Monday, March 26, 2007http:///www.chroniclesmagazine.org
The husband routinely beat his 26-year-old German-born wife, mother of their two young children, and threatened to kill her when the court ordered him to move out of their apartment in Hamburg. The police were called repeatedly to intervene. The wife wanted a quick divorce—without waiting a year after separation, as mandated by German law—arguing that that the abuse and death threats she suffered easily fulfilled the “hardship” criteria required for an accelerated decree absolute. The judge—a woman by the name of Christa Datz-Winter—refused, however, arguing that the Kuran allows the husband to beat his wife and that the couple’s Moroccan origin must be taken into account in the case.
They both come from a cultural milieu, Her Honor wrote, in which it is common for husbands to beat their wives—and the Kuran sanctions such treatment. “The [husband’s] exercise of the right to castigate does not fulfill the hardship criteria as defined by Paragraph 1565” of German federal law, the judge’s letter said. [emphasis added] The judge further suggested that the wife’s Western lifestyle would give her husband grounds to claim his honor had been compromised.
The reports in German and English do not state this, but Turkish papers have reported that the judge made specific reference to Sura 4, which contains the infamous Verse 34:
Men have the authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.
The wife’s lawyer, Barbara Becker-Rojczyk, could not believe her eyes: a German judge was invoking Kuran in a German legal case to assert the husband’s “right to castigate” his wife. The meaning was clear: “the husband can beat his wife,” Becker-Rojczyk commented. She decided to go public with the case last Tuesday because the judge was still on the bench, two months after the controversial verdict was handed down. The judge was subsequently removed from the case, but not from the bench.
A spokesman for the court, Bernhard Olp, said the judge did not intend to suggest that violence in a marriage is acceptable, or that the Kuran supersedes German law. “The ruling is not justifiable, but the judge herself cannot explain it at this moment,” he said. But according to Spiegel Online this was not the first time that German courts have used “cultural background” to inform their verdicts. Christa Stolle of the women’s rights organization Terre des Femmes said that in cases of marital violence there have been a number of cases where the perpetrator’s culture of origin has been considered as a mitigating circumstance.
Of some 25 million Muslims in Western Europe, the majority already consider themselves autonomous, a community justifiably opposed to the decadent host society of infidels. They already demand the adoption of sharia within segregated Muslim communities, which but one step that leads to the imposition of sharia on the society as a whole. Swedish courts are already introducing sharia principles into civil cases. An Iranian-born man divorcing his Iranian-born wife was ordered by the high court in the city of Halmestad to pay Mahr, Islamic dowry ordained by the Kuran as part of the Islamic marriage contract.
As our magazine readers may recall, Europe’s elite class is ready for further surrenders. Dutch Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner—a Christian Democrat—sees the demand for sharia as perfectly legitimate, and argues that it could be introduced “by democratic means.” Muslims have a right to follow the commands of their religion, he says, even if the exercise of that right included some “dissenting rules of behavior”:
It is a sure certainty for me: if two thirds of all Netherlanders tomorrow would want to introduce sharia, then this possibility must exist. Could you block this legally? It would also be a scandal to say “this isn’t allowed”! The majority counts. That is the essence of democracy.
The same “essence” was reiterated in similar terms last July by Jens Orback, the Swedish Integration [sic] Minister, who declared in a radio debate on Channel P1, “We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.”
To all forward-looking Europeans it must be a welcome sign that continental courts are catching up with the leader in sharia compliance, Great Britain. A key tenet of sharia is that non-Muslims cannot try Muslims. Peter Beaumont, QC, senior circuit judge at London’s Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, accepts the commandment not only in civil, but also in criminal cases. He banned Jews and Hindus—and anyone married to one—from serving on the jury in the trial of Abdullah el-Faisal, accused of soliciting the murder of “unbelievers.” “For obvious reasons,” he said, “members of the jury of the Jewish or Hindu faith should reveal themselves, even if they are married to Jewish or Hindu women, because they are not fit to arbitrate in this case.” One can only speculate what the reaction would be if equally “obvious reasons” were invoked in an attempt to exclude Muslims from a trial of an alleged “Islamophobe.”
Here at home, The New York Times had a bone to pick with the German judge mainly because of her suggestion that Islam justified violence against women. It stated matter-of-factly, “While the verse cited by Judge Datz-Winter does say husbands may beat their wives for being disobedient—an interpretation embraced by fundamentalists— mainstream Muslims have long rejected wife-beating as a medieval relic.”
In reality “mainstream Muslims” do nothing of the sort. New York Times’ claim notwithstanding, the original sources for “true” Islam—the Kuran and Hadith—provide ample and detailed evidence on Islamic theory and the sources of Shari’a practice that remains in force all over the Islamic world today. According to orthodox Islamic tradition, the verse invoked by the German judge (4:34) was revealed in connection with a woman who complained to Mohammad that her husband had hit her on the face, which was still bruised. At first he told her to get even with him, but then added, “Wait until I think about it.” The revelation duly followed, after which he said: “We wanted one thing but Allah wanted another, and what Allah wanted is best.” Qatari Sheikh Walid bin Hadi explains that every man is his own judge when using violence: “The Prophet said: Do not ask a husband why he beats his wife.” The scholars at the most respected institution of Islamic learning, Cairo’s Azhar University, further explain:
If admonishing and sexual desertion fail to bring forth results and the woman is of a cold and stubborn type, the Qur’an bestows on man the right to straighten her out by way of punishment and beating, provided he does not break her bones nor shed blood. Many a wife belongs to this querulous type and requires this sort of punishment to bring her to her senses!
Physical violence against one’s wife, far from being Haram, remains divinely ordained and practically advised in modern Islam. “Take in thine hand a branch and smite therewith and break not thine oath,” the Kuran commands. Muslim propagators in the West “explain” that the Islamic teaching and practice is in line with the latest achievements of clinical psychology: it is not only correct, but positively beneficial to them because “women’s rebelliousness (nushuz) is a medical condition” based either on her masochistic delight in being beaten and tortured, or sadistic desire to hurt and dominate her husband. Either way,
Such a woman has no remedy except removing her spikes and destroying her weapon by which she dominates. This weapon of the woman is her femininity. But the other woman who delights in submission and being beaten, then beating is her remedy. So the Qur’anic command: ‘banish them to their couches, and beat them’ agrees with the latest psychological findings in understanding the rebellious woman. This is one of the scientific miracles of the Qur’an, because it sums up volumes of the science of psychology about rebellious women.
According to Allah’s commandment to men (Kuran 2:223), “Your wives are as a soil to be cultivated unto you; so approach your tilth when or how ye will.” Therefore “the righteous women are devoutly obedient.” Those that are not inhabit the nether regions of hell.
Muhammad has stated that most of those who enter hell are women, not men. Contemporary Azhar scholars of Egypt agree: “Oh, assembly of women, give charity, even from your jewelry, for you (comprise) the majority of the inhabitants of hell in the day of resurrection.” In the same spirit, courts in Muslim countries, to mention a particularly egregious legal practice, routinely sentence raped women to death for “adultery,” usually by stoning, because they follow the sharia that mandates this punishment.
To the outright divine command of every wife’s obedience to her husband, Muhammad has added a few comments of his own. When asked who among women is the best, he replied: “She who gives pleasure to him (husband) when he looks, obeys him when he bids, and who does not oppose him regarding herself and her riches fearing his displeasure.” Even in basic necessities the needs of the husband take precedence: “You shall give her food when you have taken your food, you shall clothe her when you have clothed yourself, you shall not slap her on the face, nor revile (her), nor leave (her) alone, except within the house.” The husband’s sexual needs have to be satisfied immediately: “When a man calls his wife to his bed, and she does not respond, the One Who is in the heaven is displeased with her until he is pleased with her.”
Such treatment of women might be expected to make Islam abhorrent within the cultural milieu epitomized by the equal-rights obsessed European Union and the neofeminist New York Times, but this has not happened. There is a reason for this. It is the refusal of Islam to accept the wife as her husband’s closest and inseparable loving partner and companion. Islam therefore challenges Christian marriage in principle and in practice. Muslim teaching on marriage and the family, though “conservative” about “patriarchy,” denies the traditional Christian concept of matrimony. Islam is therefore an “objective” ally of postmodernity, a few beatings here and a few rapes there notwithstanding.
“I can only say, Good night, Germany,” says Ronald Pofalla, general secretary of Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union, of Frau Datz-Winter’s ruling. Unless the madness is checked it will be good night to us all well before this century is over.
Srdja Trifkovic is the foreign-affairs editor of Chronicles: A Magazineof American Culture and director of The Rockford Institute's Center forInternational Affairs.
Click here to find out when Dr. Trifkovic is scheduledto appear on radio or television.
No comments:
Post a Comment