‘Justice’
‘This is Islamic justice, British style’.
The woman in black wanted an Islamic divorce. She told the religious judge that her husband hit her, cursed her and wanted her dead. But her husband was opposed, and the Islamic scholar adjudicating the case seemed determined to keep the couple together. So, sensing defeat, she brought our her secret weapon: her father. In walked a bearded man in long robes who described his son-in-law as a hot-tempered man who had duped his daughter, evaded the police and humiliated his family. The judge promptly reversed himself and recommended divorce. This is Islamic justice, British style.
Well obviously ‘justice’ is the wrong word there. Obviously that word should be in scare-quotes, or followed by ‘hahahaha,’ or a headline in The Onion. ‘Justice’ you call it – when men get together and decide a woman’s fate while ignoring the woman herself; when ‘the Islamic scholar’ is determined to ‘keep the couple together’ no matter how disgustingly the man treats the woman; when the woman is doomed to a life of degradation and loathing unless she has her father handy and he sides with her. That’s not justice. That’s a bad cruel joke, that’s what that is.
But Shariah has been rejected in the West as well. The Canadian province of Ontario had allowed rabbinical courts and Christian courts to resolve some civil and family disputes with binding rulings under a 1991 law. But when the Islamic Institute on Civil Justice there tried to create a Shariah court, it was attacked as a violation of the rights of Muslim women. As a result, Ontario changed the entire system in 2006 to strip the rulings of any religious arbitration of legal validity or enforceability.
Yeah – thanks largely to the tireless efforts of our friend Homa Arjomand.
“We always try to keep the marriages together, especially when there are children,” said Hasan’s wife, Shakila Qurashi, who works as an unofficial counselor for women. If the husband beats her, she should go to the police and have a divorce, Qurashi said. “But if he’s slapped her only once or something like that,” she said, “and he admits he has made a mistake and promised not to do it again, then we say, ‘You have to forgive.’ “
Bastards.
I think religion, lately, is really doing a spoof on itself. We have the Bishop of Lancaster complaining because educated Catholics have learned to think! Surprise! Surprise! And Catholics have something to do with education?!! They may even think they were the originators of it all!! I don’t think I’d be too quick to change the Act of Settlement just now, till we see where the Roman Catholic Church, and Prince Charles’ bid to have a voice go. Can you imagine a lackey of the Vatican with the same expectations? On second thought, wouldn’t we (and that includes Canada too) be better off without the monarchy? Watching the Transition to Power in the US, Presidents are obviously much more exciting.
And then of course we have the perennial topic of the Islamic Injustice System operating with its usual ham-fisted idiocy, trying to apply to real people laws dreamed up by a desert brigand and a gang of cut-throats.
If people would just laugh at the idiots, perhaps we could just get rid of the lot of them. Let them establish private talking shops where they entertain each other with their sage profundities, and let the rest of the people can get on with the real task of living. It really is a form of madness, when these kinds of things are read in supposedly reputable media of communication instead of in The Onion. But nothing that they say should be published except in the silly press, with all the appropriate warnings, of course, about how silly it all really is.
What a sad spectacle this is, thousands of years after the stuff religions depend upon for the latest wisdom was written, for the most part, thousands of years ago. And they are still squeezing it like silly putty, hoping to make it fit. And when it doesn’t, what does a woman or two matter? Hey! It’s old! What do you expect?! It’s a nonsense. Like a prince who thinks that, just because of an accident of birth, he has something to say that everyone needs to hear.
One begins to really appreciate the rare sanity of the Ontario decision. Kudos to the men and women who fought for that cause. The UK has wimped out in the face of the sharia onslaught, appeasement and guilt for the “War on Terror”?
No, I think it goes deeper than the war on terror (TM). This has a lot more to do with Empire.
Hair/clothes-wise in the picture, I could not help but notice the modernity of the older man, as opposed to the antediluvian dress code of the young woman.
The well- dressed man must be making a mint off the backs of vulnereable black- clad women.
The young woman looks so subservient.
“But if he’s slapped her only once or something like that,” she said, “and he admits he has made a mistake and promised not to do it again, then we say, ‘You have to forgive.’ “
If he does it once- he will do it twice and thrice times over. The template has been set for further abuse.
What does Shakila Qurashi mean by “or something like that,”? What, I wonder, would the equivalent of ‘slapping’ be in his book? That would be OK by the law/counsellor for him to be forgiven.