Monday, April 25, 2005

Rashomon All Over Again

I Could Scream: Examining the plight of women under Islam
Annoy Mouse, a commenter on the previous post, sent along a link to a story of a woman who was stoned to death over the weekend in a small village several hundred miles from Kabul.

Here are some random thoughts on this latest version of the plague that passes for Islamic law:

Thanks, annoy mouse.

Yeah, I saw the news about the stoning yesterday but the story caused such an overwhelming sense of malaise there didn't seem to be any point in posting about it.

However, if you read all the reports -- you can google them and come up with at least a dozen -- there seem to be as many versions as there are villagers to tell it.

According to one report her husband had been away for some time in Iran. When he came back, his wife wanted a divorce, supposedly because he couldn't support her (this is a valid reason for a Muslim woman to request a divorce). But the husband somehow knew she'd been unfaithful (we aren't told how he knew this) so he went to the Ulema, who tried her for the crime of adultery and issued a fatwah: Ramj (death by stoning) for the woman, 100 lashes for the man.

Remember that the point of Shar'ia is punishment, purification, and perhaps deterrence. Also recall that the miscreant has to admit to the crime; we are never told if the woman admitted anything.

Then another story claims that it was her father who killed her by cutting her throat. This cultural nugget is called karo-kiri--i.e., honor killing of women to remove any blot from the family name.

Another version has it that her family hid her but the husband and Islamic authorities dragged her out of the house and the husband stoned her to death in short order. With a little help from his friends.

Yet another version says the whole thing started when the woman went to see Mohammed Karim -- the "other man" in the case, if that's what he was. Karim's father saw her go into his son's house. He locked them up in the house and then called in the village to see his son and this woman together. So the villagers, in high dudgeon, beat up the couple in order to make an example of them --the old 'deterrent' routine -- and then the woman's father dragged her home and killed her. Another deterrent right there.

Karim got 100 lashes. That either means he was unmarried (the unmarried are flogged rather than stoned) or it was just business as usual: one punishment for women and one for men. Which is not what Mohammed decreed at all, at all.

So the police are sending some investigators to detain the woman's father, her husband -- oops, her widower -- and the father of Karim, her alleged lover. Oh, they also want to detain Karim himself, though one wonders why. He's already been beaten; what more is there to be had from him?

You can also wonder what was really going on. Is there a land dispute? Some old enmity playing itself out? Was the Ulema who purportedly ordered the stoning holding a grudge perhaps? It's all conjecture at this point, but each of those motivations has been behind more than one woman's untimely death.

Here are the undisputed facts:

In a remote village in northeast Afghanistan, Amina Aslam, age twenty nine, died one April day in 2005.
Her murderer was either her husband or her father.
Her alleged lover will recover from the one hundred lashes.

Do not send out to ask for whom the bell tolls.

3 comments:

Dymphna said...

Well, in a way they're right, aren't they? We certainly don't respect their treatment of women or children, do we? I sure don't. And Shar'ia is a cesspit.

But I think that professor who led the prayers in NYC was trivial. There are *so* many things Muslim women need, beginning with self-respect. Having some woman lead prayers is not going to lead other Muslim women to join her. The professor is too much a Westernized-type feminist to do any real good.

If Muslim women are ghettoized by the men, Western feminists have ghettoized themselves into a mandarin, elitist irrelevance. That professor at Harvard who had to rush from the room (when Larry Summers was discussing the hard-wiring differences between men and women) was an obscenity. And now, the mau-mauing they are performing on Summers is disgusting beyond words. If he had any integrity he'd leave.

Nope, those Western feminists are trying to destroy our men and it's up to other women to stop them. They are the terrorists on the inside, destroying our polity in the name of a smelly orthodoxy that could have been lifted from the pages of Lenin.

Poor Muslim women have no one to help them but themselves...and a few people willing to help them with that bootstrap operation.

So if Shar'ia is a cesspit, American feminism is no better: no less strident, destructive, and small-minded. Bottom line, they both practice pc thinking and believing.

A pox on both their houses.

End of diatribe...

~D

truepeers said...

hear hear!

Unknown said...

Welcome to the Watcher's Council, Dymphna.