Another pretty story.

“Hannah Shah” is…the daughter of an imam in one of the tight-knit Deobandi Muslim Pakistani communities in the north of England. Her father…rap[ed] his daughter from the age of five until she was 15, ostensibly as part of her punishment for being “disobedient”. At the age of 16 she fled her family to avoid the forced marriage they had planned for her in Pakistan…[S]he then became a Christian – an apostate. The Koran is explicit that apostasy is punishable by death; thus it was that her father the imam led a 40-strong gang – in the middle of a British city – to find and kill her.

Islam is a religion of peace; Allah is merciful.

Hannah’s description in the book of the moment when her “community” discovered the “safe” home where she had fled after becoming an apostate is terrifying. A mob with her father at its head pounded and hammered at the door as she cowered upstairs hoping she could not be seen or heard. She heard her father shout through the letter box: “Filthy traitor! Betrayer of your faith! Cursed traitor! We’re going to rip your throat out! We’ll burn you alive!” Does she still believe they would have killed her? “Yes, without a doubt. They had hammers and knives and axes.”

Then the social services helped out.

When, at school, she had finally summoned the courage to tell a teacher that her father had been beating her (she couldn’t bring herself to reveal the sexual abuse), the social services sent out a social worker from her own community. He chose not to believe Hannah and, in effect, shopped her to her father, who gave her the most brutal beating of her life. When she later confronted the social worker, he said: “It’s not right to betray your community.”

From ‘her own community’ – but which one? The one that was raping her? The one that was beating her? The one that wasn’t protecting her? The one that thinks girls and women should be beaten? The men of ‘the community’ but not the women? Notice the ‘he said’ – the social worker was not just ‘from her own community,’ he was also a man from that community. In what sense was that ‘community’ her ‘own’ community? In what sense was it not a hostile alien force that was oppressing and subordinating her through physical violence and intimidation? And why, above all, were such questions apparently not available to ‘the social services’? Why did such questions not occur to them before sending out a man from this particular ‘community’ to investigate a reported pattern of beatings? In short, why did they not know what they were doing?

‘It’s not right to betray your community’ – so that means it is right to accept beatings and furthermore that it is not right to refuse to accept them. But if that’s the case – then it’s not ‘your’ community. It’s your enemy, your boss, your tyrant, your owner, your oppressor; it’s not your ‘community.’ If you’re not permitted any recourse against violence and brutality – then there is no affiliation, there is only force. Community me no community under those circumstances. Don’t pretty things up. Don’t tell me ‘It’s not right to betray your community’; tell the truth; say ‘You’re not allowed to tell outsiders you’re being beaten, and if you do you’ll get beaten even harder.’

This is the sort of cultural sensitivity displayed by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, last year when he suggested that problems within the British Muslim community such as financial or marital disputes could be dealt with under sharia…What did Hannah, now an Anglican, think on hearing these remarks? “I was horrified.” If you could speak to him now, what would you say to the archbishop? “I would say: have you actually spoken to any ordinary Muslim women about the situation that they live in, in their communities? By putting in place these Muslim arbitration tribunals, where a woman’s witness is half that of a man, you are silencing women even more.” She believes the British government is making exactly the same mistake as Rowan Williams: “It says it talks to the Muslim community, but it’s not speaking to the women. I mean, you are always hearing Muslim men speaking out, the representatives of the big federations, but the government is not listening to Muslim women. With the sharia law situation and the Muslim arbitration tribunals, have they thought about what effect these tribunals have on Muslim women? I don’t think so.”

Because they’re still labouring under the same confusion – that a ‘community’ is homogeneous and united and dissent-free and any member of the ‘community’ is as worth talking to as any other, except in fact if the ‘community’ in question believes in subordinating and silencing women, why, it is only respectful to talk to the men and ignore the women. They have started learning better (they have talked to Maryam Namazie and Gina Khan) – but slowly, slowly.