Did Egyptian Islamists really try to legalize necrophilia? The Muslim Brotherhood vigorously denies it on their official Twitter account:
@Ed_Husain necrophilia discussion is disgusting & never happened, another dirty trick for distraction instead of focusing on real issues
— Ikhwanweb (@Ikhwanweb) April 25, 2012
Munawar Hasan: I am saying she should keep quite if she has no witnesses. If she has witnesses than she should present them.
Anchor: What kind of an argument is that? A woman is raped and she has to look for witnesses to prove the crime?
Munawar Hasan: Argue with the Quran and not me.
I’ve got a post on this up at CoB – important to emphasize in discussing the issue that rape is not adultery.
Yes absolutely. The principle that one becomes punishable for being a forced, coerced, or unwilling participant in anything is unethical, because it punishes the victim.
I would submit a somewhat more tricky point in this context though. To make punishable an act where all parties consent and no party took harm is also unethical, and creates victims in a victimless situation.
Hence not only is rape not adultery/fornication, but the very notion that adultery/fornication should be punishable in the way it is interpreted currently is unethical. The same reason goes for homosexuality and other consensual behavior that may be persecuted.
These things do have in common that they lead to punishment of the innocent, and the arm of the legal system becomes the actual criminal.
To make punishable an act where all parties consent and no party took harm is also unethical
in adultery, the faithful partners are victims. It isn’t as victimless as you make it out to be.
Likewise, one might imagine a sexual relationship between a 17 year old and a 18 year old that is fully consensual. You argue that punishment of the 18 year old is unethical, yet that is our law.
Its not as simple as you paint it to be.
at any rate, the Qur’an mandates 4 witnesses for any punishment for adultery, a standard intended to be near-impossible to meet. Thus, the Qur’an is merciful.
But we arent talking about adultery. We are talking about rape. lets not change the subject and fall into the trap set by Jamaat e Islaami.
I agree that rape is different. But I also don’t think I oversimplify at all. The reason why adultery is brought in this cases is not because it is about faithfulness, it’s because any sexuality outside wedlock is deemed adultery, and hence the argument I give still applies. This is not about redeeming some real or supposed harm incurred on a cheated-upon party. Rather it is enforcing a norm that does not actually have a victim.
So while I do agree with you that the adultery argument is a misapplication in rape cases, it is also a misapplication in many other cases.
About the second consent example, well we do have notions of age-of-consent and ability to give consent, so there I don’t really see I’m oversimplifying things, in fact countries disagree that the line should be at 18 years, and I would agree that it is a difficult line to draw and there are definitely cases in the US that really do punish victimless crimes.
if you don’t see that adultery does have a victim – teh faithful partner(s) – then I guess we disagree.
Yes, I do believe you should be free to make your own sexual decisions as an adult. And no, I don’t think that there should be legislated consequences. Which is why I find the Qur’an to be merciful in practice even if it violates our sensibility about sexual freedom in theory.
I don’t say that. But ponder this: Do we call on the state to punish all slights against us? My trust is broken, my expectations violated, promises not held all the time. Should we want the state to be handling of those situations? It seems to me that even in this case it is not consistent. It’s not about having a clear principle such as that any civil violation of trust or behavioral expectation is punishable, but just a specific one.
I will just say that I am not in favor of corporal punishability of violations of this type. Divorce with monetary punativity is a workable path as far as I am concerned.
I think you miss the deliberate point of the standard of proof required by the QUr’an before any punishment would be meted out.
The point of a jury in the jury-driven system is not to make a questionable rule unlikely that’s on the book, but to prevent error of judgment for a law that is considered itself just. That’s theory though and I recognize that.
I’m basically saying that even if everybody was a witness I would consider it unjust based on the principles I have listed. I think we just differ on that point.
“The reason why adultery is brought in this cases is not because it is about faithfulness, it’s because any sexuality outside wedlock is deemed adultery, and hence the argument I give still applies.”
Someone who has studies this in greater detail can weigh in on this, but IIRC Muslim jurists classified ‘rape’ as ‘forced zina’ (‘zina bil jabr’). But I don’t think even this helps Pakistanis trying to justify the insanity of the Hudood Ordinance.
On a related note, the historical record shows that not all sexual relations outside marriage were deemed as adultery by Muslim societies in the past. Some were, while others were tolerated and regulated. So I agree about the criticism of the “faithfulness” aspect; seems like reading back (dare I say) quaint, western Christian notions of ‘faithfully’ married people who stayed in that state ’till death do us [them] part’.
‘Inheritance rights for women irk Bangladeshi Islamists’:
The protesters, mostly students of Islamic schools, smashed vehicles and set fire to a fuel station and attacked a convoy of devotees on their way to an Islamic shrine in southeastern Bangladesh, according to police, news reports and witnesses. Police fired tear gas and used batons to disperse protesters in various parts of the country.
[...]
Monday’s strike was organised by the Islamic Law Implementation Committee, a grouping of several religious groups and political parties. Its head, Fazlul Huq Amini, told a news conference later on Monday that about 100 activists had been arrested in the capital, Dhaka.
While the strike was called to broadly seek the adoption of Islamic law in the Muslim-majority nation of 150 million people, its specific agenda was to oppose the government’s new policy on women’s inheritance rights.
Under the government’s new rules, every child inherits the same amount.
Amini accuses the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of violating the Quran by introducing the new inheritance policy.
Leicester, an industrial city in central England, is home to the most conservative Islamic population anywhere in Europe, according to American diplomatic cables that were obtained and recently released by the website, Wikileaks. Leicester is also on track to become the first majority non-white city in British history.
My feeling is that this has nothing to do with Islam and everything to do with unregulated multi-culturalism. If you subsidize the creation and maintenance of isolated, radically anti-mainstream sub-societies, then perhaps this is the natural result. The long and rich history of Islam can provide a suitable ideology to galvanize these pockets of radicalism, but it is not the cause.
I don’t know enough about Leicester or its social problems to comment on their extent or their causes. I have in the past listened to a lot of lectures by Shaykh Abu Yusuf Riyadh-ul-Haq and based on that and an ability to read I can tell that this is a biased and bigoted screed which is not at all interested in the truth either.
I want to say that I have a great deal of respect for conservative Islam, and I think that the “Western world” has evolved alot of social/cultural problems that cry out for a remedy. But when people are told to abstain from music and sports and wish death to their countrymen (obviously not the norm in most American conservative communities), deep down in my gut that just feels very, very wrong. I agree that this article is written from a biased perspective, but some of the things it mentions would disturb me from almost any perspective.
I think there is an interesting discussion to be had here, and I have a lot to say about it, but I just think it is poisoned with the sort of nonsense that was quoted at the beginning of this thread. Also I don’t want to make it about Leicester in particular, because as I said, I do not know what the reality is there. Maybe I’ll try to start another thread about the whole idea of traditional religous teachings and “social integration”, etc.
i look forward to that – and to your thoughts on that other post of mine a while back about guilt.
This story is not necessarily about dumping on conservative Islam and it is unnecessarily defensive to react that way.
The story, to my mind, and the reason I posted it, is that wikileaks found the US concerned and intervening in UK affairs and that MI6 seemed to think that was necessary.
Of course the back story is that fundamentalist Islam is on a collision course with modernity. It will be hard now for western backed dictators to keep the younger generation of Muslims in the Middle East back in the 7th century.
Dave Hill continues to cover the ongoing saga that is the Labour nomination for the Executive Mayor of Tower Hamlets.
Richard Seymour weighs in on this from over on the left.
In an attempt to propel self satire to a new extreme, after promising to burn the US flag on 9/11, Anjem “Andy” Choudary has mustered his latest organization (after his old one was banned), called Muslims Against the Crusades (MAC), in a bid to protest against the Pope’s visit to Britain. Sad.
Muslim Against the Crusades (MAC), otherwise known as Brothers Against Doing An Honest Days Work.
LOL
Here’s some posts worth reading on the release of a ‘secret list’ by the Quilliam Foundation, which accuses ‘a number of Muslim groups, politicians, a television channel and a Scotland Yard unit of sharing the ideology of terrorists’:
Maajid Nawaz has written a reponse to The Guardian report in which he accuses Vikram Dodd of being in league with Islamists. You are smart enough to make up your own minds…
Islamist rebels ‘vow jihad on Somalia’s Puntland’:
Sheikh Mohamed Saiid Atom, who says his fighters are allied to the al Qaeda-inspired al Shabaab insurgents behind this month’s coordinated bomb attack on Uganda’s capital Kampala, urged local residents and businessmen to take up arms.
“We shall never stop fighting Puntland. We are part and parcel of al Shabaab, we are brothers united by Islamic sharia (law),” Sheikh Atom told reporters in the town of Galkayo.
Bangladesh Islamic parties face political ban:
Bangladesh banned religion-based politics after it gained independence from Pakistan in 1971, but an amendment to the country’s constitution in 1979 allowed Islamic parties to operate again.
Since then Bangladesh has seen the emergence of more than two dozen Islamist parties, some demanding the establishment of Islamic Shariah law in the predominantly Muslim country governed by liberal secular laws.
In a ruling released Wednesday, the Supreme Court struck down the 1979 amendment saying it contradicted secularism, one of Bangladesh’s four founding pillars.
Germany has announced plans for a hotline for Islamists who want to leave ‘the movement’:
Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière described the scheme as a “valuable preventative effort.” Fromm however warned against overly high expectations for the scheme. “We’ll have to wait and see if it gets a big response,” he said.
As Joshua Keating points out, a similar programme run for neo-Nazis has been largely ineffective:
Looks like some sort of political or publicity stunt.
thabet, 
Hitch, and 
bk, 
Abu Noor Al-Irlandee, and 1 other are discussing. 
Naved and
sick.