Village life
A 16-year-old girl who was raped in Bangladesh has been given 101 lashes for conceiving during the assault. The girl’s father was also fined and warned the family would be branded outcasts from their village if he did not pay. According to human rights activists, the girl, who was quickly married after the attack, was divorced weeks later after medical tests revealed she was pregnant. The girl was raped by a 20-year-old villager in Brahmanbaria district in April last year…Muslim elders in the village issued a fatwa insisting that the girl be kept in isolation until her family agreed to corporal punishment.
Her rapist was pardoned by the elders.
No, I have nothing to add.
But there is a lot to subtract.
If Allah is as merciful and compassionate as he is claimed to be, why can’t his followers learn to be likewise? No, don’t answer that. Rhetorical question.
Islam showing off its true colors.
What do you do when news like this makes you actually want to harm someone? When you’re so enraged by the injustice of it, that the only fantasy that gives you the tiniest bit of comfort has to do with disemboweling these bastards?
I don’t like feeling this way. At all. I don’t understand how anyone can be so deeply, fundamentally wicked . And I hate feeling impotent to do anything but indulge my most grotesque (and immoral) revenge fantasies.
Disgusting story. So it’s all her father’s fault. The nearest there is to comfort is that it has come out in the media, presumably from the human rights activists it mentions.
What do you bet she’ll end up being cast out and dying in poverty?
I have a lot of things to add, but it’s all mostly profanity-laced tirades based on frustration and sadness.
I actually tried a few times to type a response in this post that captured my real feelings, but I just deleted every one of them. I really don’t have the words to express it. I keep trying to come up with a way to express sympathy for this girl and her father, but nothing I say can capture it. The words just seem trivial in comparison. Anything I tried to say would trivialize their experience. It’s just too fucking horrible.
Wes, you summed up just how I feel. You can’t put it into words. And that just makes it all the more infuriating.
This is what happens in a culture where women are held responsible for men’s desires. If it is women’s role to wear voluminous tents to stop men becoming inflamed by lust, then according to this line of thinking it follows that this girl must have done something to inflame the man’s lust. This is why I loathe the hijab, niqab and burqa: because they symbolise the same attitude which, when taken to its logical conclusion, mean women and girls get punished for being raped while men get pardoned for raping.
It’s often said that the decency or humanity of a culture can be measured by the way it treats the physically weaker.
FAIL.
The stories about the horrendous offences of religion are coming in so fast and so furiously that it does leave one literally speechless. How can one really add to this kind of horror? How many more stories like this do we need to hear before reasonable religious folk begin to say ‘There’s something terribly wrong with religion’? It does poison everything. And when do people stop dressing religion up in fancy clothes and start looking at the very nasty virus that’s underneath it all, sucking the life out of things.
Instead we get people like Armstrong – or, on a lower rung, Douthat (if, that is, there is lower and higher in this cesspool) – trying to claim that the fancy clothes are so precious and worth preserving, which reminds me of Paine’s remark about Burke, who (in his Reflections) praised the plumage, but neglected the dying bird. After awhile, one begins to feel terribly sick – but helpless too. How can we get through to the mindless defenders of religion? Let’s bear in mind, shall we?, that the churches got away with it again in Britain, just like the Muslim elders in the village in Bungladesh. And more helpless people will suffer as a result.
Religion is hateful and despicable. This is not only what happens in a culture where women are blamed and punished for men’s desires. This is what happens when cultural mores are overlaid with religious permissions and sanctions, when the non-existent transcendent rules and corrupts our ordinary humanity. Time for atheism to become more strident and insistent.
PooterGeek, that’s contemptible. Such overweening respect for “culture”–and such hatred for women. Let’s rephrase the article to apply to lynching in the Jim Crow American south. Presumably, white southerners thought black men were just LYING about not raping/harassing/whistling at white women, right? Or that black men shouldn’t put themselves in a position where they’re alone with white women, and can be accused of raping them. Surely, “lynching for whistling at a white woman” is an exaggeration. We shouldn’t try and impose our Northern/non-American perspective on these white southerners, since it is, after all, not written into the fabric of the universe.
I’m with Josh. I want to hurt someone.
Eric: I’m on board with your outrage but I do question the idea that getting rid of religion would fix this. It seems to me that this is fundamentally about patriarchy, not religion. Obviously religion is a close ally of patriarchy and there is a lot you can blame on it. But this doesn’t seem to be about any particular Islam-specific verse, or religion-specific concept, at least not judging from the linked article. Blaming rape victims is a time-honored old idea that has as much to do with secular sexism as it does with religion. So I don’t think getting rid of religion would fix this.
What I mean is, I’ve heard a lot of vicious victim-blaming crap about rape victims in non-religious contexts, from non-religious people. So while getting rid of religion-based attitudes to rape is a good thing, I don’t think it will be sufficient.
“However, the elders’ decision may start to seem more reasonable if you start with radically different premises about, say, the relative importance of discouraging rape versus discouraging female promiscuity.”
Yes indeed! Well spotted! And by the same token Hitler’s decision may start to seem more reasonable if you start with radically different premises about, say, the relative importance of not klling people by the trainload versus discouraging the existence of Jews.
The Telegraph account is sketchy and I was unable to find another, but it looks as if what may have happened is that the girl was hastily married to a third party and then found to be pregnant – so perhaps the grotesque punishment was for that. But presumably the girl and her family wouldn’t have been in such a panic if Pakistan’s laws and customs didn’t punish rape victims for the crime of ‘zinnah.’ Remember when Musharref tried to reform those laws just a little, and the ‘religious authorities’ raised holy hell?
Hmm, true. This is Bangladesh, not Pakistan, but I presume the religious dynamics might be very similar.
Oh der, so it is. I need more coffee!
Jenavir, you may indeed be right, but it’s very hard to say which came first, patriarchy or religion. They are so closely allied, that the lines of dependence are not clear. However, I think getting rid of the kind of suppositious nonsense that most religion is based on would help a great deal. I may be wrong, but I don’t think so.
In may ways, this is not a story about rape at all. It’s a story about the power of women’s sexuality and the need to control it. There is no simple secular reason for holding this to be a reliable account of the dynamics of male-female relationships. But it finds a place somewhere in practically all the myths. They are simply besotted with sexuality, and with the idea that somehow women’s sexuality is dangerous and (religiously) unclean.
Part of this probably has to do with the fact that, as the bearer of life, women are also the source of death, something that is made so very clear in the mythic goddess Kali. And this is related to the mythic idea of women’s liminality and unclear boundaries, and so on. But in one way or another, it seems to me, it’s bundled up with religion and its hatred of life.
They’re definitely so closely linked it’s hard to tease them apart. After all, what’s the difference between a frat boy calling all the girls he sleeps with “sluts” and a minister fulminating about daughters of Eve, or an imam comparing unveiled women to meat?
I often see the religious excuses as rationalizations for misogynistic feelings, rather than the causes of them, which is why I made my initial comment. But it’s arguably a vicious circle, with the rationalizations themselves becoming causes.
“Presumably”
Let me stop you there, quoted person…
But we’re so lucky to live in the enlightened West…
Where the government has just spent 10,000 friggin’ quid to boost the power of prayer as a crime-busting tool.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/16310000-grant-for-christian-police-who-believe-prayer-can-cut-crime-1882554.html
The question of which came first, religion or patiarchy? is interesting but a bit of a distraction. It’s even a distraction to ask whether Islam (in this case) actually leads to such behaviour or whether its a case of the forms of the religion being co-opted by evildoers (a possibly valid claim, certainly a debateable one).
But what the innumerable cases like this indisputably show – as OB has observed again and again – is that the religion does not discourage these acts of evil and that the religion is used to give evil a veneer of moral rightness.
I’m deeply dubious of the idea that religion causes evil (or good). Religion is a human creation, and the forms it takes and the behaviours it encourages are quinessentially, fundamentally human as well. It’s the sheet thrown over the elephant: take the sheet away and you’ll still have a fricking huge elephant in your living room.
The Koran has this to say about her situation:
From: Sura 2, section 28 verse 228
Divorced women
Shall wait concerning themselves
For three monthly periords.
Nor is it lawful for them
To hide what God
Hath created in their wombs,
If they have faith
In God and the Last Day.
And their husbands
Have the better right
To take them back
In that period, if
They wish for reconciliation.
And women shall have rights
Similar to the rights
Against them, according
To what is equitable;
But men have a degree
(of advantage) over them.
And God is Exalted in Power,
Wise
The poor thing never had a chance of compassion given that this considered to be the literal word of Allah by the powers that be.
PooterGeek,
Just a gander at that comment you’ve highlighted. Someone (at the original site) has posted this delightful reply.
“Holy cow! Are you serious?!! (In case the answer is yes, I’ve already copied your comment and its url to show people from time to time that such attitudes do in fact exist.)”
“the relative importance of discouraging rape versus discouraging female promiscuity.”
It is very interesting that anyone can think flogging a rape victim is a way to discourage ‘female promiscuity.’ It’s interesting that anyone can think being raped is an instance of ‘female promiscuity.’
Ho hum.