In response to commenter "Vijay"

Submitted by Reem (United Kingdom), Oct 31, 2004 at 21:29

In response to your two questions Vijay:

--Do you condemn "honor" killings practiced in many Muslim countries where a father/brother/relative kills a woman for real and many times imagined infidelity?
--Do you condemn the practice of female genital mutiliation carried out often in tandem with child marriages?

My answers as a Muslim are :

Number one, you will find zero mention of honor killings in any written scripture to do with islam be it the quran or the sayings of the prophet! They are purely cultural, and in fact islamically the relative responsible for killing the girl should in fact by islamic shariah be condemed to death. In the case of an unmarried girl commiting fornication, in shariah law the punishment would be to be whipped and only after the statement of 4 witnesses who actually witnessed the fornication have been accepted by the judge. I think you will agree that it is virtually unheard of that 4 people would witness two people having intercourse supposedly in secret!

Number two, female genital mutlation is also prohibited islamicially and is abhorred. Again this is down to cultural practice.

As a last comment, both honor killings and genital mutilation are only practices in a handful of Muslim countries. And they have nothing to do with Islam. In the same sense one could (to be pedantic) argue that the large number of rapes and murders occurring daily in western countries are due to Chrisitanity (or the lack of it!)

Why must everything that happens in Muslim countries be attributed to Islam, and yet anything that happens in any other religious environment not be attributed to the religion! Give the religion a break people!

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