That is a very Human thing to do Hind..

Submitted by Mark (United Arab Emirates), Mar 28, 2006 at 00:22

Hind,

I applaud your comments on what should happen to Abdul Rahman in Afghanistan and I am sure that you are sincere in wishing that.
I would say that is a very human thing to do. It seems that the judge in the case is also a human and has found an escape clause for Abdul Rahman who has been adjudged not competent mentally to be responsible for his actions..

Here is an interesting article reported in Today's Gulf News here in Dubai:

'Talaq' in sleep lands couple in trouble
Reuters



New Delhi: A Muslim couple in India have been told by local Islamic leaders they must separate after the husband "divorced" his wife in his sleep, the Press Trust of India reported.

Sohela Ansari told friends that her husband Aftab had uttered the word talaq, or divorce, three times in his sleep, according to the report published in newspapers yesterday.

When local Islamic leaders got to hear, they said Aftab's words constituted a divorce under an Islamic procedure known as "triple talaq". The couple, married for 11 years with three children, were told they had to split.

The religious leaders ruled that if the couple wanted to remarry they would have to wait at least 100 days. Sohela would also have to spend a night with another man and be divorced by him in turn.

The couple, who live in the eastern state of West Bengal, have refused to obey the order and the issue has been referred to a local family counselling centre.

India's Muslim population is governed by Islamic personal laws on issues such as marriage, divorce and property inheritance.

"This is a totally unnecessary controversy and the local 'community leaders' or whosoever has said it are totally ignorant of Islamic law," said Zafarul Islam Khan, an Islamic scholar and editor of The Milli Gazette, a popular Muslim newspaper.
"The law clearly says any action under compulsion or in a state of intoxication has no effect. The case of someone uttering something while asleep falls under this category and will have no impact whatsoever," Khan told Reuters.
http://www.gulf-news.com/world/India/10028877.html

To be fair I have to congratulate Mr. Zafarul Islam Khan on his clarification of the matter and no doubt all of you educated Muslims would agree with he and I that this was and is a totally unnecessary controversy.

But it does raise the question, where do these people who make these wild, absurd and rash judgements get their authority from? Well they claim to get it from the Koran. And yet there is, in this case at least a certain amount of controversy over exactly what is meant by the Quran. Did Allah mean to confuse us with his perfect book or is the more obvious explanation true? i.e. that the Quran is not divine at all.

The problem with islam is that there are altogether to many of these unnecessary controversies. In front of the Dubai courts at the moment is a case of a British Air hostess who was gang raped by a bunch of local boys. The facts of the case as I understand it are that the girl got into a car with these boys on the understanding that she was getting a ride home. In fact she was taken to the desert and raped by all of them, These facts are not disputed but there is still some controversy in the law. The lawyer for the defendants has appealed the conviction (which is only 2 years jail) and asked to court to press charges against the girl who was raped as she was obviously at fault since she had been drinking, therefore she must have consented therefore it is her fault.. Well I am trusting in the law here to see the absurdity in that petition but other islamic courts have been even more absurd, for example the woman in Pakistan who was ordered by the tribal religious leaders to be raped by the men in the village because of something her brother did..

Another example here in the UAE that very moderate gulf state. About 5 years ago the same paper reported a story of an 11 year old girl who was raped. She was a Jordanian girl who was playing in the front of her house and was picked up by a local boy, taken into the desert raped and then returned to the house. The boy was tried and convicted of rape, 2 years in Jail. But, the case went to appeal and the sentence was reduced since the girl and her parents were found to be partially responsible for the rape since the girl was outside her house without a headscarf on. Bear in mind that she was in the yard of the house and she was 11 years old.

Anyways, no doubt if you will reply at all it will be to say that this is not Islam yadda yadda yadda. But the point is the people who do this stuff believe that it is Islam.

Lets give Islam the benefit of the doubt and say that it really is a pure religion that if followed will lead the world to peace spirituallity and happiness. If that is true then there is a huge cognitive dissonance. The practical application does not match that theoretical idea.

Islam needs to clean up its act. It is no point replying with something that some redneck did as an example of moral equivalence. Remember I am not a Christian. I prefer there was no religion. But where is God in Islam? It seems he has not been very active in influencing local leadership and especially the law...

---

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".