2014-12-01 19:24:47
An Egyptian preacher’s controversial remarks have hit the headlines this week after he issued a fatwa (religious edict) allowing a man to see his wife-to-be “while she is showering” before they marry. by Daniel Pipes (Dec 29, 2004, updated Nov 22, 2014)
The deepest differences between Muslims and Westerners concern not politics but sexuality.
Each side has a long history of looking at the other's sexual mores with a mixture of astonishment and disgust. (The term termagant sums up the surprising way Westerners saw Muslim women before the seventeenth century.)
Here are some examples of customs and social attitudes from the Muslim side of the divide (in reverse chronological order) that have me, for one, shaking my head. I have made sure only to include instances in this weblog entry that represent a general outlook, and not just a single person's idiosyncrasy, anecdotes that reflect the Shari'a or societal consensus, not deviants and outcasts.
Saudi groom divorces his bride on first seeing her face: An identified couple got married in Medina and only after the nuptials, when the photographer asked them to pose, did the man for the first time look at his wife's face. Then, the Daily Mail reports:
when the bride removed her veil and smiled for the camera, her new husband leapt to his feet in disgust. "You are not the girl I want to marry," he declared. "You are not the one I had imagined. I am sorry, but I divorce you." According to local daily Okaz, the bride immediately collapsed in a fit of tears as panicked wedding guests stepped in to try to resolve the dispute.Comment: Discussion of this incident has been unremittingly negative toward the groom, but surely the woman (who chose to hide herself until after the wedding) and the whole notion of marrying a couple without their both seeing each other are equally to blame. (November 17, 2014)
Afghan girls who live as boys: For various reasons – economic, familial, educational – some Afghan families cut their pre-pubescent daughters' hair short, give them male names, and send them temporarily out in the world, Jenny Nordberg reports for the Atlantic. (September 8, 2014)
Female jihadis run brothel for ISIS militiamen: Female jihadis, mostly of British origin, are running brothels of as many as 3,000 Iraqi women kidnapped and forced to service ISIS men. The Daily Mirror reports:
Sources suggest that members of the all-women al-Khanssaa Brigade in Raqqa, Syria, are running brothels to satisfy the fighters' desires. One said: "These women are using barbaric interpretations of the Islamic faith to justify their actions. They believe the militants can use these women as they please as they are non-Muslims. The Yazidi people are being ethnically cleansed, and their women are being subjected to the most brutal treatment. It is the British women who have risen to the top of the Islamic State's sharia police and now they are in charge of this operation. It is as bizarre as it is perverse."(September 10, 2014)
Temporary marriages in Iran to deal with pre-marital sex: A report from Iran's parliamentary research branch based on interviews with 142,000 students finds a lot of pre-marital sex underway: 80 percent of females have had it and 17 percent identify as homosexual. Things get interesting when the report offers a very Islamic solution, as paraphrased by FoxNews.com:
To get around societal boundaries that prohibit having a girlfriend or boyfriend, or being caught in public with someone of the opposite gender, the report suggests that young people utilize the Islamic Shia practice of a temporary marriage, or sigheh. … A sigheh is a temporary arrangement, with mutual consent, that can last anywhere from one meeting to years. According to Sharia Law, a Muslim man can have up to four legal wives, but up to 99 of the temporary marriages.(August 20, 2014)
Peeping Toms allowed if intention is to marry: In one of those fatwas that make everyone wonder what the Islamic establishment is thinking, an Egyptian Salafi named Usama al-Qawsi ruled live on Mehwar television that a man may surreptiously watch a woman "while she is showering" if he intends to marry her. To be precise, he said:
If you were really honest and wanted to marry that woman, and you were able to hide and watch her in secret, see the things that she wouldn't usually let you see before marrying her, then it is acceptable as long as your intentions are pure.Of course, this ruling runs quite contrary to Islamic teachings, which requires that unmarried women be modestly dressed and men to lower their gaze. (August 18, 2014)
"ISIS wants to impregnate Yazidi women and smash our blond bloodline: Fears grow for the 300 women kidnapped from Sinjar": According to London's Daily Mail,
Fears are growing for the 300 Yazidi women reportedly kidnapped by Islamic State fighters last week amid claims they would be used to bear children to break up the ancient sect's bloodline. The minority group is originally Aryan and has retained a fairer complexion, blonde hair and blue eyes by only marrying within the community. But in a furious bid to convert all non-Muslims, ISIS jihadists have vowed to impregnate the hostages.(August 13, 2014)
Family plans to honor kill daughter, 10, after her rape by a mullah: Rod Nordland of the New York Times tells the story datelined Kunduz, Afghanistan:
It was bad enough that the alleged rape took place in the sanctity of a mosque, and that the accused man was a mullah who invoked the familiar defense that it had been consensual sex. But the victim was only 10 years old. And there was more: The authorities said her family members openly planned to carry out an "honor killing" in the case — against the young girl. The mullah offered to marry his victim instead. This past week, the awful matter became even worse. On Tuesday, local policemen removed the girl from the shelter that had given her refuge and returned her to her family, despite complaints from women's activists that she was likely to be killed.As for the accused mullah, Mohammad Amin, he
was arrested and confessed to having sex with the girl after Quran recitation classes at the mosque on May 1, but claimed that he thought the girl was older and that she responded to his advances. The girl's own testimony, and medical evidence, supported a rape so violent that it caused a fistula, or a break in the wall between the vagina and rectum, according to the police and the official bill of indictment. She bled so profusely after the attack that she was at one point in danger of losing her life because of a delay in getting medical care.
Photographs of the girl that Dr. Sarwari took in the hospital clearly show a pre-pubescent child, and the doctor said the girl weighed only 40 pounds. Few Afghans have birth records, and many do not know their precise ages. But the girl's mother said she was 10, and a forensic examination in the hospital agreed, saying she had not yet started menstruating or developing secondary sexual characteristics.The case has had an impact in Kunduz, but not as Westerners might expect. Norland notes that "Most of the anger in Kunduz has been focused not on the mullah but on the women's activists and the shelter."
The head of the Women for Afghan Women shelter here where the girl took refuge, Dr. Hassina Sarwari, was at one point driven into hiding by death threats from the girl's family and other mullahs, who sought to play down the crime by arguing the girl was much older than 10. One militia commander sent Dr. Sarwari threatening texts and an ultimatum to return the girl to her family. The doctor said she now wanted to flee Afghanistan.
The head of the women's affairs office in Kunduz, Nederah Geyah, who actively campaigned to have the young girl protected from her family and the mullah prosecuted, resigned on May 21 and moved to another part of the country.As for the family's reaction, the girl's father came under tremendous pressure by his village to kill her because she had "brought shame" to them. This fits the general pattern in Afghanistan, where honor killing the raped woman is "often more important to the victim's family than vengeance against the attacker."
The girl's aunt told how her husband ordered her to sneak the girl out of the hospital and deliver her to the male relatives outside, who planned to execute her and dump her body in the river. Also,
In the hospital room, the doctor found the girl's mother holding her child's hand, and both were weeping. "My daughter, may dust and soil protect you now," Dr. Sarwari quoted the mother as saying. "We will make you a bed of dust and soil. We will send you to the cemetery where you will be safe."(July 19, 2014)
Saudi women bear their future guardians: Lubna Al-Khamis, a Saudi woman complains in the Saudi daily Al-Jazirah that "Only in the Kingdom: A Woman Gives Birth to Her Own Guardian." Excerpts from the article, dated March 3, 2014:
Image a woman who carries a baby in her womb for nine months, suffers exhausting labor pains, and then nourishes [her baby] with her tears and milk, caring for him through the nights as her best years go by. She teaches him to read and write and plants noble humane values in him, often spending her own savings just to make him smile... And when that [baby] reaches the age of 18, he suddenly becomes her guardian.
This happens to every woman who suffers the fate of being widowed. Then the 'guardianship' passes from her husband to her brother, and later to her son when he reaches the age of 18. When that happens, a woman is forbidden to leave the kingdom without [her son's] permission or to renew basic state documents, like a passport. Additionally, if her father is deceased, she cannot remarry without [her son's] blessing. She also cannot be employed in many fields without presenting a signed letter of approval from her son.(July 1, 2014)
Families hire bounty hunters to enforce arranged marriages: From a confused report from the BBC's Lucy Adams about the situation in Scotland on the eve of a UK law to criminalise forced marriage going into effect on June 16:
A record 83 honour-based violence cases were referred to Police Scotland in the past yearAn estimated 8,000 women in the UK are forced into marriage each year.Some family members have no need for bounty hunters because, "after six months, because there is a lack of support services, the victim goes back. They cannot cope with life. They have been in a golden cage and find that they don't know how to make breakfast or lunch."Bounty hunters sometimes bring the wayward girls back ("the only reason she was not killed was her family did not want blood on their hands") and sometimes have them executed ("We have cases where the family paid more than £100,000 to track someone down and kill them").(June 12, 2014)
Sudan court convicts woman for being gang-raped: An Ethiopian woman,18 and three months' pregnant, was looking for a house to buy in Omdurman, Sudan, when she was lured to an empty property and sexually attacked by three men who videoed the encounter and then posted it on social media. The woman was arrested, convicted of "indecent acts," fined 5,000 Sudanese pounds (US$880), sentenced to a month in jail (suspended because of her pregnancy), and faced deportation. She avoided charges of adultery and prostitution (with a possible death penalty by stoning) because she divorced. The three men admitted having sex with her were sentenced to 100 lashes for adultery; the two who distributed the video got 40 lashes. (February 21, 2014) May 6, 2014 update: A 25-year-old Indonesian widow, and her alleged sex partner, a married man, 40, were caught by eight males, one as young as 13, who gang-raped her, beat him, and threw raw sewage on them both. After this, the gang took the couple down to the local office of the Shari'a police, the Wilayatul Hisbah in Langsa, Aceh. The head of this police force, Ibrahim Latif, decided to have the couple caned "because they violated the religious bylaw on sexual relations." Their punishment: nine strokes in a public place. May 31, 2014 update: A girl, 15, was raped by 38 men in Ketereh, Malaysia (near Kota Bharu), including a father and two sons combination, then arrested by the police as part of their investigation.
Shaving a Muslim woman's pubic hair costs UK taxpayers £350K in legal bills: This one reflects more on the British life than Muslim one, and it's only barely to do with sex, but here goes:
The parents of retarded Muslim woman in her 30s, known only as "ED" in court documents, demanded in 2011 that, in accord with Islamic tradition, her pubic hair be removed. But the local council, which had looked after ED since 2008, argued that she lacked the mental capacity to consent to this procedure. In response, the parents applied to family court to have ED returned home. The counsel resisted.
The result was a multi-year legal battle to be tried at London's High Court in which the sides amassed 300 pages of expert testimony, 740 pages of witness statements, and much other evidence. Then, at the last minute, the parents dropped the case. The judge pronounced himself "utterly baffled" and decried the "astonishing sum of money" wasted on the process: £82,000 in legal costs for the parents, £130,000 for the official solicitor, appearing on ED's behalf, and £138,000 for the council – with the British taxpayer footing the entire £350,000 bill. (October 22, 2013)
13-year-old girl raped, buried alive in Pakistan: A girl on her way to seminary for Koran lessons in a village of Toba Tek Singh district, was abducted by two men who took her to a deserted place, raped her, and then, thinking she died during the assault, buried her in a shallow mud grave by the roadside, her father Siddique Mughal recounted. But, the girl regained consciousness and managed to dig out of the tomb. (October 28, 2013)
Asian worker speaks to a Saudi woman, gets beaten by her husband: A video (which can be seen here) from Saudi Arabia shows an Asian man slapped and hit in the face by a Saudi man who accuses him of the audacity to have talked to the Saudi's wife. As the Daily Mail explains:
The Saudi man then starts to repeatedly whip the Asian man with his belt. The victim falls to the floor crying out in pain, where he is kicked and whipped over and over. When he gets to his feet, the Saudi man appears to grab him by the throat and forces him up against the wall before continuing to beat him.(October 28, 2013)
Afghan lovers beheaded: The Shari'a has draconian rules concerning sex outside marriage, but they are rules. For zina (fornication) to be punished requires four men of good reputation to have watched the sexual act in flagrante delicto, not an easy thing to arrange, and if their accusation does not meet the required standard, they themselves are punished. The rules also prescribe different penalties for unmarried and married offenders, with the latter being more severe.
In practice, however, these unwieldy rules tend to be ignored and Muslim communities often savage anyone suspected of zina or even a microscopic move toward zina; honor killings are a prime example of this pattern, with girls being murdered for the slightest flirtation. Another sort of example comes from the province of Helmand in southern Afghanistan, concerning a man and woman, both in their 20s. The Daily Telegraph (London) reports:
The elder brother of the male victim …told officers the woman had run away with him recently and was living in their family home. On Monday, [Oct. 21,] 10 men broke into the house near the provincial capital Lashkar Gah and kidnapped the pair, police official Mohammad Ismail Hotak told the AFP news agency. "On Tuesday, local residents reported that there were two bodies in the graveyard. We went there and found them. Both were beheaded. From our investigations, we have found that the two had a love affair. We believe the family and relatives of the girl are behind the killing."Comment: This is not Islam or even Islamism but customs built upon an Islamic base, what is called Islamicate. (October 23, 2013)
Muslim child marriages in Great Britain: Reporting on a ITV show, "Forced to Marry," Soeren Kern provides information on "Britain's Underage Muslim Marriage Epidemic." The documentary, which has two reporters posing as mother and brother of an unwilling 14-year-old girl they want to marry an older man in a nikah ceremony, caught 18 of the country's leading imams agreeing to break British law and oversee the nuptials. (The minimum legal age for marriage in Britain is 16.)
The imams who agreed to marry the girl openly mocked the legitimacy of British law, reflecting the rise of a parallel Islamic legal system in Britain. One of the Muslim clerics who agreed to perform the underage marriage is Mohammed Shahid Akhtar, the imam of the Central Jamia Masjid Ghamkol Sharif Mosque in Birmingham, the second-largest mosque in Britain with a capacity of more than 5,000 worshippers.On being informed that the girl did not want to get married, Akhtar replied: "She's 14. By Sharia, grace of God, she's legal to get married. Obviously Islam has made it easy for us. There is nothing against that. We're doing it because it's okay through Islam. You've got the kaffirs [non-believers], the law, the English people that ... you know, you can't get married twice but, by the grace of God, we can get married four times."
Another cleric who agreed to marry the 14 year old girl is Mufti Shams al-Huda al-Misbahi, who preaches at the Jamia Masjid Kanzul Iman Mosque in Heckmondwike, a town near Leeds in north-central England. When the undercover reporter, posing as the brother of the girl to be married, says, "She's not willing now, but she will be," Misbahi responds: "If you make her willing, she will be willing." He is then filmed saying that he would perform the marriage without providing an official marriage certificate valid under British law. "We'll make everything okay by Islam. We'll write down and put it in our records." Misbahi goes on to tell the undercover reporters that the girl will be able to live with her new husband after the ceremony. Misbahi is a senior Muslim cleric who has worked with the West Yorkshire Police as an advisor on community cohesion, a British concept that refers to the integration of Muslim immigrants within a multicultural society. Before being caught on camera advocating forced marriage, Misbahi had publicly condemned the practice for many years.And so on and on. (October 15, 2013)
Kuwait government to ban foreign homosexuals: Yousouf Mindkar, director of public health at the Kuwaiti health ministry, told the newspaper Al-Rai that "Health centres conduct routine medical checks to assess the health of the expatriates when they come into the GCC countries. However, we will take stricter measures that will help us detect gays who will be then barred from entering Kuwait or any of the GCC member states." The Gulf Cooperation Council countries are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. (October 7, 2013)
Saudi sheikh: Women's ovaries and pelvis damaged if they drive: Salah al-Luhaydan, a Saudi sheikh, has warned against women driving by claiming that this would damage their bodies and cause "disorders of varying degrees" among their children. This comments are hardly unique: in 2011, a Saudi report to the Majlis al-Ifta al-A'la found that women driving would "provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce" among male and female Saudis. More: Within ten years of ending the driving ban, there would be "no more virgins" left in the kingdom. (September 28, 2013)
Iranian parliament passes bill allowing men to marry 13-year-old adopted daughters: At present, it's illegal for adoptive fathers to marry their daughters, but that will change if the Guardian Council accepts legislation that permits a man to marry his adopted daughter as young as 13 years. According to the Iranian news website Tabnak, 42,000 children aged between 10 and 14 were married in 2010.
Shadi Sadr, a lawyer with the London-based "Justice for Iran," argues that "It's not part of the Iranian culture to marry your adopted child. … this bill is legalising paedophilia and is endangering our children and normalising this crime in our culture. You should not be able to marry your adopted children, full stop. If a father marries his adopted daughter who is a minor and has sex, that's rape. … With this bill, you can be a paedophile and get your bait in the pretext of adopting children."
The reformist newspaper, Shargh, warned: "How can someone be looking after you and at the same time be your husband?" It quoted Shiva Dolatabadi, head of Iran's society for protecting children's rights, warning: "You cannot open a way in which the role of a father or a mother can be mixed with that of an spouse. Children can't be safe in such a family." (September 26, 2013)
How many women per man in paradise? The number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin is a favored symbol of medieval Christian religious scholasticism (whether accurate or not is another matter), that is, the rigorous application of logic to theological tenets. Other religions also contain this strain too, such as pilpul in Judaism or kalam in Islam.
But Islam differs from the other monotheistic faiths in its extreme focus on sexual fantasies about the afterlife.
For example, in a lecture posted on March 23, 2013, Muhammad Ali Shanqiti, a Mauritanian born in 1970, with two higher degrees from New York's Columbia University, now serving as imam of Al-Ahmadi Mosque in Jeddah, figured out the number of women a Muslim man can enjoy in paradise. MEMRI located, translated, and transcribed his insights. Here is the heart of his lengthy reasoning:
If you get married in this world, then [in Paradise], you get your wife from this world, along with 70 black-eyed virgins with whom you are allowed to have sex, and each of these 70 virgins comes with 70 servant girls. … Now, let's assume that you are married to four wives, each of whom comes with 70 black-eyed virgins, and each virgin comes with 70 servant girls.Do the math: That's (70+70 x 70) x 4 + 4 = 19,884 women per virtuous Muslim man. (MEMRI calculates a mere 19,604 per virtuous Muslim man.) Half of these women, incidentally, will be virgins. (September 20, 2013)
Tunisian women offer themselves as "sex jihadis" to Syrian rebels, return pregnant: It sounds like something out of someone's overheated imagination but the Tunisian government (itself Islamist) has verified the news: Interior Minister Lotfi ben Jeddou revealed to the National Constituent Assembly that, responding to so-called sexual fatwas, some Tunisian women went to Syria specifically to have sex where each one is "having sexual relations with 20, 30, 100" fighters. Then, "After the sexual liaisons they have there in the name of jihad al-nikah [Arabic: jihad marriage] they come home pregnant." Ben Jeddou did not say how many women have done this; France 24 estimated the number in the hundreds. (September 20, 2013) Sep. 22, 2013 update: Steven Plaut responded to the above news with some biting wit:
Now I know exactly what you are thinking when you read this, and that is that this is a wonderful opportunity for far-Leftist anti-Israel Jews to join in these delegations of solidarity with the jihadi fighters in Syria. I mean, after all, why should anti-Semitic Jews be excluded from this Jihad al-Nikah??? SO I wanted to suggest that you take a moment and send an email to a group of radical anti-Israel Jewish women activists and suggest to them that they join in one of these solidarity delegations.
Heck, I know I would be willing to chip in to cover their travel costs. Here they have a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate their opposition to colonialism and Zionism and show their embrace for the jihad al-nikah. … And since we certainly do not want to appear to be discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, I see no reason why male homosexual anti-Israel radicals cannot also be invited to join in these delegations."Yemeni child bride, eight, dies of internal injuries on first night of forced marriage to groom five times her age": The Daily Mail headline tells the basics about a girl named Rawan in Hardh, near Saudi Arabia. (September 9, 2013)
Re-virginising cream for sale in Pakistan's pharmacies: Halima Mansour of the Express Tribune reports on and bemoans the ubiquity of various ointments with names such as "B-Virgin," "18 Again Vaginal Shrink Cream," and "Virgin Cream" that promise to restore a woman's virginity. (August 20, 2013)
Some of the virginity-inducing creams.
Jailed for being raped: The government of Dubai has sentenced Marte Deborah Dalelv, 24, a Norwegian woman on a business trip in Dubai who reported her rape to police, to 16 months in prison. She was charged with having extramarital sex, drinking alcohol, and perjury. The BBC recounts: Dalelv was out with colleagues in the evening of March 6, 2013, when the rape took place.
Marte Deborah Dalelv, 24, a Norwegian businesswoman.
She reported it to the police, who proceeded to confiscate her passport and seize her money. She was charged four days later on three counts, including having sex outside marriage. Her alleged attacker, she said, received a 13-month sentence for extra-marital sex and alcohol consumption. This sentence reflects the fact that both Islamic and UAE law require either a confession or the testimony of four adult male witnesses of good standing who personally witnessed the crime in fragrante delicto. (July 20, 2013) Jan. 21, 2014 update: Dubai has done it again, charging an unnamed 24-year-old Austrian female tourist with illegal sex; she says she was raped in a car on Dec. 2 by the son of a policeman. The Austrian Times recounts:
She had been in the region with friends on holiday and accepted an offer by the man to drive her home. But once they had walked into an underground car park underneath a five-star hotel in Yemen he had raped her, she claims. The man then tried to drive the woman away from the hotel but she managed to jump out of the car screaming for help – where other guests helped her and the police were called. … According to Austrian media the man initially claimed that the woman had offered him sex because she was drunk, and then later claimed that she was a prostitute who had demanded money for sex – something she also denies.Oh, the Austrian reports a policeman told her she could avoid the charges by marrying the man she accused of the rape.The Times notes that in both of these cases, the European women brought their complaints to the same police station in the in Bur area of Dubai. Feb. 3, 2014 update: More on the Austrian woman, Marie, now released by Dubai's police and back in Austria after the intervention by Austria's foreign minister, Sebastian Kurz:
It was terrible. I never knew what was going on, they told me nothing when I said I'd been raped, instead everything was taken away form me and I was locked up. Nobody kept me informed about my situation. I was treated worse than a dog. Nobody spoke to me properly. It was horrendous. I just thought it would be like in Europe, counselling, maybe tests. But now I know better. Dubai is very different. … I will never travel to an Arab land again.Her lawyer Mohammad al Redha, says the alleged rapist no longer faces rape charges, but could face a fine for fornication.
Marry me, marry my friends too: Here's an off-beat story from the kingdom about a demanding bride:
A Saudi teacher has reportedly told the man who wanted to marry her that she had only one condition before accepting his proposal: He must marry her two friends at the school at the same time. The would-be groom was shocked by her unexpected demand, but came under strong pressure from relatives and friends who eventually persuaded him to accept to marry the three women, Saudi daily Al Youm reported. Under the deal, the bridegroom rented three apartments in the same building and lodged each of his brides in her own flat.(April 21, 2013)
Eloping Somalis: During al-Shabaab's domination of Somalia, eloping was punishable by whipping or even death by stoning. But as their bizarre form of Islam has retreated, in the words of Abdi Guled of the Associated Press, "elopement once again is popular among young Somali couples, many of whom have dramatic stories of defying their families to follow their hearts and marry." Abdi tells the story of one couple:
Outside a dilapidated two-story building, Abdi Ali says goodbye to his veiled girlfriend Anisa and they take two separate streets to avoid attention. Soon they're aboard a minibus heading outside Mogadishu, pretending they don't know each other. After more than two hours of travel, they arrive at Walaweyn, a run-down town 90 kilometers (56 miles) north of Mogadishu, and are led inside a shanty by a man running a string of Arab worry beads through his fingers. Another man and woman walk out; they have just been married. Abdi Ali, who is 25, and his 23-year-old girlfriend will be next. …In the case of Ali and Anisa, they had dated in secret for two years. Anisa, who refused to give her full name for fear of family retribution, said they decided to elope after her parents refused her request to marry Ali, intending her to marry a cousin in America. "They tried to turn down my choice, and I had to do the same against their will," said Anisa, her soft voice and shy demeanor belying her determination. "You can't be engaged with just a stranger you have been forced to marry. We are living a civilized world." Anisa, with hennaed hands and bangle bracelets, is studying business at a Mogadishu university. She looks fondly at Ali, a lanky man with wispy hair who works as a tailor.
A Muslim religious figure sits on the left, Abdi Ali in the center, and Anisa on the right during a simple marriage ceremony on March 13, 2013, in Walaweyn, Somalia.
Getting married does not change their living arrangements, however:
they will continue to keep their relationship secret, at least for now. Anisa will live with her parents and have clandestine meetings with Ali. Now that they have had the certificate, the two are looking forward to consummating their marriage when they can find time alone together. "Secret meetings, phone calls and anonymity will dictate our relationship," said Ali. "But we shall finally, officially, be married." … Then the newlyweds board a minivan heading back to Mogadishu, sitting separately, as if they don't know each other.Elopements are a good business in Walaweyn, a cow town.
Walaweyn's elopement activity is one of the most visible signs that the tight grip that Islamic militiamen once held here has loosened. After the al-Shabab rebels left in October 2012, elopement became an industry in this town. There are several eloping rooms, including some in buildings that once housed al-Shabab extremists. Guides welcome new arrivals to the town, asking them if they want to elope.
Elopements here have soared, says Sheikh Mohamed Salad, an Islamic cleric who marries eloping couples. "Already this year we married hundreds of people, unlike last year when you could barely receive ten or fewer a month," he said.(April 17, 2013)
Cover baby girls in burqas: Abdullah Daoud, a Saudi religious figure, wants parents to cover female babies in burqas to protect them from sexual exploitation. To argue his case, Daoud claims that sexual molestation of babies takes place in Saudi Arabia, without providing specifics. (February 3, 2013)
Fayhan al-Ghamdi on a television show about Islam.
Saudi father pays "blood money" to mother for raping and killing their 5-year-old daughter: Fayhan al-Gamdi is a well-known Saudi religious figure and frequent guest on Islamic television shows (click here for an example: al-Ghamdi is sitting on the right side). Apparently worried that his little daughter Lama was not a virgin, he decided to take matters into his own hands, as a news report elaborates:
[Lama] Al Ghamdi was admitted to hospital on December 25, 2011 with multiple injuries, including a crushed skull, broken ribs and left arm, extensive bruising and burns. … Randa Al Kaleeb, a social worker from the hospital where Lama was admitted, said the girl's back was broken and that she had been raped "everywhere." … According to the victim's mother, hospital staff told her that her "child's rectum had been torn open and the abuser had attempted to burn it closed."Fayhan confessed to having used cables and a cane to inflict the injuries. Lama died ten months later, on Oct. 22, 2012.
The late Lama al-Ghamdi, 5.
Then, based on a Saudi law that a father cannot be executed for murdering his children, plus the custom that a father effectively owns his children, a judge ruled that the prosecution could only seek as Fayhan's punishment "blood money [to be paid to Lama's mother] and the time the defendant had served in prison since Lama's death." Blood money refers to the ancient Arabian practice of diya, absorbed into Islam (see Koran 5:45): it means paying the next of kin in compensation for murder. Feb. 4, 2013 update: Lama's mother has appealed the negligible sentence. Also, the Saudi Islamic Affairs Ministry has said that Ghamdi is not officially sanctioned by it as a preacher. One official is quoted illogically saying that "He had committed a heinous crime and he cannot be a preacher." Marrying Syrian refugee women: L. Barkan of MEMRI uncovers the "lust jihad" whereby female Syrian refugees get wed via something called "protection marriage" (sutra in Arabic). This
involves Arab Muslim men marrying female Syrian refugees, often girls aged 12-16, under the pretext of saving them from the harsh living conditions in the refugee camps, protecting their honor, and assisting the Syrian revolution. According to reports, the girls' families are often willing to marry them off for a very low bride-price in order to spare them life in the camps while securing some income for the family's subsistence. Media reports indicate that these cases exist in Jordan, Turkey, Libya and other countries, and that Muslim men from across the Arab world travel to the countries neighboring Syria in search of a young refugee bride. Some reports claim that certain Muslim clerics encourage this practice, calling it "a national duty," and are even taking part in it themselves.
The Arab media's recent exposure of this phenomenon has triggered a wave of outrage among Syrians and other Arabs, and activists have launched a campaign against it, including on Facebook. According to the activists, these marriages constitute an exploitation of the refugees in the camps, especially of young girls. They have reported cases of girls marrying elderly men, marriages leading to rape and prostitution, and men from different Arab countries bargaining for Syrian women on the internet.(November 12, 2012) Mar. 31, 2013 update: For more on this phenomenon, see "Jihadis' Exploitation of Muslim Girls" by Khaled Abu Toameh.
Islamic shrine in Indonesia hosts orgiastic sex: The shrine of Gunung Kemukus on a hilltop in central Java every year hosts an intermittent orgy where men and women have adulterous sex in order to improve their business. Aubrey Belford reports in "The Swingers' Guide to Islam" about Sarimah, a thickset, 63-year-old widowed grandmother, who lives in Solo, about an hour away:
Sarimah waits for a sex partner for the evening.
Sarimah arrives at dusk, ascending a path of stone steps that passes under a scattered canopy of trees in Java's hyper-real green, to the single grave believed to hold the legendary prince Pangeran Samodro and his stepmother, Nyai Ontrowulan. In the cramped room, Sarimah drops aromatic leaves in a brazier and moves over to the grave, sprinkling it with flowers. She kneels down, raises her hands in supplication and mutters to herself surahs from the holy Quran.
Sarimah gets up, and plants herself by the yellow stucco wall by the shrine's entrance, and waits to complete the next part of the ritual. It's just before maghrib, the fourth of the five daily prayers required of all Muslims. It's time to find a stranger — and have sex with them. Like the of thousands of pilgrims that have turned up this night to Gunung Kemukus, Sarimah is here to seek her fortune. According to local belief, the ritual here can guarantee success in business, usually for those at or near the bottom of the ladder – bus drivers, rice farmers, market stall traders and the like. Pilgrims mostly come from Indonesia's Javanese-speaking core, but some travel days across the massive archipelago to get here.The ritual needs to be done right, Belford explains:
First, prayers and offerings must be made at the grave of Pangeran Samodro and Nyai Ontrowulan. At some stage, pilgrims must wash themselves at either one or two of the sacred springs on the hill. Then they must find a sex partner who meets two conditions. First, your mate for the night must be of the opposite sex; and second, they cannot be your spouse. Many people believe the ritual only works if you return at seven consecutive, 35-day intervals.The ritual includes much paid sex: Keontjoro Soeparno, a social psychologist at Gadjah Mada University, reckons that
about half of the women who show up are commercial sex workers. Another 25 percent are "part-timers," people like Sarimah who carry out the ritual but will accept money if it's on offer. … Since the 1998 fall of the Suharto regime, religiously-minded authorities have cracked down on many legal red-light districts. Gunung Kemukus, on the other hand, has come to be seen as a safe place.The government profits from the sex and so protects it:
When word got out recently that a radical vigilante group, the Islamic Defenders Front, was going to conduct a raid from Solo, the police showed up in force to protect the hill. The shrine is too valuable to shut down, he says. "This is tourism. Every component, every element, every layer of society gets something out of tourism."Attitudes vary among the pilgrims:
Some people arrive with the blessing of their spouses; others do it secretly. For some, paying for sex invalidates the ritual; for others, it's just a shortcut. Everyone has a different idea of just how Islamic the whole thing is.Back to Sarimah:
Each time she comes here, she finds a new man by about midnight. Often, the men will hand her money afterwards. She doesn't ask for it upfront, or haggle over the price – sometimes up to 200,000 rupiah, or about A$20 – but she accepts it gladly, she says, even though accepting money might detract a little from the ritual's spiritual power. At about 2am she heads home after bathing at one of the springs, bringing the water home in a plastic bottle to sprinkle over her stall, which buys her about three weeks of good business.Sarimah had a successful evening:
"I just finished!" she exclaims gleefully. It turns out Sarimah had already found herself a partner, Wagiyo, a rice farmer from Purwodadi, not so far away, who estimates he's in his mid-sixties. Wagiyo isn't very keen to meet at first, but he also seems a little smitten and, after some goading from Sarimah, he comes and sits down to talk.
Sarimah and her partner for the evening, Wagiyo.
He opens up fairly quickly. Wagiyo says this is his first visit to Gunung Kemukus. His wife died in 2007, and his joint business with family and friends selling rice and beans was flailing. "I heard from a friend that if you came here you'd get your fortune, so I thought I'd try it out," he says.
Wagiyo was approached by two younger women who offered themselves in exchange for money before he spotted Sarimah. … The two went together to one of the small rooms for rent on the hill. Afterwards, Wagiyo slipped Sarimah 100,000 rupiah and bought her a cup of tea. He asked her to come back home and live with him on his farm.
Sarimah's not so sure about this. In a moment when Wagiyo isn't paying attention, she says she doubts his wife is really dead, and, miming her own throat being slit, says she's afraid of the fracas that would take place if the two ever met. Whether the two will meet again or not seems to be an open question. Since he seems taken with Sarimah, I ask Wagiyo if he'll be back in 35 days. "Insha'Allah."(October 11, 2012) May 15, 2014 update: Rebecca Henschke provides a similar report, even quoting the same professor, "In Muslim Indonesia, throngs of people are seeking salvation at a shrine to anonymous sex," about Gunung Kemukus for Public Radio International.
Two British imams agree to marry girl, 12: The Sunday Times ran a sting and got two mosque leaders (Mohamed Kassamali of the Husaini Islamic Centre in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, and Abdul Haque of the Shoreditch Mosque, East London) to officiate at a wedding with a girl not yet through puberty. (September 10, 2012)
Child brides in the West: Girls as young as 11 and 9 are fairly often married off to older men in London in Shari'a courts, reports the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation, as reported by the Islington Tribune. Dianna Nammi, director of IKWRO, explains more: although the girls are not legally married according to British law,
They are still expected to carry out their wifely duties, though, and that includes sleeping with their husband. They have to cook for them, wash their clothes, everything. They are still attending schools in Islington, struggling to do their primary school homework, and at the same time being practically raped by a middle-aged man regularly and being abused by their families. So they are a wife, but in a primary school uniform. The reason it doesn't get out is because they are too terrified to speak out, and also the control their families have over them is impossible to imagine if you're not going through it. The way it is covered up is so precise, almost unspeakable."(January 27, 2012)
Afghan father says kill both young lovers: Halima Mohammedi and, Rafi Mohammed of Heart, both 17, met inside an ice cream factory and were caught riding in a car, presumably alone, were pulled out, interrogated, and nearly executed vigilante-style as adulterers. When the police rescued the couple, angering a mob of several hundred, it proceeded to riot for hours, setting fire to police cars and storming a police station, leaving one man dead and the lovers confined to separate wings of a juvenile prison. Jack Healy takes it from here in the New York Times:
Ms. Mohammedi's uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in Iran, sorrowfully concurred. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter. Blood, he said, was perhaps the only way out. "What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them," said the father, Kher Mohammed.In contrast,
the provincial council decided that Mr. Mohammed and Ms. Mohammedi deserved the government's protection because neither was engaged, and because each said they wanted to get married. "They are not criminals, even if they have committed sexual activities," said Abdul Zahir, the council's leader. But so far, their words have not freed either of the teenagers or lent them any long-term security. …
They now spend the days at opposite ends of the same juvenile jail, out of each other's sight. Mr. Mohammed nurses the wounds still visible in his swollen face and blood-laced eyes, and Ms. Mohammedi has been going to classes and learning to tailor clothes. Both say they want to be together, but there are complications. Family members of the man killed in the riot sent word to Ms. Mohammedi that she bears the blame for his death. But they offered her an out: Marry one of their other sons, and her debt would be paid.(July 30, 2011)
Israeli women cavorting on the beach.
Muslim men desiring Jewish women on Israeli beaches: From the early days of Zionism, the sexual freedom of Jewish women has disturbed and attracted the Muslim Palestinians living near them. One response has been for Hebrew-speaking Muslims to pretend they are Jews, especially on the beaches of Israel where the Israeli women's assets are particularly evident. So widespread has this deceit become that a Jewish group has come into existence to fight back. "The Organization for Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land," known as Lehava, has started a program "defending the daughters of Israel" by handing out leaflets on beaches in Ashdod, Ashkelon, Bat Yam, Caesarea and Eilat, suggesting they avoid the charms of Muslim men. Benzi Gopstein of Lehava explains:
Last year we discovered that there are many gentiles arriving at the beaches, but not in search of the sun or water. Due to the multiple complaints, we decided to promote a campaign at the start of the bathing season this year in order to prevent situations in which girls discover that the "Yossi" they are dating is actually "Yusuf". … We turn to the girls with a plea: "There are enough good Jewish men you can go out with."Comment: Israeli beaches offer a miniature example of the sexual tensions Muslim men experience. Calling Muslim females "dull dates," ignoring families and culture, they chase non-Muslim women. (July 17, 2011)
Campaign for polygamy in Jordan: David E. Miller reports in the Jerusalem Post on a new Jordanian organization, the Association to Advocate Polygamy, founded by Muhammad Hajaya, an agricultural engineer with three wives. It tackles the spinsterhood problem by agitating against dowries and raising money to pay for weddings. Government statistics show that 87,000 Jordanian women 30 years old and over are unmarried. (July 9, 2011)
Iranian authorities endorse gang rapes: In Khomeinishahr, near Isfahan, as a private party of 14 adults took place outside on May 24, the BBC reports, late in the evening
a gang of more than a dozen men armed with long knives entered the garden, locked some men in a room and tied others to trees. Female guests - including one said to have been heavily pregnant - were taken to an adjacent property and raped. One guest used a hidden mobile phone to call 110, the police emergency hotline. Most of the attackers had fled by the time officers arrived, reports said, but four were later arrested.
In the medium-sized town, word of the rapes spread like wildfire. … With people angered by this silence and fearful about the security of local women, a huge protest was organised outside the courthouse via text messages. Yet the comments then made by state officials were to provoke even greater controversy.Town leaders proceeded to blame the victims:
Musa Salemi, the imam of Khomeinishahr, said in his Friday sermon that "Those who were raped were not praiseworthy. Only two out of the 14 were related. They had come to our town to party and provoked the others [the rapists] by their wine drinking and dancing."Hossein Yardoosti, a colonel in the Revolutionary Guards and police commander of Khomeinishahr, added: "I believe the raped women's families are to blame, because if they had proper clothing and if the sound of their music was not so loud, the rapist would not have imagined it as a depraved get-together." Reports indicated he might bring legal action against the rape victims for their behaviour.(June 15, 2011)
$15,000 Reward for Men Who Marry Second Wife over 40: A Kuwaiti member of parliament, Faysal al-Duwaysan, intends to propose a law, reports Khabarni on June 11, 2011 (and made available by TranslatingJihad.com today) "which would grant a reward of up to $15,000 to the Kuwaiti man who marries a second wife. This would carry with it the stipulation that the women be over 40, widowed, or divorced." He explained that
This is the best solution to curb the "old maid" problem, and eliminate many of the societal problems which began to appear in society as a result of the aggravation of this phenomenon. The high rates [of "old maids"] make it imperative on everybody—including governmental and even non-governmental institutions—to move to confront the phenomenon which has become a threat. Especially since the numbers indicate there are tens of thousands of unmarried women, alongside a comparable number of men who resort to taking a non-Kuwaiti woman as a second wife. This indicates that marriage to foreign women is the most serious factor in the spread of the "old maid" phenomenon.(June 14, 2011)
Muslim mothers in India honor kill daughters: The usual honor killing pattern has males killing females, but not always. I maintain a weblog on "'Honor Killings' of Muslim Males in the West" and now here are three women who colluded to murder two brides:
Two Muslim mothers in India were arrested and accused of killing their daughters for dishonoring their families for running off with Hindu men, authorities said. Newlyweds Zahida, 19, and Husna, 26, who were neighbors, were strangled on Wednesday night when they returned home after marrying men their mothers didn't approve of, cops said. The mothers allegedly helped each other choke their daughters. "We killed them because they brought shame to our community," Khatun, one of the mothers who uses one name, told the Indian Express newspaper after her arrest on Friday. "How could they elope with Hindus? They deserved to die. We have no remorse," she said. A third woman who allegedly helped the mothers was on the run, the Express reported.(May 15, 2011)
Camp for "effeminate" schoolboys in Malaysia: The department of state education in the Malaysian state of Terengganu sent 57 schoolboys ages 13 to 17 with "effeminate tendencies" to a four-day camp that included religious lectures, visiting local mosques, and aerobics workouts. The goal? To make their behavior more masculine, reports Reuters. (April 21, 2011)
Females thrown into the sea: Boats making the perilous passage from North Africa to Europe are by definition dangerous for all on board, but especially so for the women. Le Figaro today quotes a Tunisian, Tarek, 20, about one voyage that began in mid-March in Kairouan: "Nous étions entassés à 150 dans un bateau prévu pour 60. Au cours du trajet pour Lampedusa, douze filles ont été jetées à la mer." In English: "We were packed in, 150 in a boat meant for 60. During the trip to Lampedusa [an Italian island], twelve girls were thrown into the sea." Comment: This incident gives gruesome meaning to "women and children first." (April 4, 2011)
Illegitimate babies murdered in Pakistan: The Edhi Foundation conservatively estimates that more than 1,000 infants—most of them girls—were killed or abandoned to die in Pakistani cities in 2010. Hasan Mansoor of Agence France-Presse explains why: "In the conservative Muslim nation, where the birth of children outside of marriage is condemned and adultery is a crime punishable by death under strict interpretations of Islamic law, infanticide is a crime on the rise." He also notes that crimes of infanticide are rarely prosecuted and quotes a lawyer: "The majority of police stations do not register cases of infanticide, let alone launch investigations into them." (January 17, 2011)
Saudi women sue their male guardians: As a 2008 Human Rights Watch report put it, women in Saudi Arabia are treated as "perpetual minors," kept under the thumb throughout their lives by one or other male guardian – grandfather, father, brother, cousin, husband, son, or even grandson. This means that women of all ages must usually obtain permission from the guardian (known as wali al-amr) to study, work, travel, marry, or undergo certain medical procedures.
But lately, Maggie Michael of the Associated Press writes, women are suing for their rights:
Year after year, the 42-year-old Saudi surgeon remains single, against her will. Her father keeps turning down marriage proposals, and her hefty salary keeps going directly to his bank account. The surgeon in the holy city of Medina knows her father, also her male guardian, is violating Islamic law by forcibly keeping her single, a practice known as adhl. So she has sued him in court, with questionable success.
Adhl cases reflect the many challenges facing single women in Saudi Arabia. But what has changed is that more women are now coming forward with their cases to the media and the law. Dozens of women have challenged their guardians in court over adhl, and one has even set up a Facebook group for victims of the practice. …Comment: With enough will, even a custom so deeply entrenched as the Saudi wali al-amr can be changed. (November 27, 2010)
"Pakistan media gripped by man marrying twice in one day": A Pakistani man, a herbal medicine practitioner, has married in a day's time the woman his family picked out for him and also the woman he's in love with, captivating the country in the process to the point that television stations provided live coverage of Azhar Haidri's two weddings.
At first he refused to marry the woman selected by his family since childhood because he loved someone else. … Mr Haidri's love for 21-year-old Rumana Aslam - ahead of 28-year-old Humaira Qasim - at one point threatened to split his family apart. "I gave this offer that I will marry both of them," Mr Haidri, 23, told the Associated Press ahead of his first marriage to Ms Qasim on Sunday in the central Pakistani city of Multan. "Both the girls agreed."(October 18, 2010)
Afghan girls dressed as boys to attend school: In a large-scale version of Yentl, families disguise their girl children as boys so that they can get educated, reports Jenny Nordberg for the New York Times.
There are no statistics about how many Afghan girls masquerade as boys. But when asked, Afghans of several generations can often tell a story of a female relative, friend, neighbor or co-worker who grew up disguised as a boy. To those who know, these children are often referred to as neither "daughter" nor "son" in conversation, but as bacha posh, which literally means "dressed up as a boy" in Dari.
Through dozens of interviews conducted over several months, where many people wanted to remain anonymous or to use only first names for fear of exposing their families, it was possible to trace a practice that has remained mostly obscured to outsiders. Yet it cuts across class, education, ethnicity and geography, and has endured even through Afghanistan's many wars and governments.
Afghan families have many reasons for pretending their girls are boys, including economic need, social pressure to have sons, and in some cases, a superstition that doing so can lead to the birth of a real boy. Lacking a son, the parents decide to make one up, usually by cutting the hair of a daughter and dressing her in typical Afghan men's clothing. There are no specific legal or religious proscriptions against the practice. In most cases, a return to womanhood takes place when the child enters puberty. The parents almost always make that decision.(September 20, 2010)
Saudi women cash in on ban on bachelors: In Saudi Arabia, entrance to shopping malls, gated amusement parks, and other family destinations is restricted to married couples or families; single men cannot enter. To enforce this, the religious police (mutaween) keep a lookout for single males or unmarried couples, punishing infractors.
Diana Al-Jassem reports in the Arab News that enterprising women charging young men to pretend to be their wives so they can get access. The going rate is between SR10 and SR50 (US$3 to $13), depending on time and place. The recent summer and Eid holidays saw a particular surge in women generating money in this way. (September 19, 2010)
"Gang tried to sell girls' virginity to wealthy Arabs for £150,000": Charlotte Gill and David Wilkes of the Daily Mail report how three women and a man offered girls as young as thirteen for sexual services in London.
One of the women had arrived at the Jumeirah Carlton Hotel in Knightsbridge, central London, in a silver BMW to offer the gang's services in a handwritten letter to the owner in August last year. It read: "I have 12 girls ready from the age 14-20 years, who are living all over the UK, I have spent money on the preparation of this event such as a rented house for the girls and also all expenses needed."
Worried staff immediately alerted police who traced the car and telephone number given in the letter to an address in Wigan where Fatima Hagnegat, 24, lived with her husband, Rassoul Gholampour. Inquires revealed that another similar letter had been delivered to the hotel on an earlier date.
Detectives then exchanged messages with the gang under the guise of potential clients. One undercover officer, known as "Cameron," telephoned the mobile number provided in the letter to ask about hiring girls on behalf of a client. He spoke to Hagnegat's aunt, Marohkh Jamali, 41, who told him that she could arrange a party for four to five people that night if required. She stated that she could provide girls from Iran, England and Eastern Europe aged 14 and 20.
The officer arranged to meet Jamali who told him some of her girls were virgins and could be 'broken' by his client. She emailed him photographs of a number of girls and said she would bring up to five girls to London, including two 13-year-olds, and would expect £50,000 to £150,000 for each. The next day Jamali went to a different London hotel, in Bayswater, accompanied by Hagnegat and six girls, two of whom were aged 14 and 17. The other four were 18 or older. Officers swooped and arrested Jamali and Hagnegat.
The six victims, who had all been brought to London from the North-West of England and cannot be identified for legal reasons, were taken to a victims' centre. They later described how they had travelled from Wigan with the defendants on the understanding that they would be able to earn some money 'dancing' for a party of rich men. It was only later, on their arrival in London, that they were told they may be asked to have sex with the men.
The gang members, all jobless and Iranian, pleaded guilty to trafficking and prostitution offences at Harrow Crown Court yesterday.(September 14, 2010)
Muslim patrons of Dutch brothel triple during Ramadan: The owner of a Dutch escort agency, Society Service, reports that her Muslim clientele shoots up from about 13 percent of the total to 40 percent during Ramadan, based on her analysis of names (such as a businessman from Egypt named Mohammed). Most of the Muslim clients, she adds, come from abroad. "I think that they plan their business trips to be in the Netherlands during Ramadan. Otherwise I can't explain the increase." (September 13, 2010)
Afghan couple stoned to death: This is the story of Khayyam, 25, and his lover Siddiqa, 19, as reported by Rod Nordland for the New York Times. Siddiqa was enaged to marry a relative of Khayyam's but refused him. Khayyam tried to persuade her family to let her marry him, but they refused, perhaps because Khayyam already had a wife and two young children. The couple then
eloped to Kunar Province, in eastern Afghanistan, staying with distant relatives, but family members persuaded them to return to their village, promising to allow them to marry. (Afghan men are legally allowed to marry up to four wives). Once back in Kunduz, however, they were seized by the Taliban, who convened local mullahs from surrounding villages for a religious court.The lovers declared, "We love each other no matter what happens" as a Taliban mullah prepared to read out the court's judgment. They were found guilty of fornication and sentenced to death. Siddiqa was dressed in a burqa and the two of them were encircled by about two hundred males (no women) in the bazaar of Mullah Quli village, in Archi district, a remote corner of Kunduz Province close to Tajikistan.
Taliban members began the stoning, then villagers joined in, including Khayyam's father and brother, Siddiqa's brother, and other relatives. Siddiqa was killed first, then Khayyam. A crowd of onlookers who did not take part cheered them on in a festive atmosphere. "People were very happy seeing this," said Nadir Khan, 40, a local farmer and Taliban sympathizer, because the couple "did a bad thing."
The stoning found widespread support among Afghan religious authorities. For example, the head of the Ulema Council in Kunduz Province, Mawlawi Abdul Yaqub, deemed stoning to death an appropriate punishment for illegal sexual relations. (August 16, 2010)
Facebook campaign urges Muslim men to marry four wives: Some young Saudis started a Facebook group, "We Want Them Four," that advocates polygamy to end the problem of spinsterhood in their country. "Every Saudi and Arab man who is financially and physically able to marry more than one wife should not hesitate to do so in order to end spinsterhood among our women and help cap the high marriage costs that have deterred many young men from getting married." (July 6, 2010)
"1 homme, 4 femmes, 46 enfants": That's the title of an article by Mathieu Deslandes in Le Journal du Dimanche; "1 man, 4 wives, 46 children." The article tells about this Muslim family from Malii living in Bobigny, a northeastern suburb of Paris, and how the man could stop working because the government stipend for 40 children comes to €6,157 (= US$8,456) a month, and that's not even counting housing aid. The article goes into some detail how the local social worker is trying to help the women establish their own residences. (June 12, 2010)
Afghan child brides beaten for fleeing husbands: Rod Nordland and Alissa J. Rubin tell how Khadija Rasoul, 13, and Basgol Sakhi, 14, from the village of Gardan-i-Top, in the Dulina district of Ghor Province, central Afghanistan,
had every reason to expect the law would be on their side when a policeman at a checkpoint stopped the bus they were in. Disguised in boys' clothes, the girls, ages 13 and 14, had been fleeing for two days along rutted roads and over mountain passes to escape their illegal, forced marriages to much older men, and now they had made it to relatively liberal Herat Province. Instead, the police officer spotted them as girls, ignored their pleas and promptly sent them back to their remote village in Ghor Province.
There they were publicly and viciously flogged for daring to run away from their husbands. Their tormentors, who videotaped the abuse, were not the Taliban, but local mullahs and the former warlord, now a pro-government figure who largely rules the district where the girls live. Neither girl flinched visibly at the beatings, and afterward both walked away with their heads unbowed.The article provides ample detail on the beatings, including a video of what took place, and ends with the denouement:
In some ways, the two girls from Ghor were among the luckier child brides. After the floggings, the mullah declared them divorced and returned them to their own families. Two years earlier, in nearby Murhab district, two girls who had been sold into marriage to the same family fled after being abused, according to a report by the Human Rights Commission. But they lost their way, were captured and forcibly returned. Their fathers — one the village mullah — took them up the mountain and killed them.(May 30, 2010)
Palestinian husband chokes wife because pregnant with girl: An unnamed man in Nasiriyah, a village north of Nablus on the West Bank, was arrested on charges of having strangled his pregnant wife to death after an ultrasound test revealed a female fetus. Never mind that the couple already has three boys and a girl – the father insisted on another son. Relatives indicated the husband was envious of his brother, who has nine sons. (May 13, 2010)
Sun-tanned women risk arrest in Tehran: Tehran's police ch InfoGnomon
The deepest differences between Muslims and Westerners concern not politics but sexuality.
Each side has a long history of looking at the other's sexual mores with a mixture of astonishment and disgust. (The term termagant sums up the surprising way Westerners saw Muslim women before the seventeenth century.)
Here are some examples of customs and social attitudes from the Muslim side of the divide (in reverse chronological order) that have me, for one, shaking my head. I have made sure only to include instances in this weblog entry that represent a general outlook, and not just a single person's idiosyncrasy, anecdotes that reflect the Shari'a or societal consensus, not deviants and outcasts.
Saudi groom divorces his bride on first seeing her face: An identified couple got married in Medina and only after the nuptials, when the photographer asked them to pose, did the man for the first time look at his wife's face. Then, the Daily Mail reports:
when the bride removed her veil and smiled for the camera, her new husband leapt to his feet in disgust. "You are not the girl I want to marry," he declared. "You are not the one I had imagined. I am sorry, but I divorce you." According to local daily Okaz, the bride immediately collapsed in a fit of tears as panicked wedding guests stepped in to try to resolve the dispute.Comment: Discussion of this incident has been unremittingly negative toward the groom, but surely the woman (who chose to hide herself until after the wedding) and the whole notion of marrying a couple without their both seeing each other are equally to blame. (November 17, 2014)
Afghan girls who live as boys: For various reasons – economic, familial, educational – some Afghan families cut their pre-pubescent daughters' hair short, give them male names, and send them temporarily out in the world, Jenny Nordberg reports for the Atlantic. (September 8, 2014)
Female jihadis run brothel for ISIS militiamen: Female jihadis, mostly of British origin, are running brothels of as many as 3,000 Iraqi women kidnapped and forced to service ISIS men. The Daily Mirror reports:
Sources suggest that members of the all-women al-Khanssaa Brigade in Raqqa, Syria, are running brothels to satisfy the fighters' desires. One said: "These women are using barbaric interpretations of the Islamic faith to justify their actions. They believe the militants can use these women as they please as they are non-Muslims. The Yazidi people are being ethnically cleansed, and their women are being subjected to the most brutal treatment. It is the British women who have risen to the top of the Islamic State's sharia police and now they are in charge of this operation. It is as bizarre as it is perverse."(September 10, 2014)
Temporary marriages in Iran to deal with pre-marital sex: A report from Iran's parliamentary research branch based on interviews with 142,000 students finds a lot of pre-marital sex underway: 80 percent of females have had it and 17 percent identify as homosexual. Things get interesting when the report offers a very Islamic solution, as paraphrased by FoxNews.com:
To get around societal boundaries that prohibit having a girlfriend or boyfriend, or being caught in public with someone of the opposite gender, the report suggests that young people utilize the Islamic Shia practice of a temporary marriage, or sigheh. … A sigheh is a temporary arrangement, with mutual consent, that can last anywhere from one meeting to years. According to Sharia Law, a Muslim man can have up to four legal wives, but up to 99 of the temporary marriages.(August 20, 2014)
Peeping Toms allowed if intention is to marry: In one of those fatwas that make everyone wonder what the Islamic establishment is thinking, an Egyptian Salafi named Usama al-Qawsi ruled live on Mehwar television that a man may surreptiously watch a woman "while she is showering" if he intends to marry her. To be precise, he said:
If you were really honest and wanted to marry that woman, and you were able to hide and watch her in secret, see the things that she wouldn't usually let you see before marrying her, then it is acceptable as long as your intentions are pure.Of course, this ruling runs quite contrary to Islamic teachings, which requires that unmarried women be modestly dressed and men to lower their gaze. (August 18, 2014)
"ISIS wants to impregnate Yazidi women and smash our blond bloodline: Fears grow for the 300 women kidnapped from Sinjar": According to London's Daily Mail,
Fears are growing for the 300 Yazidi women reportedly kidnapped by Islamic State fighters last week amid claims they would be used to bear children to break up the ancient sect's bloodline. The minority group is originally Aryan and has retained a fairer complexion, blonde hair and blue eyes by only marrying within the community. But in a furious bid to convert all non-Muslims, ISIS jihadists have vowed to impregnate the hostages.(August 13, 2014)
Family plans to honor kill daughter, 10, after her rape by a mullah: Rod Nordland of the New York Times tells the story datelined Kunduz, Afghanistan:
It was bad enough that the alleged rape took place in the sanctity of a mosque, and that the accused man was a mullah who invoked the familiar defense that it had been consensual sex. But the victim was only 10 years old. And there was more: The authorities said her family members openly planned to carry out an "honor killing" in the case — against the young girl. The mullah offered to marry his victim instead. This past week, the awful matter became even worse. On Tuesday, local policemen removed the girl from the shelter that had given her refuge and returned her to her family, despite complaints from women's activists that she was likely to be killed.As for the accused mullah, Mohammad Amin, he
was arrested and confessed to having sex with the girl after Quran recitation classes at the mosque on May 1, but claimed that he thought the girl was older and that she responded to his advances. The girl's own testimony, and medical evidence, supported a rape so violent that it caused a fistula, or a break in the wall between the vagina and rectum, according to the police and the official bill of indictment. She bled so profusely after the attack that she was at one point in danger of losing her life because of a delay in getting medical care.
Photographs of the girl that Dr. Sarwari took in the hospital clearly show a pre-pubescent child, and the doctor said the girl weighed only 40 pounds. Few Afghans have birth records, and many do not know their precise ages. But the girl's mother said she was 10, and a forensic examination in the hospital agreed, saying she had not yet started menstruating or developing secondary sexual characteristics.The case has had an impact in Kunduz, but not as Westerners might expect. Norland notes that "Most of the anger in Kunduz has been focused not on the mullah but on the women's activists and the shelter."
The head of the Women for Afghan Women shelter here where the girl took refuge, Dr. Hassina Sarwari, was at one point driven into hiding by death threats from the girl's family and other mullahs, who sought to play down the crime by arguing the girl was much older than 10. One militia commander sent Dr. Sarwari threatening texts and an ultimatum to return the girl to her family. The doctor said she now wanted to flee Afghanistan.
The head of the women's affairs office in Kunduz, Nederah Geyah, who actively campaigned to have the young girl protected from her family and the mullah prosecuted, resigned on May 21 and moved to another part of the country.As for the family's reaction, the girl's father came under tremendous pressure by his village to kill her because she had "brought shame" to them. This fits the general pattern in Afghanistan, where honor killing the raped woman is "often more important to the victim's family than vengeance against the attacker."
The girl's aunt told how her husband ordered her to sneak the girl out of the hospital and deliver her to the male relatives outside, who planned to execute her and dump her body in the river. Also,
In the hospital room, the doctor found the girl's mother holding her child's hand, and both were weeping. "My daughter, may dust and soil protect you now," Dr. Sarwari quoted the mother as saying. "We will make you a bed of dust and soil. We will send you to the cemetery where you will be safe."(July 19, 2014)
Saudi women bear their future guardians: Lubna Al-Khamis, a Saudi woman complains in the Saudi daily Al-Jazirah that "Only in the Kingdom: A Woman Gives Birth to Her Own Guardian." Excerpts from the article, dated March 3, 2014:
Image a woman who carries a baby in her womb for nine months, suffers exhausting labor pains, and then nourishes [her baby] with her tears and milk, caring for him through the nights as her best years go by. She teaches him to read and write and plants noble humane values in him, often spending her own savings just to make him smile... And when that [baby] reaches the age of 18, he suddenly becomes her guardian.
This happens to every woman who suffers the fate of being widowed. Then the 'guardianship' passes from her husband to her brother, and later to her son when he reaches the age of 18. When that happens, a woman is forbidden to leave the kingdom without [her son's] permission or to renew basic state documents, like a passport. Additionally, if her father is deceased, she cannot remarry without [her son's] blessing. She also cannot be employed in many fields without presenting a signed letter of approval from her son.(July 1, 2014)
Families hire bounty hunters to enforce arranged marriages: From a confused report from the BBC's Lucy Adams about the situation in Scotland on the eve of a UK law to criminalise forced marriage going into effect on June 16:
A record 83 honour-based violence cases were referred to Police Scotland in the past yearAn estimated 8,000 women in the UK are forced into marriage each year.Some family members have no need for bounty hunters because, "after six months, because there is a lack of support services, the victim goes back. They cannot cope with life. They have been in a golden cage and find that they don't know how to make breakfast or lunch."Bounty hunters sometimes bring the wayward girls back ("the only reason she was not killed was her family did not want blood on their hands") and sometimes have them executed ("We have cases where the family paid more than £100,000 to track someone down and kill them").(June 12, 2014)
Sudan court convicts woman for being gang-raped: An Ethiopian woman,18 and three months' pregnant, was looking for a house to buy in Omdurman, Sudan, when she was lured to an empty property and sexually attacked by three men who videoed the encounter and then posted it on social media. The woman was arrested, convicted of "indecent acts," fined 5,000 Sudanese pounds (US$880), sentenced to a month in jail (suspended because of her pregnancy), and faced deportation. She avoided charges of adultery and prostitution (with a possible death penalty by stoning) because she divorced. The three men admitted having sex with her were sentenced to 100 lashes for adultery; the two who distributed the video got 40 lashes. (February 21, 2014) May 6, 2014 update: A 25-year-old Indonesian widow, and her alleged sex partner, a married man, 40, were caught by eight males, one as young as 13, who gang-raped her, beat him, and threw raw sewage on them both. After this, the gang took the couple down to the local office of the Shari'a police, the Wilayatul Hisbah in Langsa, Aceh. The head of this police force, Ibrahim Latif, decided to have the couple caned "because they violated the religious bylaw on sexual relations." Their punishment: nine strokes in a public place. May 31, 2014 update: A girl, 15, was raped by 38 men in Ketereh, Malaysia (near Kota Bharu), including a father and two sons combination, then arrested by the police as part of their investigation.
Shaving a Muslim woman's pubic hair costs UK taxpayers £350K in legal bills: This one reflects more on the British life than Muslim one, and it's only barely to do with sex, but here goes:
The parents of retarded Muslim woman in her 30s, known only as "ED" in court documents, demanded in 2011 that, in accord with Islamic tradition, her pubic hair be removed. But the local council, which had looked after ED since 2008, argued that she lacked the mental capacity to consent to this procedure. In response, the parents applied to family court to have ED returned home. The counsel resisted.
The result was a multi-year legal battle to be tried at London's High Court in which the sides amassed 300 pages of expert testimony, 740 pages of witness statements, and much other evidence. Then, at the last minute, the parents dropped the case. The judge pronounced himself "utterly baffled" and decried the "astonishing sum of money" wasted on the process: £82,000 in legal costs for the parents, £130,000 for the official solicitor, appearing on ED's behalf, and £138,000 for the council – with the British taxpayer footing the entire £350,000 bill. (October 22, 2013)
13-year-old girl raped, buried alive in Pakistan: A girl on her way to seminary for Koran lessons in a village of Toba Tek Singh district, was abducted by two men who took her to a deserted place, raped her, and then, thinking she died during the assault, buried her in a shallow mud grave by the roadside, her father Siddique Mughal recounted. But, the girl regained consciousness and managed to dig out of the tomb. (October 28, 2013)
Asian worker speaks to a Saudi woman, gets beaten by her husband: A video (which can be seen here) from Saudi Arabia shows an Asian man slapped and hit in the face by a Saudi man who accuses him of the audacity to have talked to the Saudi's wife. As the Daily Mail explains:
The Saudi man then starts to repeatedly whip the Asian man with his belt. The victim falls to the floor crying out in pain, where he is kicked and whipped over and over. When he gets to his feet, the Saudi man appears to grab him by the throat and forces him up against the wall before continuing to beat him.(October 28, 2013)
Afghan lovers beheaded: The Shari'a has draconian rules concerning sex outside marriage, but they are rules. For zina (fornication) to be punished requires four men of good reputation to have watched the sexual act in flagrante delicto, not an easy thing to arrange, and if their accusation does not meet the required standard, they themselves are punished. The rules also prescribe different penalties for unmarried and married offenders, with the latter being more severe.
In practice, however, these unwieldy rules tend to be ignored and Muslim communities often savage anyone suspected of zina or even a microscopic move toward zina; honor killings are a prime example of this pattern, with girls being murdered for the slightest flirtation. Another sort of example comes from the province of Helmand in southern Afghanistan, concerning a man and woman, both in their 20s. The Daily Telegraph (London) reports:
The elder brother of the male victim …told officers the woman had run away with him recently and was living in their family home. On Monday, [Oct. 21,] 10 men broke into the house near the provincial capital Lashkar Gah and kidnapped the pair, police official Mohammad Ismail Hotak told the AFP news agency. "On Tuesday, local residents reported that there were two bodies in the graveyard. We went there and found them. Both were beheaded. From our investigations, we have found that the two had a love affair. We believe the family and relatives of the girl are behind the killing."Comment: This is not Islam or even Islamism but customs built upon an Islamic base, what is called Islamicate. (October 23, 2013)
Muslim child marriages in Great Britain: Reporting on a ITV show, "Forced to Marry," Soeren Kern provides information on "Britain's Underage Muslim Marriage Epidemic." The documentary, which has two reporters posing as mother and brother of an unwilling 14-year-old girl they want to marry an older man in a nikah ceremony, caught 18 of the country's leading imams agreeing to break British law and oversee the nuptials. (The minimum legal age for marriage in Britain is 16.)
The imams who agreed to marry the girl openly mocked the legitimacy of British law, reflecting the rise of a parallel Islamic legal system in Britain. One of the Muslim clerics who agreed to perform the underage marriage is Mohammed Shahid Akhtar, the imam of the Central Jamia Masjid Ghamkol Sharif Mosque in Birmingham, the second-largest mosque in Britain with a capacity of more than 5,000 worshippers.On being informed that the girl did not want to get married, Akhtar replied: "She's 14. By Sharia, grace of God, she's legal to get married. Obviously Islam has made it easy for us. There is nothing against that. We're doing it because it's okay through Islam. You've got the kaffirs [non-believers], the law, the English people that ... you know, you can't get married twice but, by the grace of God, we can get married four times."
Another cleric who agreed to marry the 14 year old girl is Mufti Shams al-Huda al-Misbahi, who preaches at the Jamia Masjid Kanzul Iman Mosque in Heckmondwike, a town near Leeds in north-central England. When the undercover reporter, posing as the brother of the girl to be married, says, "She's not willing now, but she will be," Misbahi responds: "If you make her willing, she will be willing." He is then filmed saying that he would perform the marriage without providing an official marriage certificate valid under British law. "We'll make everything okay by Islam. We'll write down and put it in our records." Misbahi goes on to tell the undercover reporters that the girl will be able to live with her new husband after the ceremony. Misbahi is a senior Muslim cleric who has worked with the West Yorkshire Police as an advisor on community cohesion, a British concept that refers to the integration of Muslim immigrants within a multicultural society. Before being caught on camera advocating forced marriage, Misbahi had publicly condemned the practice for many years.And so on and on. (October 15, 2013)
Kuwait government to ban foreign homosexuals: Yousouf Mindkar, director of public health at the Kuwaiti health ministry, told the newspaper Al-Rai that "Health centres conduct routine medical checks to assess the health of the expatriates when they come into the GCC countries. However, we will take stricter measures that will help us detect gays who will be then barred from entering Kuwait or any of the GCC member states." The Gulf Cooperation Council countries are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. (October 7, 2013)
Saudi sheikh: Women's ovaries and pelvis damaged if they drive: Salah al-Luhaydan, a Saudi sheikh, has warned against women driving by claiming that this would damage their bodies and cause "disorders of varying degrees" among their children. This comments are hardly unique: in 2011, a Saudi report to the Majlis al-Ifta al-A'la found that women driving would "provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce" among male and female Saudis. More: Within ten years of ending the driving ban, there would be "no more virgins" left in the kingdom. (September 28, 2013)
Iranian parliament passes bill allowing men to marry 13-year-old adopted daughters: At present, it's illegal for adoptive fathers to marry their daughters, but that will change if the Guardian Council accepts legislation that permits a man to marry his adopted daughter as young as 13 years. According to the Iranian news website Tabnak, 42,000 children aged between 10 and 14 were married in 2010.
Shadi Sadr, a lawyer with the London-based "Justice for Iran," argues that "It's not part of the Iranian culture to marry your adopted child. … this bill is legalising paedophilia and is endangering our children and normalising this crime in our culture. You should not be able to marry your adopted children, full stop. If a father marries his adopted daughter who is a minor and has sex, that's rape. … With this bill, you can be a paedophile and get your bait in the pretext of adopting children."
The reformist newspaper, Shargh, warned: "How can someone be looking after you and at the same time be your husband?" It quoted Shiva Dolatabadi, head of Iran's society for protecting children's rights, warning: "You cannot open a way in which the role of a father or a mother can be mixed with that of an spouse. Children can't be safe in such a family." (September 26, 2013)
How many women per man in paradise? The number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin is a favored symbol of medieval Christian religious scholasticism (whether accurate or not is another matter), that is, the rigorous application of logic to theological tenets. Other religions also contain this strain too, such as pilpul in Judaism or kalam in Islam.
But Islam differs from the other monotheistic faiths in its extreme focus on sexual fantasies about the afterlife.
For example, in a lecture posted on March 23, 2013, Muhammad Ali Shanqiti, a Mauritanian born in 1970, with two higher degrees from New York's Columbia University, now serving as imam of Al-Ahmadi Mosque in Jeddah, figured out the number of women a Muslim man can enjoy in paradise. MEMRI located, translated, and transcribed his insights. Here is the heart of his lengthy reasoning:
If you get married in this world, then [in Paradise], you get your wife from this world, along with 70 black-eyed virgins with whom you are allowed to have sex, and each of these 70 virgins comes with 70 servant girls. … Now, let's assume that you are married to four wives, each of whom comes with 70 black-eyed virgins, and each virgin comes with 70 servant girls.Do the math: That's (70+70 x 70) x 4 + 4 = 19,884 women per virtuous Muslim man. (MEMRI calculates a mere 19,604 per virtuous Muslim man.) Half of these women, incidentally, will be virgins. (September 20, 2013)
Tunisian women offer themselves as "sex jihadis" to Syrian rebels, return pregnant: It sounds like something out of someone's overheated imagination but the Tunisian government (itself Islamist) has verified the news: Interior Minister Lotfi ben Jeddou revealed to the National Constituent Assembly that, responding to so-called sexual fatwas, some Tunisian women went to Syria specifically to have sex where each one is "having sexual relations with 20, 30, 100" fighters. Then, "After the sexual liaisons they have there in the name of jihad al-nikah [Arabic: jihad marriage] they come home pregnant." Ben Jeddou did not say how many women have done this; France 24 estimated the number in the hundreds. (September 20, 2013) Sep. 22, 2013 update: Steven Plaut responded to the above news with some biting wit:
Now I know exactly what you are thinking when you read this, and that is that this is a wonderful opportunity for far-Leftist anti-Israel Jews to join in these delegations of solidarity with the jihadi fighters in Syria. I mean, after all, why should anti-Semitic Jews be excluded from this Jihad al-Nikah??? SO I wanted to suggest that you take a moment and send an email to a group of radical anti-Israel Jewish women activists and suggest to them that they join in one of these solidarity delegations.
Heck, I know I would be willing to chip in to cover their travel costs. Here they have a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate their opposition to colonialism and Zionism and show their embrace for the jihad al-nikah. … And since we certainly do not want to appear to be discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, I see no reason why male homosexual anti-Israel radicals cannot also be invited to join in these delegations."Yemeni child bride, eight, dies of internal injuries on first night of forced marriage to groom five times her age": The Daily Mail headline tells the basics about a girl named Rawan in Hardh, near Saudi Arabia. (September 9, 2013)
Re-virginising cream for sale in Pakistan's pharmacies: Halima Mansour of the Express Tribune reports on and bemoans the ubiquity of various ointments with names such as "B-Virgin," "18 Again Vaginal Shrink Cream," and "Virgin Cream" that promise to restore a woman's virginity. (August 20, 2013)
Some of the virginity-inducing creams.
Jailed for being raped: The government of Dubai has sentenced Marte Deborah Dalelv, 24, a Norwegian woman on a business trip in Dubai who reported her rape to police, to 16 months in prison. She was charged with having extramarital sex, drinking alcohol, and perjury. The BBC recounts: Dalelv was out with colleagues in the evening of March 6, 2013, when the rape took place.
Marte Deborah Dalelv, 24, a Norwegian businesswoman.
She reported it to the police, who proceeded to confiscate her passport and seize her money. She was charged four days later on three counts, including having sex outside marriage. Her alleged attacker, she said, received a 13-month sentence for extra-marital sex and alcohol consumption. This sentence reflects the fact that both Islamic and UAE law require either a confession or the testimony of four adult male witnesses of good standing who personally witnessed the crime in fragrante delicto. (July 20, 2013) Jan. 21, 2014 update: Dubai has done it again, charging an unnamed 24-year-old Austrian female tourist with illegal sex; she says she was raped in a car on Dec. 2 by the son of a policeman. The Austrian Times recounts:
She had been in the region with friends on holiday and accepted an offer by the man to drive her home. But once they had walked into an underground car park underneath a five-star hotel in Yemen he had raped her, she claims. The man then tried to drive the woman away from the hotel but she managed to jump out of the car screaming for help – where other guests helped her and the police were called. … According to Austrian media the man initially claimed that the woman had offered him sex because she was drunk, and then later claimed that she was a prostitute who had demanded money for sex – something she also denies.Oh, the Austrian reports a policeman told her she could avoid the charges by marrying the man she accused of the rape.The Times notes that in both of these cases, the European women brought their complaints to the same police station in the in Bur area of Dubai. Feb. 3, 2014 update: More on the Austrian woman, Marie, now released by Dubai's police and back in Austria after the intervention by Austria's foreign minister, Sebastian Kurz:
It was terrible. I never knew what was going on, they told me nothing when I said I'd been raped, instead everything was taken away form me and I was locked up. Nobody kept me informed about my situation. I was treated worse than a dog. Nobody spoke to me properly. It was horrendous. I just thought it would be like in Europe, counselling, maybe tests. But now I know better. Dubai is very different. … I will never travel to an Arab land again.Her lawyer Mohammad al Redha, says the alleged rapist no longer faces rape charges, but could face a fine for fornication.
Marry me, marry my friends too: Here's an off-beat story from the kingdom about a demanding bride:
A Saudi teacher has reportedly told the man who wanted to marry her that she had only one condition before accepting his proposal: He must marry her two friends at the school at the same time. The would-be groom was shocked by her unexpected demand, but came under strong pressure from relatives and friends who eventually persuaded him to accept to marry the three women, Saudi daily Al Youm reported. Under the deal, the bridegroom rented three apartments in the same building and lodged each of his brides in her own flat.(April 21, 2013)
Eloping Somalis: During al-Shabaab's domination of Somalia, eloping was punishable by whipping or even death by stoning. But as their bizarre form of Islam has retreated, in the words of Abdi Guled of the Associated Press, "elopement once again is popular among young Somali couples, many of whom have dramatic stories of defying their families to follow their hearts and marry." Abdi tells the story of one couple:
Outside a dilapidated two-story building, Abdi Ali says goodbye to his veiled girlfriend Anisa and they take two separate streets to avoid attention. Soon they're aboard a minibus heading outside Mogadishu, pretending they don't know each other. After more than two hours of travel, they arrive at Walaweyn, a run-down town 90 kilometers (56 miles) north of Mogadishu, and are led inside a shanty by a man running a string of Arab worry beads through his fingers. Another man and woman walk out; they have just been married. Abdi Ali, who is 25, and his 23-year-old girlfriend will be next. …In the case of Ali and Anisa, they had dated in secret for two years. Anisa, who refused to give her full name for fear of family retribution, said they decided to elope after her parents refused her request to marry Ali, intending her to marry a cousin in America. "They tried to turn down my choice, and I had to do the same against their will," said Anisa, her soft voice and shy demeanor belying her determination. "You can't be engaged with just a stranger you have been forced to marry. We are living a civilized world." Anisa, with hennaed hands and bangle bracelets, is studying business at a Mogadishu university. She looks fondly at Ali, a lanky man with wispy hair who works as a tailor.
A Muslim religious figure sits on the left, Abdi Ali in the center, and Anisa on the right during a simple marriage ceremony on March 13, 2013, in Walaweyn, Somalia.
Getting married does not change their living arrangements, however:
they will continue to keep their relationship secret, at least for now. Anisa will live with her parents and have clandestine meetings with Ali. Now that they have had the certificate, the two are looking forward to consummating their marriage when they can find time alone together. "Secret meetings, phone calls and anonymity will dictate our relationship," said Ali. "But we shall finally, officially, be married." … Then the newlyweds board a minivan heading back to Mogadishu, sitting separately, as if they don't know each other.Elopements are a good business in Walaweyn, a cow town.
Walaweyn's elopement activity is one of the most visible signs that the tight grip that Islamic militiamen once held here has loosened. After the al-Shabab rebels left in October 2012, elopement became an industry in this town. There are several eloping rooms, including some in buildings that once housed al-Shabab extremists. Guides welcome new arrivals to the town, asking them if they want to elope.
Elopements here have soared, says Sheikh Mohamed Salad, an Islamic cleric who marries eloping couples. "Already this year we married hundreds of people, unlike last year when you could barely receive ten or fewer a month," he said.(April 17, 2013)
Cover baby girls in burqas: Abdullah Daoud, a Saudi religious figure, wants parents to cover female babies in burqas to protect them from sexual exploitation. To argue his case, Daoud claims that sexual molestation of babies takes place in Saudi Arabia, without providing specifics. (February 3, 2013)
Fayhan al-Ghamdi on a television show about Islam.
Saudi father pays "blood money" to mother for raping and killing their 5-year-old daughter: Fayhan al-Gamdi is a well-known Saudi religious figure and frequent guest on Islamic television shows (click here for an example: al-Ghamdi is sitting on the right side). Apparently worried that his little daughter Lama was not a virgin, he decided to take matters into his own hands, as a news report elaborates:
[Lama] Al Ghamdi was admitted to hospital on December 25, 2011 with multiple injuries, including a crushed skull, broken ribs and left arm, extensive bruising and burns. … Randa Al Kaleeb, a social worker from the hospital where Lama was admitted, said the girl's back was broken and that she had been raped "everywhere." … According to the victim's mother, hospital staff told her that her "child's rectum had been torn open and the abuser had attempted to burn it closed."Fayhan confessed to having used cables and a cane to inflict the injuries. Lama died ten months later, on Oct. 22, 2012.
The late Lama al-Ghamdi, 5.
Then, based on a Saudi law that a father cannot be executed for murdering his children, plus the custom that a father effectively owns his children, a judge ruled that the prosecution could only seek as Fayhan's punishment "blood money [to be paid to Lama's mother] and the time the defendant had served in prison since Lama's death." Blood money refers to the ancient Arabian practice of diya, absorbed into Islam (see Koran 5:45): it means paying the next of kin in compensation for murder. Feb. 4, 2013 update: Lama's mother has appealed the negligible sentence. Also, the Saudi Islamic Affairs Ministry has said that Ghamdi is not officially sanctioned by it as a preacher. One official is quoted illogically saying that "He had committed a heinous crime and he cannot be a preacher." Marrying Syrian refugee women: L. Barkan of MEMRI uncovers the "lust jihad" whereby female Syrian refugees get wed via something called "protection marriage" (sutra in Arabic). This
involves Arab Muslim men marrying female Syrian refugees, often girls aged 12-16, under the pretext of saving them from the harsh living conditions in the refugee camps, protecting their honor, and assisting the Syrian revolution. According to reports, the girls' families are often willing to marry them off for a very low bride-price in order to spare them life in the camps while securing some income for the family's subsistence. Media reports indicate that these cases exist in Jordan, Turkey, Libya and other countries, and that Muslim men from across the Arab world travel to the countries neighboring Syria in search of a young refugee bride. Some reports claim that certain Muslim clerics encourage this practice, calling it "a national duty," and are even taking part in it themselves.
The Arab media's recent exposure of this phenomenon has triggered a wave of outrage among Syrians and other Arabs, and activists have launched a campaign against it, including on Facebook. According to the activists, these marriages constitute an exploitation of the refugees in the camps, especially of young girls. They have reported cases of girls marrying elderly men, marriages leading to rape and prostitution, and men from different Arab countries bargaining for Syrian women on the internet.(November 12, 2012) Mar. 31, 2013 update: For more on this phenomenon, see "Jihadis' Exploitation of Muslim Girls" by Khaled Abu Toameh.
Islamic shrine in Indonesia hosts orgiastic sex: The shrine of Gunung Kemukus on a hilltop in central Java every year hosts an intermittent orgy where men and women have adulterous sex in order to improve their business. Aubrey Belford reports in "The Swingers' Guide to Islam" about Sarimah, a thickset, 63-year-old widowed grandmother, who lives in Solo, about an hour away:
Sarimah waits for a sex partner for the evening.
Sarimah arrives at dusk, ascending a path of stone steps that passes under a scattered canopy of trees in Java's hyper-real green, to the single grave believed to hold the legendary prince Pangeran Samodro and his stepmother, Nyai Ontrowulan. In the cramped room, Sarimah drops aromatic leaves in a brazier and moves over to the grave, sprinkling it with flowers. She kneels down, raises her hands in supplication and mutters to herself surahs from the holy Quran.
Sarimah gets up, and plants herself by the yellow stucco wall by the shrine's entrance, and waits to complete the next part of the ritual. It's just before maghrib, the fourth of the five daily prayers required of all Muslims. It's time to find a stranger — and have sex with them. Like the of thousands of pilgrims that have turned up this night to Gunung Kemukus, Sarimah is here to seek her fortune. According to local belief, the ritual here can guarantee success in business, usually for those at or near the bottom of the ladder – bus drivers, rice farmers, market stall traders and the like. Pilgrims mostly come from Indonesia's Javanese-speaking core, but some travel days across the massive archipelago to get here.The ritual needs to be done right, Belford explains:
First, prayers and offerings must be made at the grave of Pangeran Samodro and Nyai Ontrowulan. At some stage, pilgrims must wash themselves at either one or two of the sacred springs on the hill. Then they must find a sex partner who meets two conditions. First, your mate for the night must be of the opposite sex; and second, they cannot be your spouse. Many people believe the ritual only works if you return at seven consecutive, 35-day intervals.The ritual includes much paid sex: Keontjoro Soeparno, a social psychologist at Gadjah Mada University, reckons that
about half of the women who show up are commercial sex workers. Another 25 percent are "part-timers," people like Sarimah who carry out the ritual but will accept money if it's on offer. … Since the 1998 fall of the Suharto regime, religiously-minded authorities have cracked down on many legal red-light districts. Gunung Kemukus, on the other hand, has come to be seen as a safe place.The government profits from the sex and so protects it:
When word got out recently that a radical vigilante group, the Islamic Defenders Front, was going to conduct a raid from Solo, the police showed up in force to protect the hill. The shrine is too valuable to shut down, he says. "This is tourism. Every component, every element, every layer of society gets something out of tourism."Attitudes vary among the pilgrims:
Some people arrive with the blessing of their spouses; others do it secretly. For some, paying for sex invalidates the ritual; for others, it's just a shortcut. Everyone has a different idea of just how Islamic the whole thing is.Back to Sarimah:
Each time she comes here, she finds a new man by about midnight. Often, the men will hand her money afterwards. She doesn't ask for it upfront, or haggle over the price – sometimes up to 200,000 rupiah, or about A$20 – but she accepts it gladly, she says, even though accepting money might detract a little from the ritual's spiritual power. At about 2am she heads home after bathing at one of the springs, bringing the water home in a plastic bottle to sprinkle over her stall, which buys her about three weeks of good business.Sarimah had a successful evening:
"I just finished!" she exclaims gleefully. It turns out Sarimah had already found herself a partner, Wagiyo, a rice farmer from Purwodadi, not so far away, who estimates he's in his mid-sixties. Wagiyo isn't very keen to meet at first, but he also seems a little smitten and, after some goading from Sarimah, he comes and sits down to talk.
Sarimah and her partner for the evening, Wagiyo.
He opens up fairly quickly. Wagiyo says this is his first visit to Gunung Kemukus. His wife died in 2007, and his joint business with family and friends selling rice and beans was flailing. "I heard from a friend that if you came here you'd get your fortune, so I thought I'd try it out," he says.
Wagiyo was approached by two younger women who offered themselves in exchange for money before he spotted Sarimah. … The two went together to one of the small rooms for rent on the hill. Afterwards, Wagiyo slipped Sarimah 100,000 rupiah and bought her a cup of tea. He asked her to come back home and live with him on his farm.
Sarimah's not so sure about this. In a moment when Wagiyo isn't paying attention, she says she doubts his wife is really dead, and, miming her own throat being slit, says she's afraid of the fracas that would take place if the two ever met. Whether the two will meet again or not seems to be an open question. Since he seems taken with Sarimah, I ask Wagiyo if he'll be back in 35 days. "Insha'Allah."(October 11, 2012) May 15, 2014 update: Rebecca Henschke provides a similar report, even quoting the same professor, "In Muslim Indonesia, throngs of people are seeking salvation at a shrine to anonymous sex," about Gunung Kemukus for Public Radio International.
Two British imams agree to marry girl, 12: The Sunday Times ran a sting and got two mosque leaders (Mohamed Kassamali of the Husaini Islamic Centre in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, and Abdul Haque of the Shoreditch Mosque, East London) to officiate at a wedding with a girl not yet through puberty. (September 10, 2012)
Child brides in the West: Girls as young as 11 and 9 are fairly often married off to older men in London in Shari'a courts, reports the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation, as reported by the Islington Tribune. Dianna Nammi, director of IKWRO, explains more: although the girls are not legally married according to British law,
They are still expected to carry out their wifely duties, though, and that includes sleeping with their husband. They have to cook for them, wash their clothes, everything. They are still attending schools in Islington, struggling to do their primary school homework, and at the same time being practically raped by a middle-aged man regularly and being abused by their families. So they are a wife, but in a primary school uniform. The reason it doesn't get out is because they are too terrified to speak out, and also the control their families have over them is impossible to imagine if you're not going through it. The way it is covered up is so precise, almost unspeakable."(January 27, 2012)
Afghan father says kill both young lovers: Halima Mohammedi and, Rafi Mohammed of Heart, both 17, met inside an ice cream factory and were caught riding in a car, presumably alone, were pulled out, interrogated, and nearly executed vigilante-style as adulterers. When the police rescued the couple, angering a mob of several hundred, it proceeded to riot for hours, setting fire to police cars and storming a police station, leaving one man dead and the lovers confined to separate wings of a juvenile prison. Jack Healy takes it from here in the New York Times:
Ms. Mohammedi's uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in Iran, sorrowfully concurred. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter. Blood, he said, was perhaps the only way out. "What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them," said the father, Kher Mohammed.In contrast,
the provincial council decided that Mr. Mohammed and Ms. Mohammedi deserved the government's protection because neither was engaged, and because each said they wanted to get married. "They are not criminals, even if they have committed sexual activities," said Abdul Zahir, the council's leader. But so far, their words have not freed either of the teenagers or lent them any long-term security. …
They now spend the days at opposite ends of the same juvenile jail, out of each other's sight. Mr. Mohammed nurses the wounds still visible in his swollen face and blood-laced eyes, and Ms. Mohammedi has been going to classes and learning to tailor clothes. Both say they want to be together, but there are complications. Family members of the man killed in the riot sent word to Ms. Mohammedi that she bears the blame for his death. But they offered her an out: Marry one of their other sons, and her debt would be paid.(July 30, 2011)
Israeli women cavorting on the beach.
Muslim men desiring Jewish women on Israeli beaches: From the early days of Zionism, the sexual freedom of Jewish women has disturbed and attracted the Muslim Palestinians living near them. One response has been for Hebrew-speaking Muslims to pretend they are Jews, especially on the beaches of Israel where the Israeli women's assets are particularly evident. So widespread has this deceit become that a Jewish group has come into existence to fight back. "The Organization for Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land," known as Lehava, has started a program "defending the daughters of Israel" by handing out leaflets on beaches in Ashdod, Ashkelon, Bat Yam, Caesarea and Eilat, suggesting they avoid the charms of Muslim men. Benzi Gopstein of Lehava explains:
Last year we discovered that there are many gentiles arriving at the beaches, but not in search of the sun or water. Due to the multiple complaints, we decided to promote a campaign at the start of the bathing season this year in order to prevent situations in which girls discover that the "Yossi" they are dating is actually "Yusuf". … We turn to the girls with a plea: "There are enough good Jewish men you can go out with."Comment: Israeli beaches offer a miniature example of the sexual tensions Muslim men experience. Calling Muslim females "dull dates," ignoring families and culture, they chase non-Muslim women. (July 17, 2011)
Campaign for polygamy in Jordan: David E. Miller reports in the Jerusalem Post on a new Jordanian organization, the Association to Advocate Polygamy, founded by Muhammad Hajaya, an agricultural engineer with three wives. It tackles the spinsterhood problem by agitating against dowries and raising money to pay for weddings. Government statistics show that 87,000 Jordanian women 30 years old and over are unmarried. (July 9, 2011)
Iranian authorities endorse gang rapes: In Khomeinishahr, near Isfahan, as a private party of 14 adults took place outside on May 24, the BBC reports, late in the evening
a gang of more than a dozen men armed with long knives entered the garden, locked some men in a room and tied others to trees. Female guests - including one said to have been heavily pregnant - were taken to an adjacent property and raped. One guest used a hidden mobile phone to call 110, the police emergency hotline. Most of the attackers had fled by the time officers arrived, reports said, but four were later arrested.
In the medium-sized town, word of the rapes spread like wildfire. … With people angered by this silence and fearful about the security of local women, a huge protest was organised outside the courthouse via text messages. Yet the comments then made by state officials were to provoke even greater controversy.Town leaders proceeded to blame the victims:
Musa Salemi, the imam of Khomeinishahr, said in his Friday sermon that "Those who were raped were not praiseworthy. Only two out of the 14 were related. They had come to our town to party and provoked the others [the rapists] by their wine drinking and dancing."Hossein Yardoosti, a colonel in the Revolutionary Guards and police commander of Khomeinishahr, added: "I believe the raped women's families are to blame, because if they had proper clothing and if the sound of their music was not so loud, the rapist would not have imagined it as a depraved get-together." Reports indicated he might bring legal action against the rape victims for their behaviour.(June 15, 2011)
$15,000 Reward for Men Who Marry Second Wife over 40: A Kuwaiti member of parliament, Faysal al-Duwaysan, intends to propose a law, reports Khabarni on June 11, 2011 (and made available by TranslatingJihad.com today) "which would grant a reward of up to $15,000 to the Kuwaiti man who marries a second wife. This would carry with it the stipulation that the women be over 40, widowed, or divorced." He explained that
This is the best solution to curb the "old maid" problem, and eliminate many of the societal problems which began to appear in society as a result of the aggravation of this phenomenon. The high rates [of "old maids"] make it imperative on everybody—including governmental and even non-governmental institutions—to move to confront the phenomenon which has become a threat. Especially since the numbers indicate there are tens of thousands of unmarried women, alongside a comparable number of men who resort to taking a non-Kuwaiti woman as a second wife. This indicates that marriage to foreign women is the most serious factor in the spread of the "old maid" phenomenon.(June 14, 2011)
Muslim mothers in India honor kill daughters: The usual honor killing pattern has males killing females, but not always. I maintain a weblog on "'Honor Killings' of Muslim Males in the West" and now here are three women who colluded to murder two brides:
Two Muslim mothers in India were arrested and accused of killing their daughters for dishonoring their families for running off with Hindu men, authorities said. Newlyweds Zahida, 19, and Husna, 26, who were neighbors, were strangled on Wednesday night when they returned home after marrying men their mothers didn't approve of, cops said. The mothers allegedly helped each other choke their daughters. "We killed them because they brought shame to our community," Khatun, one of the mothers who uses one name, told the Indian Express newspaper after her arrest on Friday. "How could they elope with Hindus? They deserved to die. We have no remorse," she said. A third woman who allegedly helped the mothers was on the run, the Express reported.(May 15, 2011)
Camp for "effeminate" schoolboys in Malaysia: The department of state education in the Malaysian state of Terengganu sent 57 schoolboys ages 13 to 17 with "effeminate tendencies" to a four-day camp that included religious lectures, visiting local mosques, and aerobics workouts. The goal? To make their behavior more masculine, reports Reuters. (April 21, 2011)
Females thrown into the sea: Boats making the perilous passage from North Africa to Europe are by definition dangerous for all on board, but especially so for the women. Le Figaro today quotes a Tunisian, Tarek, 20, about one voyage that began in mid-March in Kairouan: "Nous étions entassés à 150 dans un bateau prévu pour 60. Au cours du trajet pour Lampedusa, douze filles ont été jetées à la mer." In English: "We were packed in, 150 in a boat meant for 60. During the trip to Lampedusa [an Italian island], twelve girls were thrown into the sea." Comment: This incident gives gruesome meaning to "women and children first." (April 4, 2011)
Illegitimate babies murdered in Pakistan: The Edhi Foundation conservatively estimates that more than 1,000 infants—most of them girls—were killed or abandoned to die in Pakistani cities in 2010. Hasan Mansoor of Agence France-Presse explains why: "In the conservative Muslim nation, where the birth of children outside of marriage is condemned and adultery is a crime punishable by death under strict interpretations of Islamic law, infanticide is a crime on the rise." He also notes that crimes of infanticide are rarely prosecuted and quotes a lawyer: "The majority of police stations do not register cases of infanticide, let alone launch investigations into them." (January 17, 2011)
Saudi women sue their male guardians: As a 2008 Human Rights Watch report put it, women in Saudi Arabia are treated as "perpetual minors," kept under the thumb throughout their lives by one or other male guardian – grandfather, father, brother, cousin, husband, son, or even grandson. This means that women of all ages must usually obtain permission from the guardian (known as wali al-amr) to study, work, travel, marry, or undergo certain medical procedures.
But lately, Maggie Michael of the Associated Press writes, women are suing for their rights:
Year after year, the 42-year-old Saudi surgeon remains single, against her will. Her father keeps turning down marriage proposals, and her hefty salary keeps going directly to his bank account. The surgeon in the holy city of Medina knows her father, also her male guardian, is violating Islamic law by forcibly keeping her single, a practice known as adhl. So she has sued him in court, with questionable success.
Adhl cases reflect the many challenges facing single women in Saudi Arabia. But what has changed is that more women are now coming forward with their cases to the media and the law. Dozens of women have challenged their guardians in court over adhl, and one has even set up a Facebook group for victims of the practice. …Comment: With enough will, even a custom so deeply entrenched as the Saudi wali al-amr can be changed. (November 27, 2010)
"Pakistan media gripped by man marrying twice in one day": A Pakistani man, a herbal medicine practitioner, has married in a day's time the woman his family picked out for him and also the woman he's in love with, captivating the country in the process to the point that television stations provided live coverage of Azhar Haidri's two weddings.
At first he refused to marry the woman selected by his family since childhood because he loved someone else. … Mr Haidri's love for 21-year-old Rumana Aslam - ahead of 28-year-old Humaira Qasim - at one point threatened to split his family apart. "I gave this offer that I will marry both of them," Mr Haidri, 23, told the Associated Press ahead of his first marriage to Ms Qasim on Sunday in the central Pakistani city of Multan. "Both the girls agreed."(October 18, 2010)
Afghan girls dressed as boys to attend school: In a large-scale version of Yentl, families disguise their girl children as boys so that they can get educated, reports Jenny Nordberg for the New York Times.
There are no statistics about how many Afghan girls masquerade as boys. But when asked, Afghans of several generations can often tell a story of a female relative, friend, neighbor or co-worker who grew up disguised as a boy. To those who know, these children are often referred to as neither "daughter" nor "son" in conversation, but as bacha posh, which literally means "dressed up as a boy" in Dari.
Through dozens of interviews conducted over several months, where many people wanted to remain anonymous or to use only first names for fear of exposing their families, it was possible to trace a practice that has remained mostly obscured to outsiders. Yet it cuts across class, education, ethnicity and geography, and has endured even through Afghanistan's many wars and governments.
Afghan families have many reasons for pretending their girls are boys, including economic need, social pressure to have sons, and in some cases, a superstition that doing so can lead to the birth of a real boy. Lacking a son, the parents decide to make one up, usually by cutting the hair of a daughter and dressing her in typical Afghan men's clothing. There are no specific legal or religious proscriptions against the practice. In most cases, a return to womanhood takes place when the child enters puberty. The parents almost always make that decision.(September 20, 2010)
Saudi women cash in on ban on bachelors: In Saudi Arabia, entrance to shopping malls, gated amusement parks, and other family destinations is restricted to married couples or families; single men cannot enter. To enforce this, the religious police (mutaween) keep a lookout for single males or unmarried couples, punishing infractors.
Diana Al-Jassem reports in the Arab News that enterprising women charging young men to pretend to be their wives so they can get access. The going rate is between SR10 and SR50 (US$3 to $13), depending on time and place. The recent summer and Eid holidays saw a particular surge in women generating money in this way. (September 19, 2010)
"Gang tried to sell girls' virginity to wealthy Arabs for £150,000": Charlotte Gill and David Wilkes of the Daily Mail report how three women and a man offered girls as young as thirteen for sexual services in London.
One of the women had arrived at the Jumeirah Carlton Hotel in Knightsbridge, central London, in a silver BMW to offer the gang's services in a handwritten letter to the owner in August last year. It read: "I have 12 girls ready from the age 14-20 years, who are living all over the UK, I have spent money on the preparation of this event such as a rented house for the girls and also all expenses needed."
Worried staff immediately alerted police who traced the car and telephone number given in the letter to an address in Wigan where Fatima Hagnegat, 24, lived with her husband, Rassoul Gholampour. Inquires revealed that another similar letter had been delivered to the hotel on an earlier date.
Detectives then exchanged messages with the gang under the guise of potential clients. One undercover officer, known as "Cameron," telephoned the mobile number provided in the letter to ask about hiring girls on behalf of a client. He spoke to Hagnegat's aunt, Marohkh Jamali, 41, who told him that she could arrange a party for four to five people that night if required. She stated that she could provide girls from Iran, England and Eastern Europe aged 14 and 20.
The officer arranged to meet Jamali who told him some of her girls were virgins and could be 'broken' by his client. She emailed him photographs of a number of girls and said she would bring up to five girls to London, including two 13-year-olds, and would expect £50,000 to £150,000 for each. The next day Jamali went to a different London hotel, in Bayswater, accompanied by Hagnegat and six girls, two of whom were aged 14 and 17. The other four were 18 or older. Officers swooped and arrested Jamali and Hagnegat.
The six victims, who had all been brought to London from the North-West of England and cannot be identified for legal reasons, were taken to a victims' centre. They later described how they had travelled from Wigan with the defendants on the understanding that they would be able to earn some money 'dancing' for a party of rich men. It was only later, on their arrival in London, that they were told they may be asked to have sex with the men.
The gang members, all jobless and Iranian, pleaded guilty to trafficking and prostitution offences at Harrow Crown Court yesterday.(September 14, 2010)
Muslim patrons of Dutch brothel triple during Ramadan: The owner of a Dutch escort agency, Society Service, reports that her Muslim clientele shoots up from about 13 percent of the total to 40 percent during Ramadan, based on her analysis of names (such as a businessman from Egypt named Mohammed). Most of the Muslim clients, she adds, come from abroad. "I think that they plan their business trips to be in the Netherlands during Ramadan. Otherwise I can't explain the increase." (September 13, 2010)
Afghan couple stoned to death: This is the story of Khayyam, 25, and his lover Siddiqa, 19, as reported by Rod Nordland for the New York Times. Siddiqa was enaged to marry a relative of Khayyam's but refused him. Khayyam tried to persuade her family to let her marry him, but they refused, perhaps because Khayyam already had a wife and two young children. The couple then
eloped to Kunar Province, in eastern Afghanistan, staying with distant relatives, but family members persuaded them to return to their village, promising to allow them to marry. (Afghan men are legally allowed to marry up to four wives). Once back in Kunduz, however, they were seized by the Taliban, who convened local mullahs from surrounding villages for a religious court.The lovers declared, "We love each other no matter what happens" as a Taliban mullah prepared to read out the court's judgment. They were found guilty of fornication and sentenced to death. Siddiqa was dressed in a burqa and the two of them were encircled by about two hundred males (no women) in the bazaar of Mullah Quli village, in Archi district, a remote corner of Kunduz Province close to Tajikistan.
Taliban members began the stoning, then villagers joined in, including Khayyam's father and brother, Siddiqa's brother, and other relatives. Siddiqa was killed first, then Khayyam. A crowd of onlookers who did not take part cheered them on in a festive atmosphere. "People were very happy seeing this," said Nadir Khan, 40, a local farmer and Taliban sympathizer, because the couple "did a bad thing."
The stoning found widespread support among Afghan religious authorities. For example, the head of the Ulema Council in Kunduz Province, Mawlawi Abdul Yaqub, deemed stoning to death an appropriate punishment for illegal sexual relations. (August 16, 2010)
Facebook campaign urges Muslim men to marry four wives: Some young Saudis started a Facebook group, "We Want Them Four," that advocates polygamy to end the problem of spinsterhood in their country. "Every Saudi and Arab man who is financially and physically able to marry more than one wife should not hesitate to do so in order to end spinsterhood among our women and help cap the high marriage costs that have deterred many young men from getting married." (July 6, 2010)
"1 homme, 4 femmes, 46 enfants": That's the title of an article by Mathieu Deslandes in Le Journal du Dimanche; "1 man, 4 wives, 46 children." The article tells about this Muslim family from Malii living in Bobigny, a northeastern suburb of Paris, and how the man could stop working because the government stipend for 40 children comes to €6,157 (= US$8,456) a month, and that's not even counting housing aid. The article goes into some detail how the local social worker is trying to help the women establish their own residences. (June 12, 2010)
Afghan child brides beaten for fleeing husbands: Rod Nordland and Alissa J. Rubin tell how Khadija Rasoul, 13, and Basgol Sakhi, 14, from the village of Gardan-i-Top, in the Dulina district of Ghor Province, central Afghanistan,
had every reason to expect the law would be on their side when a policeman at a checkpoint stopped the bus they were in. Disguised in boys' clothes, the girls, ages 13 and 14, had been fleeing for two days along rutted roads and over mountain passes to escape their illegal, forced marriages to much older men, and now they had made it to relatively liberal Herat Province. Instead, the police officer spotted them as girls, ignored their pleas and promptly sent them back to their remote village in Ghor Province.
There they were publicly and viciously flogged for daring to run away from their husbands. Their tormentors, who videotaped the abuse, were not the Taliban, but local mullahs and the former warlord, now a pro-government figure who largely rules the district where the girls live. Neither girl flinched visibly at the beatings, and afterward both walked away with their heads unbowed.The article provides ample detail on the beatings, including a video of what took place, and ends with the denouement:
In some ways, the two girls from Ghor were among the luckier child brides. After the floggings, the mullah declared them divorced and returned them to their own families. Two years earlier, in nearby Murhab district, two girls who had been sold into marriage to the same family fled after being abused, according to a report by the Human Rights Commission. But they lost their way, were captured and forcibly returned. Their fathers — one the village mullah — took them up the mountain and killed them.(May 30, 2010)
Palestinian husband chokes wife because pregnant with girl: An unnamed man in Nasiriyah, a village north of Nablus on the West Bank, was arrested on charges of having strangled his pregnant wife to death after an ultrasound test revealed a female fetus. Never mind that the couple already has three boys and a girl – the father insisted on another son. Relatives indicated the husband was envious of his brother, who has nine sons. (May 13, 2010)
Sun-tanned women risk arrest in Tehran: Tehran's police ch InfoGnomon
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