| Submit your comments on this article |
| International |
| Nigerian woman sentenced to stoning for premarital sex |
| 2001-10-19 |
Last week, the Upper Sharia Court in Gwadabawa, Sokoto State, in northern Nigeria sentenced a 30-year-old pregnant woman to be stoned for premarital sex. Human-rights organizations immediately protested the sentence. The human-rights problems in imposing a 1,000-year-old codification of law are not confined to tribalistic Nigeria. Muslims and non-Muslims alike suffer under some of the extreme provisions of the Sharia (Islamic law) applied, directly or indirectly, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, and other areas. But these actions are not the essentialist Islam. In fact, most contemporary fundamentalist impositions do not even observe the strict procedural protections the Sharia provided, and under which few if any of today's attacks on human rights could be accomplished. They violate the provisions of the very law they claim to be following. Furthermore, today's application of the criminal provisions of the Sharia are as ahistorical as they are problematical for human rights. The Islamic empire in its various forms more often substituted its own criminal courts and criminal decrees for that of the qadi (judge), leaving the criminal-law provisions of the Sharia among the least developed areas of classical Islamic law. Of course religion isn't the enemy; culture is the enemy. Unfortunately, religion is deeply intertwined with culture, and cultures are often imperialistic. Islam in non-Arab settings produces a version of the religion that's relatively tolerant -- for instance, as Indonesia was until quite recently, or Malaysia. Islam in the Arab setting can be just as easy-going, the Sufis for instance, or it can be ineffably brutal, as in Afghanistan and (dare one say it?) Saudi Arabia. This brutal version, exemplified by the Wahhabi sect, is the one that's being exported, and everywhere it's been exported violence and intolerance has followed in its wake. The roots of the Wahhabi are Arab, and their brutality resonates especially well in those cultures -- such as are found in northern Nigeria -- that have their own deeply venerated traditions of ignorance and brutality. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |