generalspeaking

Stone-Age Barbarism

For a religion that prides itself on its associated legal system and cultural heritage, fundamentalist Islam appears on the evidence to practise truly barbaric systems of justice.

When sharia law will not permit fundamental human freedom of choice, imposing death sentences on those wishing to detach themselves from Islam, on those whose gender identification is differentiated, on those said to blaspheme Allah and/or His Prophet, or women who are alleged to have compromised their virginity, or who have been raped and found to blame for it, this is a clear signal that something is dramatically human-rights averse.

Most Muslim-majority countries of the world have found it expedient to recognize they inhabit a Globe far from the Middle Ages, and facing modernity have become somewhat enlightened in their practise of Islam. Yet there are countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia where the kind of Islam that is the normative captures everyday life and culture in a strictured web of stern fundamentalism. The death penalty is casually imposed.

And it is imposed in dreadfully brutal ways, reflecting the barbarity of the past, not the recognition of the present that people have fundamental human rights that must be honoured. A country like Pakistan, modern enough to have availed itself of nuclear weaponry, has sentenced a Christian mother of five to death for blaspheming against the Prophet Mohammad. Muslim women in a work crew protested that as a non-Muslim they had no wish for her to handle a communal water bowl.

She responded by what they took to be derogatory comments about the Prophet and the outraged Muslim women reported her to a local cleric who then alerted the authorities, leading to a court located in the Punjab less than 47 miles from Lahore to sentence her to death for the crime of blasphemy under the Pakistani penal code. So much for civil authority under Islamic sharia law.

In Afghanistan a man was sentenced to death for converting from Islam to Christianity. Sharia courts in Afghanistan sentenced Sayed Pervez Kambakhsh to death for reading an article on woman's rights. A court in Nigeria sentenced a man to death for stealing a bicycle.
In Iran hundreds of women are stoned to death as punishment for various purported crimes. Honour killings in many of these societies take their tribal-religious punishments seriously; about ten thousand a year in Pakistan.

Tribal patriarchies saw fit traditionally to ensure that women did not stray, did not offend Islam and tribal expectations by trifling with men not of their own family through exposing themselves in public unaccompanied by a male escort and wearing non-traditional clothing. If a woman is raped it is deemed to be her fault for tantalizing a man with her womanly wiles. If she has shamed her family honour in any such manner the male members of her family expunge the shame she brought upon them by killing her.

Just as in the medieval era an entire village would gather to regard a public execution as a festive and entertaining occasion, so too was it expected that a village, under sharia law, would participate in the stoning of a women held to be an adulteress or a man judged as an adulterer. The law is quite precise, requiring a women to be buried up to her chest, a man up to his waist, within a shroud for easy burial after the stoning ceremony concluded with the the death of the sentenced. The stones to be hurled to be of a certain size.

The case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani was one brought to the attention of the international community but there are many more instances of such death sentences that are carried out quietly without embarrassment to the country involved. Despite an international outcry in support of Ms. Ashtiani, Iran's chief of its Human Rights Council has defended the practise of stoning to death: "...only a small part of our extensive punishment laws... We are proud of having such a system."

Ms. Ashtiani was convicted in 2006 of complicity in her husband's death and jailed for ten years. She was also convicted of "having illicit relations" with two men and that carried a penalty of being flogged 99 times. The courts later found her guilty of "adultery while married", and that was the cause of her death sentence through stoning. She was beaten and tortured to force her to appear before television cameras to admit to being guilty of the charges laid against her.

Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad responded to the international protest over Ms. Ashtiani's sentencing by stating, "I want to make my own appeal. In the United States there are 53 women condemned to death. Why is the whole world not asking them to pardon these women? We handed to them a list of these women but the media is in their hands and this is why they are not covering this question."

Clever, isn't he? It is an unassailable truth that the United States still legally practises capital punishment, something abhorrent to most democratic countries of the world. There is a certain logic there; sentencing someone to death by state dictate as a system of justice is not an admirable, civil action; it demeans the society by subverting respect for human life. Irrespective of the manner of delivering death it is still finally, death.

There is something horribly gruesome, however, in a system of justice that employs stoning as a meritorious way of delivering punishment. And that is an inescapable fact. It was meant originally to inspire terror in people, to ensure that they knew what was in store for them should they conspire to upset social mores.

What could be more horrible than to have your neighbours despise you to the extent that they aid the authorities in your death? Most Iranians now would refuse to take part in anything so odious; instead the Basiji, the casual black-clad militias are engaged to stone the condemned. In that humane society.

Labels: Middle East, Sexism, Societal Failures, Traditions

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, November 21, 2010