retribution. This has led to the present sorry state of affairs where gang-ridden liberal societies have lost control over both violent youth as well as criminals and criminal gangs. If we applied 'an eye for an eye' to all the oiks and thugs that go around bashing people up in Britain, for instance, or the violent criminals. You might well find a lot of them sorting themselves out, after a few well-targetted legally sanctioned mutilations and executions were applied to people of any age whatsoever who had committed serious crimes of violence. Don't think it works? It would today. The problem is, historically, draconian sanctions were applied in the days when class-ridden societies with grossly oppressive laws obtained everywhere. In late eighteenth-Britain, where millions lived in desperate poverty and shifted out of their homes and lands by elite classes from where they could obtain traditional social welfare, children could be hanged for stealing an apple from a farmer's basket or a handkerchief from a gentleman's pocket. Of course, this kind of horrendous cruelty and unfairness led to a massive and sustained backlash and we are still under the impacto f this backlash. The point is, it isn't the principle of the right to equal retribution that's wrong, it's the kinds of societies that used it in the past. Today we are much better placed to apply draconian sanctions fairly. If you think draconian sanctions can't be fair in principle, read those news articles again and think about it a little more.