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2005-09-04 Afghanistan/South Asia

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Posted by john 2005-09-04 07:40|| || Front Page|| [11124 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 On a related topic, there is an excellent ebook in french by an activist(Tm) who synthethized data from Australia (where there has been more high profile cases since), Northern Europe, France, Netherland,... on the sexual predation by gangs of muslim youths from various ethnic backgrounds (north-african in western Europe, lebanese in Australia, kurdish or somalian in Northern Europe) litterally specialized in gangraping "unmodest" non-muslim girls, sometimes very young.
http://www.coranix.com/biblio/tournantes_international.htm
http://www.coranix.com/biblio/tournantes_international.pdf

The article above strikes me as an another illustration of systematic exploitation of a category deemed inferior (wimmen), in a non-criminal (but shameful and disgusting) way. This is truly revolting.
Sexual exploitation is of course not restricted to muslim culture, but this kind of institutionnalization and societal acceptance is revolting... I'm a bum, so I don't fully remember, but this remind me of some articles on the widespread abuse of young women by elements of the iranian society (resulting in pedophilia and white slavery), made possible by their intrinsic lower status in regard of the law and society's standards.

This really bugs me (I'm the sentimental type), and so does the astounding silence about the severe "flaws" of islamic cultures that no feminist or progressive dare to ttouch.

Posted by anonymous5089 2005-09-04 10:13|| 2005-09-04 10:13|| Front Page Top

#2 "It's not nikaah, it's prostitution by another name," says the frail, seventy five year old."
It's niether one you old freak it's rape.

Posted by raptor 2005-09-04 11:40|| 2005-09-04 11:40|| Front Page Top

#3 Just remember, these dirty old men would foist their ways on the rest of the world if they had their way.

Posted by Photle Sleamble2640 2005-09-04 12:06|| 2005-09-04 12:06|| Front Page Top

#4 This practice is based on the Old Testament view that biology determines marriageability - when someone hits puberty, he or she is eligible. It also happens to be the major tradition around the world across races, ethnicities and religions, until "reformers" started infantilizing children - who had previously been regarded as adults in miniature. There is nothing inherently "disgusting" about old men marrying teenagers*, any more than there is anything "disgusting" about the Texas billionaire marrying Anna Nicole Smith. What is sad is that this is being done without their consent - they are essentially being sold into arranged marriages.

* Note that teenagers in the Third World are much more mature and grown-up than their developed country counterparts - they tend to have to grow up faster, because they have to work to support their families at an early age. In the West, growing up means losing your virginity at the earliest possible date, whereas in certain Muslim countries, growing up means holding on to it, on pain of pregnancy and/or death. (Doesn't seem to apply to Southeast Asia, where Muslims are said to be pretty liberal in their attitudes towards sex - moralistic in word, but permissive in spirit).

Posted by Zhang Fei 2005-09-04 12:49|| http://timurileng.blogspot.com]">[http://timurileng.blogspot.com] 2005-09-04 12:49|| Front Page Top

#5 "This practice is based on the Old Testament view . . ."

Wrong, ZF. Again, not your topic. (Interesting to note your deconstructionist "bent" in this, and other posts, and I wish --sort of-- that I had the time to disabuse you of your uneducated opinions . . .)

On topic: These idiot-Moslem-men, and their culture, should all die.

Posted by ex-lib 2005-09-04 13:17|| 2005-09-04 13:17|| Front Page Top

#6 The Arabs prefer teenage, virgin brides

well duh! The girls don't know how badly inadequate the Arab men are in every sense of the word - they have nothing to compare to...

Posted by Frank G">Frank G 2005-09-04 13:43|| 2005-09-04 13:43|| Front Page Top

#7 ex-lib: "This practice is based on the Old Testament view . . ."

Wrong, ZF. Again, not your topic. (Interesting to note your deconstructionist "bent" in this, and other posts, and I wish --sort of-- that I had the time to disabuse you of your uneducated opinions . . .)

Are you saying that the Old Testament does not feature minors being married off when they reach puberty without divine retribution being forthcoming? This puberty standard isn't just a biblical thing - it is practiced in the natural world and in most of the non-Western world - and it is practiced here in the West - except teenagers here don't get married before having sex.

What I have written here has nothing to do with deconstructionist theories, which are written in impenetrable prose opaque even to other practitioners. I am putting ingrained prejudices in the spotlight and providing contexts and explanations for other traditions to show that many of our prejudices are neither scientific nor self-evident.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2005-09-04 13:44|| http://timurileng.blogspot.com]">[http://timurileng.blogspot.com] 2005-09-04 13:44|| Front Page Top

#8 " . . . deconstructionist theories, which are written in impenetrable prose opaque even to other practitioners . . . "

Actually, they're not that hard to uncover.

" . . . many of our prejudices are neither scientific nor self-evident . . . "

Finding dirty old men disgusting, regardless of cultural conditioning on either side, is hardly a matter of prejudice. Your statement makes me wonder if you have much first-hand experience with Moslem men and their abberant, sexually deviant, destructive mindsets.

Posted by ex-lib 2005-09-04 14:02|| 2005-09-04 14:02|| Front Page Top

#9 ex-lib: Finding dirty old men disgusting, regardless of cultural conditioning on either side, is hardly a matter of prejudice. Your statement makes me wonder if you have much first-hand experience with Moslem men and their abberant, sexually deviant, destructive mindsets.

No offense, but if you find evidence of such disgust in Muslim literature, please be so kind as to point me in that direction. The fact is that some principles aren't universal - the rampant promiscuity we in the West practice is viewed with disgust in much of the non-Christian world.* That view clearly isn't universal, since we don't have the same opinion about our own sexual norms. Outside of the West, sodomy isn't viewed as a basic human right - it is viewed as an unnatural act in many places, and a criminal act in some - many of which have nothing to do with Islam.

Bottom line for me is that I don't have any real issues with how young Muslims like their women (as long as it's at or above the age of puberty) - what I have a problem with is that these young women have no way to refuse these marriages. The other problem is that many Arab countries don't have or don't enforce laws against either wife-beating or honor-killing. The basic principle isn't deconstructionism - it's picking out a position that is defensible and universal in the sense that many men of other cultures and faiths can agree about them - and not just universal in the sense that we believe they really ought to think like us. Heck - in that sense, Muslim views are also universal, since they believe we really ought to think like them.

* This is why traditionalist - or evangelical - strains of Christianity are more successful at propagating their message in non-Christian parts of the world than the more modern strains, such as Episcopalianism or Presbyterianism.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2005-09-04 14:29|| http://timurileng.blogspot.com]">[http://timurileng.blogspot.com] 2005-09-04 14:29|| Front Page Top

#10 Why ZF, could you actually CITE A VERSE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT proving your assertion, rather than indulge in generalites calculated to play on ignorance?

I recommend looking at the selection of Rebecca for Isaac, and the courtship of Rebecca and Jacob. When Dinah got raped, her brothers didn't stone her, but slaughtered the offenders and preserved her alive. Don't blather about OT sexual attitudes until you've read Song of Solomon.

And Valentine's Day is named after a Christian Bishop who married couples in defiance of bans issued by PAGAN Roman Emperors.

I think your problem is that you can't handle Judeo-Christian exceptionalism, insisting on viewing it through a lens calculated to obscure that exceptionalism. THAT is what ex-lib was talking about when he mentioned deconstructionism: you've turned your theory about religion into a procrustean bed in order to kill religion under the pretense of scholarship.

Posted by Ptah">Ptah 2005-09-04 14:53|| http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org]">[http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org] 2005-09-04 14:53|| Front Page Top

#11 P: I recommend looking at the selection of Rebecca for Isaac, and the courtship of Rebecca and Jacob. When Dinah got raped, her brothers didn't stone her, but slaughtered the offenders and preserved her alive. Don't blather about OT sexual attitudes until you've read Song of Solomon.

And Valentine's Day is named after a Christian Bishop who married couples in defiance of bans issued by PAGAN Roman Emperors.

I believe we were on the subject on the permissibility of marriage at puberty in the Old Testament vs the view expressed by some commenters that Muslim men are perverts because they marry minors.

P: I think your problem is that you can't handle Judeo-Christian exceptionalism, insisting on viewing it through a lens calculated to obscure that exceptionalism. THAT is what ex-lib was talking about when he mentioned deconstructionism: you've turned your theory about religion into a procrustean bed in order to kill religion under the pretense of scholarship.

What I have said is that the prejudice against marriage at puberty vs the tolerance of marriage at majority is not a Judeo-Christian artifact - it is an artifact of "reformers" having nothing to do with Judaism or Christianity. My view is that there is nothing universalistic about Judeo-Christian principles - every religion or culture is an exercise in exceptionalism. If we are going to get others to agree with us, we need to establish some common ground - and that common ground is not what our atheistic "reformers" dictate as acceptable - in contradiction to what the Old Testament described as acceptable. We might achieve common ground on the desireability of free will and the undesirability of corporal punishment or murder. We are unlikely to achieve common ground on either polygamy or marriage at puberty.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2005-09-04 15:12|| http://timurileng.blogspot.com]">[http://timurileng.blogspot.com] 2005-09-04 15:12|| Front Page Top

#12 Then cite the "reformers", please.

Posted by Ptah">Ptah 2005-09-04 19:46|| http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org]">[http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org] 2005-09-04 19:46|| Front Page Top

#13 OH, I didn't really ANSWER your assertion:

Each of the passages I cited are "relevant" in that the girl is, in a sense, courted and had an option to accept or refuse the suitor. The Dinah incident is an example of what happened when the process was violated.

Posted by Ptah">Ptah 2005-09-04 19:57|| http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org]">[http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org] 2005-09-04 19:57|| Front Page Top

#14 Here's a long article about the evolution of the age of consent in the Western world. (Attitudes in the Orient are pretty similar to the Roman - and 19th century Western - views on the subject, which is why marriage with minors who have reached puberty doesn't ruffle many feathers):

Traditionally the age at which individuals could come together in a sexual union was something either for the family to decide or a matter of tribal custom. Probably in most cases this coincided with the onset of MENARCHE in girls and the appearance of pubic hair in boys, that is, between twelve and fourteen, but the boundaries remained fluid. In much of classical Greece this was true of both same- and opposite-sex relationships. In Republican Rome, marriage and the age of consent were initially private matters between the families involved. Not until the time of Augustus in the first century C.E. did the state begin to intervene. Marriage then legally became a two-step process, a betrothal which involved an enforceable agreement between the heads of two households, and then marriage itself. Women who were not yet of age could be betrothed with the consent of their fathers, but the woman herself had to consent to marriage.

The Roman tradition influenced peoples and cultures with whom it had come in contact. In the Islamic tradition following Muhammad, betrothal could take place earlier than PUBERTY, perhaps as early as seven, but the marriage was not supposed to be consummated until the girl menstruated and was of age. In medieval Europe, Gratian, the influential founder of Canon law in the twelfth century, accepted the traditional age of puberty for marriage (between 12 and 14) but he also said consent was "meaningful" if the children were older than seven. Some authorities said consent could take place earlier. Such a marriage would be permanent as long as neither party sought annulment before reaching puberty (12 for girls and 14 for boys) or if they had already consummated the marriage. Even if the husband had technically raped his wife before she reached puberty, the marriage was regarded as consummated. It was this policy which was carried over into English common law, and although consent was necessary, force and influence or persuasion seemed to have been permissible elements. Similarly Gratian's ideas about age became part of European civil law.

The age of consent in both English and continental law seemed to be particularly elastic when property was involved or family alliances were at stake. For example in 1564, a three year old named John was married to a two year old named Jane in the Bishop's Court in Chester, England. Though Shakespeare set his Romeo and Juliet in Verona, the fact that Juliet was thirteen probably reflects the reality in England. Her mother, who was twenty-six, calls her almost an old maid.

The American colonies followed the English tradition but the law could at best be called a guide. For example in Virginia in 1689, Mary Hathaway was only nine when she was married to William Williams. We know of her case only because two years later she sued for divorce, and was released from the covenant she had made because the marriage had not been consummated. Interestingly, historian Holly Brewer, who discovered the case, speculated that if William had raped Mary, she probably would not have been given the divorce. The only reliable data on age at marriage in England in the early modern period comes from Inquisitions Post Mortem which involved only those who died and left property. It appears that the more complete the records, the more likely it is to discover young marriages. Judges honored marriages based on mutual consent at age younger than seven, in spite of what Gratian had said, and there are recorded marriages of two and three year olds. The seventeenth-century lawyer Henry Swinburne distinguished between the marriages of those under seven and those between seven and puberty. He wrote that those under seven who had said their vows had to ratify it afterwards by giving kisses and embraces, by lying together, by exchanging gifts or tokens, or by calling each other husband or wife. A contemporary, Philip Stubbes, wrote that in sixteenth-century East Anglia, infants still in swaddling clothes were married. The most influential legal text of the seventeenth century in England, that of Sir Edward Coke, made it clear that the marriage of girls under twelve was normal, and the age at which a girl who was a wife was eligible for a dower from her husband's estate was nine even though her husband be only four years old.

The age of consent was more variable than a summary of the law seems to imply. Peter Laslett, for example, used available statistics to argue marriage and child bearing in the late teens was not common in England and marriage at twelve was virtually unknown. The problem is that his statistics might well be skewed because in England only a small portion of marriages were registered, and even on these registrations it is difficult to tell if they recorded first or second or later marriages. A second marriage by a man in his late fifties or a woman in her early thirties skews the data. Not all marriage records even bother to record the participants' ages. Unrecorded are marriages without parental consent and private weddings and the quality of data varies from region to region. For example in the parish of Middlesex County, Virginia, there is a record of fourteen-year-old Sarah Halfhide marrying twenty-one-year-old Richard Perrot. Only in the last sentence of the register does it indicate that she was a widow. Did the compiler read that far? We simply do not know what her age at first marriage was, or even if it had been consummated. Of the ninety-eight girls on the ten-year register, three probably married at age eight, one at twelve, one at thirteen, and two at fourteen. Historians in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have sometimes been reluctant to accept data regarding young ages of marriage, holding instead that the recorded age was a misreading by a later copier of the records. Natalie Davis, whose book The Return of Martin Guerre became a movie, made her heroine, Bertrande, much older than the nine-to ten-year old girl she was when she married her missing husband.

In the nineteenth century France issued the Napoleonic Code and many other countries, following France's example, began revising their laws. The Napoleonic Code, however, had not changed the age of consent, which remained at thirteen. When historian Magnus Hirschfeld surveyed the age of consent of some fifty countries (mostly in Europe and the Americas) at the beginning of the twentieth century, the age of consent was twelve in fifteen countries, thirteen in seven, fourteen in five, fifteen in four, and sixteen in five. In the remaining countries it remained unclear. In England and the United States, feminist agitation in the late nineteenth century called attention to the young age of consent and called for changes in the law. By the 1920s the age of consent, a state issue in the United States, was raised in every state and ranged from fourteen to eighteen, with most states settling on sixteen or eighteen.

In the last part of the twentieth century the U.S. public once again took note of age of consent issues. Although sometimes it is not possible to identify a single age of consent since the statutory age varies with the age of the defendant and with the particular sexual activity, in the United States as of 2000 the age at which a person may engage in any sexual conduct permitted to adults within a particular state ranges between fourteen to eighteen. In the vast majority of states the age is either fifteen or sixteen. Most states set the minimum age for marriage without parental approval at eighteen, and there are elaborate provisions governing which parent must give consent and who qualifies as a custodial parent or guardian when marriage under eighteen takes place. There are occasional contradictions since some states will allow a minor to marry with parental permission at an age when the minor cannot engage in legal sexual activity, while others allow a minor to engage in sexual activity years before he or she can marry without parental approval.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2005-09-04 20:05|| http://timurileng.blogspot.com]">[http://timurileng.blogspot.com] 2005-09-04 20:05|| Front Page Top

#15 Thanks ZF. I hadn't realized the change came so late.

Posted by Mrs. Davis 2005-09-04 20:11|| 2005-09-04 20:11|| Front Page Top

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