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Emeka Mamah: Why [Mohammad Nureen Ashafa] passed Fatwa on Islamic preacher with 86 wives [LINK-ZUM]

This article begins by establishing that Imam Ashafa is an authority on his religion and a recognized representative of his religion...

Mohammad Nureen Ashafa is the Imam of Ashafa Central Mosque, Tudun Wada, Kaduna; Vice President, Ashafa Mosque Foundation, as well as the Co-Executive Director of Interfaith Mediation Centre of Muslim-Christian Dialogue Forum, also in Kaduna. He spoke to some media organisations on the implications of the death sentence [fatwa] passed on octogenarian Islamic preacher, Mohammed Bello Abubakar, by the Jama'tu Nasril Islam [JNI], for marrying 86 wives contrary to Islamic injunctions.

This article includes words about women that will sound pleasing to the Western ear...

Islam took into consideration certain needs, social and emotional, sexual urge, all these are part of the things a woman needs in marriage. It is injustice if you do not provide these adequately for the woman. [...] So, how do you share 86 wives in a year? It means that you cannot meet some of the women more than once in a week. In fact, it may not even be possible because we have 52 weeks in a year. So, if you see one every week, the others have to wait till the next year to take their turns. What is the legitimacy? There is no legitimacy for that in Islam. It is an abuse on the rights and dignity of these women. It is an abuse on the sanctity of woman-hood. It is an abuse to marry 86 wives in the name of Islam. [...] Women have rights, they have dignity and honour. Islam respects the dignity of women. A woman needs emotional satisfaction. That affection is part of the rudiments of marriage. How does the man with 86 wives satisfy the sexual and emotional needs of these women?

... with all that being said a reader might accidentally gloss over the sections where Imam Ashafa condones having women as sexual slaves and stock animals...

There is room for concubine in Islam. And that is why you see some royal fathers have four wives and they have concubines. The history of concubine has to do with slavery, if you had women who are in your possession as slaves. This is because in those days, people bought slaves. It may no longer be fashionable in modern times but the law is still there. If you have women as slaves, they can have children for you but you have to protect them, and give them the same honour you give your wives, though they are not legitimate wives. [...] He can do that in the name of culture because there is no restriction on the number of women a man can marry, in most of the traditions.

... thus one is left to wonder what Imam Ashafa is talking about, what is it that Islam is really saying about women and slavery. Perhaps we should turn to the Holy Quran for answers. Answers like "All married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess" or you don't have to be modest around your wives or your slave girls "that your right hand possess." If we go by what the Holy Quran says, if we go by what today's representatives of Islam say, then using women for sexual slavery and breeding stock is an acceptable practice in the 21st Century just as it was centuries ago. And then there's the question of putting someone to death because hundreds of years ago a mass murderer and a bandit said that an invisible monster that lives in the sky told us we had to.

What do you say? - Trevor Blake

Labels: islam, slavery

Jeff Jacoby: The Islamist war on Muslim women [LINK-ZUM]

The "Qatif girl" won a reprieve last week. On Dec. 17, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah pardoned the young woman, who was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison after she pressed charges against seven men who had raped her and a male acquaintance in 2006. Two weeks earlier, Sudan's president extended a similar reprieve to Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher convicted of insulting Islam because her 7-year-old students named a teddy bear Muhammad. Gibbons had been sentenced to prison, but government-organized street demonstrators were loudly demanding her execution. [...]

No international furor saved Aqsa Parvez, a Toronto teenager, whose father was charged on Dec. 11 with strangling her to death because she refused to wear a hijab. "She just wanted to look like everyone else," one of Aqsa's friends told the National Post, "and I guess her dad had a problem with that." No reprieve came for Banaz Mahmod, either. She was 20, a Kurdish immigrant to Britain, whose father and uncle had her killed last year after she left an abusive arranged marriage and fell in love with a man not from the family's village in Kurdistan. Banaz was choked to death with a bootlace, stuffed into a suitcase, and buried in a garden 70 miles away. More than 25 such "honor killings" have been confirmed in Britain's Muslim community in recent years. Many more are suspected. [...]

By Western standards, the subjugation of women by Muslim fanatics, and the sometimes pathological Islamist obsession with female sexuality, are unthinkable. Time and again they lead to shocking acts of violence and depravity: [...] In San Francisco, a young Muslim woman was shot dead after she uncovered her hair and put on makeup in order to be a maid of honor at a friend's wedding. [...]

All these are only examples - the tip of a dreadful iceberg that will never be demolished until Muslims by the millions rise up against it. As for the rest of us, we too have an obligation to raise our voices. It took a worldwide outcry to spare "Qatif girl" and Nazanin. But there are countless others like them, and our silence may seal their fate.

[Article continues at link. The West is largely a Christian culture, but a secular Christian culture. Christianity is still tied to the Bible and all its support for slavery, all its oppression of women, all its scientific nonsense. But secular Christianity can simply ignore these cruel and foolish practices, picking out the good stuff from the Bible and getting on with things. The Muslim world has so far rejected the secular and has no intention of getting rid of its support for slavery, all its oppression of women, all its scientific nonsense. I hope the Muslim world can get its act together, keep the good stuff and join the rest of us in the 21st Century (even joining the 19th would be an improvement), but there isn't much the West can peacefully do to make that happen. But we can do something about honor killings in the West. Prosecute the murderers and their murderous support system. Use the same techniques that were successful against the Ku Klux Klan and the Mafia - crushing taxation, relentless arrests and incarceration, and inescapable social opprobrium. No honor for honor killers, not one second of respect for their sacred traditions and ancient culture. - Trevor Blake]

Labels: christianity, islam, science, sex, slavery, theocracy

Robert Spencer: Hitchens simply cannot be this stupid [LINK-ZUM]

Hitchens reflects the popular view, which is that the onus for slavery is squarely on the West. [... however...] Some of the evidence that Islamic slavery still goes on consists of a spate of slavery cases involving Muslims in the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan Al-Turki was sentenced in September 2006 to 27 years to life in prison, for keeping a woman as a slave in his home in Colorado. For his part, Al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias. He told the judge: "Your honor, I am not here to apologize, for I cannot apologize for things I did not do and for crimes I did not commit. The state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors was the focal point of the prosecution." The following month, an Egyptian couple living in Southern California received a fine and prison terms, to be followed by deportation, after pleading guilty to holding a ten-year-old girl as a slave. And in January 2007, an attache of the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington and his wife were charged with keeping three Christian domestic workers from India in slave-like conditions in al-Saleh's Virginia home. One of the women remarked: "I believed that I had no choice but to continue working for them even though they beat me and treated me worse than a slave." Slavery is still practiced openly today in two Muslim countries, Sudan and Mauritania. [...] There is evidence that slavery still continues beneath the surface in some majority-Muslim countries as well - notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962, Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970, and Niger, which didn't abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals.

[Article continues at link. It was the secularization of Christianity, and not Christianity, that ended the open slave trade in the West. The Bible contains exactly no admonishments to slave owners or the slave trade. As Christianity accomodated the advances of secular morals, it moved away from slavery. It is the resistance of Islam to secularization that keeps the open slave trade alive in the Muslim world. The Quran does contain some admonishments to slave owners and the slave trade, but it also contains support for the slave trade. The secularization of Islam will swing the Muslim world away from slavery, and the lack of secularization will keep it in place. - Trevor Blake]

Labels: christianity, islam, slavery

Trevor Blake: Christ @ Work [LINK-ZUM]

From the "Christ@Work" Web page: "Christ@Work is the organizational brand name for FCCI used in the United States. FCCI (Fellowship of Companies for Christ) is an international organization of Christian business leaders whose members believe in the sovereignty of God and the validity of His Word. As such, we understand that God is the owner of the company we seek to lead, and that we are stewards of His business. Together we seek His will for the operations of these companies through study, mutual encouragement and accountability, and prayer. [...] Mixing religion and business DOES work." FCCI believes that "the Bible is God's written and inspired revelation to man and is the primary authority for man's life." They cite Leviticus 19:35, wherein the Lord commands us to not cheat others by using dishonest weights and measurements in commerce. That sounds good. I wonder what they have to say about Leviticus 19:19, wherein the Lord commands us to not wear clothes of both linen and wool? How about Leviticus 19:20-22, wherein the Lord commands us to beat slave women who have sex with men other than their slave-fiance (the Lord missed His chance, again, to say that slavery was wrong)? And does FCCI have anything to say about Leviticus 19:27, wherein the Lord commands men to refrain from rounding the corners of their hair or beards? The Lord commanded us to do all those things, and said them all at the same time - shouldn't we do all of them?

The Bible does contain some fine moral advice in it. It also contains some inhumanly evil moral advice. It also contains some foolish nonsense that dresses itself up as moral advice. That doesn't make it much different from any number of other books, ancient and modern. What makes the Bible different is that groups like FCCI cite the Bible as divinely inspired - infalliable, and to be taken as a whole. The FCCI presents the Bible as a moral authority only when it makes sense and when it matches current secular morals. When the Bible commands us to beat women slaves or to not cut our beards in God-displeasing ways, only a few verses away from the 'good' stuff, the FCCI has to rely on people not reading the Bible for themselves to maintain their moral authority.

Labels: christianity, sex, slavery

Albert Mohler: Is Your Baby Gay? What If You Could Know? What If You Could Do Something About It? [LINK-ZUM]

What if you could know that your unborn baby boy is likely to be sexually attracted to other boys? Beyond that, what if hormonal treatments could change the baby's orientation to heterosexual? Would you do it? Some scientists believe that such developments are just around the corner. [...] If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.

[Article continues at link. Let's consider Dr. Mohler's claims. He claims Hinuism, Buddhism and Marxism are satanic (Catholics, too), and he claims that atheism is a religion. He claims "intelligent design" is a scientific theory. Dr. Mohler claims the North won the US Civil War because they were Christians (but, uh, weren't the South Christians too? And isn't the Bible just queer for slavery?) He is also way against torture except sometimes. So for sure and for real this guy has the high ground when it comes to morals and facts, and oh thank heaven he and his kind have the ear of the Bush administration. American Samizdat, March 9 2007 - Trevor Blake]

Labels: buddhism, christianity, creationism, fascism, hindu, sex, slavery, socialism

Ed Pilkington: Life without hope [LINK-ZUM]

In the US, there are 2,270 prisoners who were sentenced as children to life without parole. They will die behind bars. [...] Michigan is one of 41 states in America that allows children under 18 to be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. The US is among a tiny minority of countries (Somalia is another) that have refused to sign up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that expressly forbids the practice. According to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, only three other countries - Israel, South Africa and Tanzania - mete out the sentence and they have collectively just 12 prisoners serving it.

[How do the crimes and sentences of these children compare to the crimes and sentences of Nazi war criminals? Karl Donitz, second Reichsprasident of the Third Reich following Hitler's suicide, was sentenced to 10 years. Konstantin von Neurath, found guilty of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war-crimes and crimes against humanity, was sentenced to 15 years. Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth and found guilty of crimes against humanity, was sentenced to 20 years. Albert Speer, found guilty of the use of slave labor, was sentenced to 20 years. Nothing can bring back the men and women murdered by children serving life sentences in US prisons. But life in prison for children cannot be the only answer to this problem. - Trevor Blake]

Labels: fascism, prison, slavery

unreason tags 2 [LINK-ZUM]

objectivist orgone overpopulation prohibition race radionics slavery socialism synanon taylorism technocracy ufo

Labels: objectivist, orgone, overpopulation, prohibition, race, radionics, slavery, socialism, synanon, taylorism, technocracy, ufo

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