Sharia Law in Canada
 

You can't run, you can't hide


This is a shame. These people run to what they think is freedom and a new life, and now this....


Sidhe

If anyone is interested, here is a petition for an international campaign against setting up sharia law in Canada, drafted by Homa Arjomand, Coordinator of the International Campaign for the Defense of Women’s Rights In Iran :

Petition

Cultural relativism can lead to some very unusual and difficult consequences, but the law of the land should be the ultimate arbiter ... just as in the US you must get a civil divorce or annulment before you pursue one through your chosen religious authority.

I think I'm just going to give in and admit to being a hardcore, Radar-esque Islam apologist.

The article misses a few points about Shari'a. It's not just legal guidelines, it's everything. Shari'a includes how to pray, hygiene, and, yes, marriage/inheritance. It's the actions (sunnah) and sayings (hadith) of the prophet Muhammad. So it goes without saying that "But for Muslim women, the pressures to abide by the precepts of sharia are overwhelming. To reject sharia is, quite simply, to be a bad Muslim." The same goes with most religions; you're generally expected to follow the guidelines.

Further, it fails to note that Shari'a itself is more of a concept than anything. It's interpreted many different ways; I believe there are four main Sunni schools of fiqh and a few less Shi'ite ones, along with all the oddball terrorist types who could sort of be considered their own interpreters. Regardless of the precise numbers, lumping everything together under the broad umbrella of 'Shari'a' is directly parallel to lumping every politician in the history of humanity together, and saying that women in Canada are being pressured to follow politicians.

Ignoring the article's flaws, though, the women seem a little nutzo. It sounds like all Canada has done is say that two consenting adults can decide things based on Shari'a and the decision will be upheld. There's no obligation, just an alternative. Which, in my opinion, is pretty cool; it's true religious freedom.

It should also be noted that, as with anything, the "good" or "bad" of Islam is up to the practitioners. You can twist it, like you can twist the US legal system, or you can use it well and fairly, like you can use the US legal system. Some people argue that the limits on women set forth in the Qur'an are progressive and awesome, because they suggest a trend that should be followed; things were improved for them, and people should continue to build on those improvements. Other people argue that the Qur'an should be followed precisely, with the greater freedoms for women being as far as it should ever go.

A professor of mine once said that "Islam" is really made up of a bunch of often radically different 'islams', with no single one being the true Islam.

Hey! Just like Christianity! :D

*Bites inside of lip* yah.....The feminist in me feels my hackles rise when I hear or read the word Sharia ......but I have had some very interetsing conversations in recent years with a couple of islamic feminists and they have exposed to me some of my own instant prejudice and assumptions on sharia and Islam in general. My guess is that sharia in Canada will simply take the form of a divorce settlement, grievance hearing type thing. ...Given how specific each faith seems to be on such matters it stands to reason that a community might want a specific body to deal with them.

Now....I know that patriarchal systems carryw iththem the potential for abuse but.....I also think that the attitude of various Islamic schools of thought towards their sisters is one of the things that even righteous and forward thinking people can grasp onto as a reason to dislike Moslems or (mainly) Arabic cultures. I think we are all very willing to hear bad stuff about moslems ....this is such a beaut though.....because we get to be disdainful of moslems but under the aegis of womens rights.

Well, I have to say that I don't automatically discount this. Arab countries have a history of maltreating women, and it seems to me that the woman who talks about her arrival in Canada felt that she was escaping that kind of treatmen-- only to find that it followed her. She can't be the only one who feels that way.

I come down on the side of the petitioners; not for feminist reasons, but for reasons of individual freedom. The Arab world treats its women very badly, from sexual mutilation to murder. I have to support any woman who escapes from that situation into what she believes will be a better life.

Think--if she were happy in that situation, why would she leave? There's a thread that gets into why women stay with abusive men, and people applaud the women when they leave; but when these women leave an abusive culture, then we find "apologists" who give reasons why we shouldn't hold the culture responsible.

I'm not saying that the Muslim religion is BAD--but the way the Arab countries are ruled (by nutcase fundamentalist) is the reality, regardless of what the actual religion says. Just like christianity isn't BAD, but if we let the nutcase fundamentalists run the country, imagine what would happen. Bye-bye freedom, especially for women.

The point is, there are those women who don't want to be controlled by that law. They escaped their countries so that they wouldn't be. I'm not going to make allowances for the Arab world's treatment of women. It's just plain wrong, and if these women want to be free of it, I say more power to them!


Sidhe

Well, that's the point. The article doesn't really say that they're forced to use Shari'a instead of Canadian law, just that they have the choice. (Or, if it does, I didn't notice)

Also, doesn't most every country have a history of mistreating women? I know the United States does.

Re: sexual mutilation.

It comes from this open-to-intereptatation hadith:

<a href="http://answering-islam.org.uk/Index/C/circumcision.html">Some discussion on the subject.</a>

Have you seen any of the reports about that TV presenterin Saudi Arabia? ( I htink it was Saudi. It was either Saudi Arabia or Egypt) She was the nation's darling....a startlingly beautiful woman with her head modestly covered who presented a news/current affairs programme.

Her husband beat her very brutally, fracturing her face in several places and strangling her. Doctors were staggered that she survived the attack.

She decided to allow pictures of her beaten face to be shown in newspapers and on TV to publicise the unspoken problem of domestic abuse. The nation was outraged, the husband faced charges of attempted murder, which were reduced to charges of assault and battery.

He was sentenced ( if I recall aright) to a shortish spell in jail and 300 lashes.

What I found interesting though......is that under sharia law if this woman wishes to seek damages for her distress she can insist that her former husband give her financial recompense or....recieve a beating of equal severity to the one he inflicted upon her.......

I wonder what the chances of a wife in a small village, would have in recieving compensation. :confused:

History, not a present. The sins of the past are redeemed by the convictions of the present.

Are Muslim countries recognizing the need for racial and sexual equality and moving toward it, or are they becoming apologists for a misogynistic world-view on the basis that “our women want to live that way”? The only way to redeem the ugliness of inequality is by establishing and defending new principles.

Where that’s happening, it should be applauded. Where it is not, it should be decried.

-sm

quote:Book 41, Number 5251:

Narrated Umm Atiyyah al-Ansariyyah:

A woman used to perform circumcision in Medina. The Prophet (pbuh) said to her: Do not cut severely as that is better for a woman and more desirable for a husband.


And your point IS?
You DO realize that they're talking about Clitoridectomies , right?

Sidhe

SM:

Yeah, true enough. I honestly don't know a lot about the subject. In fact, I'm of the general opinion that the middle east is fucking insane, but that maybe if I looked closer I wouldn't feel that way. I'm generally trying to argue that people mis-associate problems with Islam simply because it's "from over there". This might prove to be too hard for me, though, in which case I'll just abandon my original goals and just claim small victories over semantic details.



Consider it in context, Sidhe. That was said around 600AD/CE and, moreover, not in English. Did you look at <a href="http://answering-islam.org.uk/Index/C/circumcision.html">the link</a>? Anything further on the subject will be parroting that, I think: the prophet might have said "it's optional for women" and definitely said "don't be abusive about it"; he said those things to a bunch of men who considered women to be often dishonorable and thusly readily-discarded property; since then, things generally haven't continued to improve.

I guess it's time for some nitpicky semantic details.

Don't forget trying to separate Arab customs from Islamic teachings. There are lots of Islamic societies all over the world that have different customs than the Arabs.:)

I worked at a Radio Shack for a while, and my boss during that time was Iranian. We got to understand each other pretty well.

He summed up the situation like this:

'Anybody with any sense has moved to America to get an education and make money. All that are left over there are crazy, fanatics, or both."

From the horses mouth.

And to add context. He treats his wife like a queen. He even bought her her own jewelry business.

Sounds like your old boss had the money, and the language skills to make a move to America possible.

I guess all the millions of cash poor Iranians are just too 'insane' to get their act together.

The point he was making was that, pre-911, there was a lot of opportunity for people to come here and get educated. The ones with money and power don't want to see change over there.

Half of the people I work with while I'm attending school are foreigners, and they are all either getting financial aid or scholarships of some sort.

Female circumcision comes in many degrees from complete removal of all external genitalia (inner labia, outer labia, clitoris...the lot) to taking a symbolic snip of labia.
What Mohammad was preaching (in that little excerpt) was to take as little as possible, to preserve the womans pleasure, yet still follow to tradition.

exactly how much of the labia and clitoris can be cut off of a conscious woman before it is considered abusive?

you forgot totally unanesthetized.

Don't they do the adolescent male circumcisions with only a mild contact anesthetic, or is that just bullshit via Alex Haley?

i don't know. i was just aware of the female version because it was a great topic of discussion when i was in saudi.

of course, while i was there i learned some great methods for showing my wife how much i value her. let's see, putting your sheep in the front of the truck but making your wife ride in the uncovered bed, that's a good one. but let's not forget the roving mutawa (sp) - the nice guys that beat women with sticks if they are showing too much skin on a public street. they were pretty cool.

i forgot to mention the best part. the british professor at the university in riyadh, explained how the bedouins take the female circumcision one step further. they also sew the vagina up except for an extremely small opening - just large enough to urinate. that way on the wedding night the women of the family wait outside the "bridal suite" and listen for the screaming as the groom tears his way through. if there is not enough screaming or blood left on the bed the marriage is anulled and she is cast out - because obviously she wasn't a virgin

These people need HBO or something... a gameboy even...

a photographer traveled with the bedouins a few years back to capture this shit on film and she had to use a manual camera, because the sound of auto focus scared them. i'm guessing that a gameboy would send them right into convulsions.

Yeah, from what I read, there's an old lady who goes around from village (Or whatever it is that nomads live in) to village. She's got a piece of stone, not sure what it is, but it's sharpened, and not necessarily clean. That's what the clitoridectomies are done with, and then she does the whole sewing up thing. The entire thing is done without any anesthesia; the girl is held down by several female relatives.

Also from what I've read, the whole reason for the operation is so that women cannot feel sexual pleasure at ALL. Since women are supposed to be "fallen," it's supposed that if they can't feel pleasure that they won't cheat on their husbands.

Of course, the information I got, I got from a book written by a high-ranking Saudi woman who'd escaped to America. She'd seen all this firsthand. So, other than her word, I have no proof of any of this.

She also said, though, that while some of the higher ranking and royal families in Saudi no longer approve of the operation, it's still extremely common among the lower classes.


Sidhe

I'll look this one up when I get home; moved on Tuesday, so no internet just yet. I've got a book (An Introduction to Islam, Frederick Denny) that, IIRC, has a fairly thorough explanation of the how and why of circumcision. Both sexes. I seem to recall that there isn't much/any anesthetic, though. Probably varies.

This is more thorough than anything I could come up with: http://www.islamfortoday.com/womensrightsbadawi.htm


But, in addition, there are a number of passages which directly refer to believers as being both male and female:

I seem to recall reading something of a creation story paraphrasing the old "everybody created equal" thing, but I'm running out of battery power, need to turn in my last assignment of the term, and have been known to misremember things. Poke around a bit; there are lots of articles arguing both sides of every issue that's been brought up in this thread, many of them written by far more reputable sources than I. Failing that, you could just read the Qur'an yourself or something. ;)

Well, just as extreme christians don't always follow what the bible says (like to be tolerant, for example), neither do the extreme muslims always follow what the koran says. Like all extremists, they twist it to fit what they want it to mean.


Sidhe