But here's the icing on the cake: these prisons jailing women for crimes against them were largely built with tens of millions of dollars of international aid.More >>
HRW’s analysis documents extensively the enforcement of Islamic law vis-à-vis women’s rights in Chechnya, as part of Chechen President Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov’s ‘Campaign for Female Virtue’. In fact, Kadyrov, who was first appointed president of the Chechen Republic by the Kremlin in February 2007, has never disguised his advocacy for Shari’a. Soon after becoming president, he defended polygamy as part of Chechen tradition, and in 2009, he praised the male relatives of seven young women, whom they shot in the head and dumped by a roadside as part of a series of honor killings. Speaking to journalists on a Friday afternoon outside a mosque in Grozny, the capital of the Chechen Republic, Kadyrov said that the women had ‘loose morals’, thereby deserving death, and that ‘no one can tell us not to be Muslims’. Even so, polygamy and honor killings...More >>
The Muslim Brotherhood may become a major political force in Egypt after this revolution is done. It may even become the dominant one. While Western commentators debate just how secular (not) or extreme (very) the Muslim Brotherhood is, there's no debating their commitment to Islamic sharia law as the blueprint for running society.
Sharia law based on (arbitrarily defined) religious injunctions is fundamentally opposed to the legal systems we have set up in the West. And while some will attempt to whitewash the practical consequences of sharia law wherever it has been imposed (eg. "This isn't real sharia. It's a cultural thing. It's being misrepresented), the examples of outrageous - some would say, barbaric - rulings by sharia-minded authorities around the world are too numerous to properly get one's head around.
Canadians were captivated by the plight of Amanda Lindhout in 2008 and 2009. She was an Albertan freelance journalist taken captive in Somalia. Speaking in Edmonton this week, Lindhout recounted her experiences in Somalia, and spoke about the plight of women there. However, she did not omit any silver lining to the misogynistic cloud hanging over Somalia; hope remains.
Al-Shabaab translates as “The Youth”. This militia group has been credited as having taken control of vast portions of Somalia, and has begun imposing a Taliban-esque interpretation of Sharia law wherever they can.
Al-Shabaab would later claim that Lindhout had given birth to a child while in captivity, allegedly fathered by one of their members. They claimed to have named the baby “Osama”. (Apparently, nothing in Al-Shabaab’s favoured version of the Koran forbids rape.) So one thing quickly becomes crystal-clear about Al-Shabaab. They’re a very classy bunch.
(Note that they made the claim after Lindhout had been released. There is no evidence to suggest that Lindhout ever gave birth to such a child, and...More >>
Advocates of sharia law courts in the West would be well advised to examine how (in)justice is served in those countries where the system is most established. The latest outrage from Saudi Arabia:
A Saudi judge has asked several hospitals in the country whether they could damage a man's spinal cord as punishment after he was convicted of attacking another man with a cleaver and paralyzing him, local newspapers reported on Thursday...
"But it's hard to follow details of the Saudi justice system. People are sentenced in closed trials with no access to the public and no lawyers," he said.
According to Amnesty, in 2005, a convict in the kingdom had his teeth pulled out by a dentist because he had smashed another man's teeth out in a fight.
"We have also had cases of people sentenced to blindness because they have caused the blindness of another person," Chirouf said. "But never anything involving a spinal cord."
So much for human rights, the Hyppocratic Oath and the common decency of human beings towards each other....More >>
A recent report by
The Muslim Brotherhood may become a major political force in Egypt after this revolution is done. It may even become the dominant one. While Western commentators debate just how secular (not) or extreme (very) the Muslim Brotherhood is, there's no debating their commitment to Islamic sharia law as the blueprint for running society.
Canadians were captivated by the plight of Amanda Lindhout in 2008 and 2009. She was an Albertan freelance journalist taken captive in Somalia. Speaking in Edmonton this week, Lindhout recounted her experiences in Somalia, and spoke about the plight of women there. However, she did not omit any silver lining to the misogynistic cloud hanging over Somalia; hope remains.
Advocates of sharia law courts in the West would be well advised to examine how (in)justice is served in those countries where the system is most established. The 
