Author: Ophelia Benson

Life in Yemen.

A 12-year-old Yemeni girl, who was forced into marriage, died during a painful childbirth that also killed her baby, a children’s rights group said Monday. Fawziya Ammodi struggled for three days in labor, before dying of severe bleeding at a hospital on Friday, said the Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children…Born into an impoverished family in Hodeidah, Fawziya was forced to drop out of school and married off to a 24-year-old man last year.

Well it was life for awhile and then it was premature death after three days of torture.

The Yemeni parliament tried in February to pass a law, setting the minimum marriage age at 17. But the measure has not reached the president because many parliamentarians argued it violates sharia, or Islamic law, which does not stipulate a minimum age.

And that of course is the important thing, not the health and survival and education and chance for some modicum of happiness of little girls.

Life in Aceh.

Adulterers can be stoned to death and homosexuality is punishable by long prison terms under a new law passed in Indonesia’s devoutly Muslim Aceh province today…The law, which reinforces Aceh’s already strict Islamic laws, is to go into effect within 30 days. Its passage comes two weeks before a new assembly led by the moderate Aceh party is sworn in after a heavy defeat of conservative parties in local elections.

Ah – the conservatives have been voted out, so as a parting gesture, they pass a law saying that ‘adulterers’ can be buried up to the neck and slowly pelted with stones until they are dead – under ‘Islamic’ laws which notoriously have an impossible standard of proof for men but not for women, so that punishments for ‘adultery’ tend to fall exclusively or all but exclusively on women. So that’s life in Indonesia’s devoutly Muslim Aceh province.

So…what’s the Home Office thinking? That now that Pervez Kambaksh is out of prison and safely out of Afghanistan, it’s only right to replace him with another apostate? Or what?

[Anonymous], activist of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB) and One Law for All Campaign, has been detained on September 10, 2009 and is facing imminent deportation back to Afghanistan where he will face the death penalty for ‘apostasy.’ As part of his fight against the Islamists, [Anonymous] has publicly renounced Islam in order to break the taboo that comes with such a renunciation and push for the right to leave religion, particularly crucial given that apostasy is punishable by death under Sharia law. As [Anonymous] has said on the CEMB’s website: ‘I was not born to be a Muslim and be afraid of God and more importantly I did not sign an agreement with him/her /it to worship him. As a child, religion has been forced upon me. I have been forced to pray, fast, etc… In Afghanistan where I was living, questioning the existence of god or religion is deemed blasphemy and punishable by stoning to death. Now in the UK I have the opportunity and courage to declare who I am. I AM A FREE MAN WITHOUT ANY EXTRA BONDAGE ON ME.’

He was, until last Thursday, when he was summoned to the Gillingham police station in Kent.

[H]e was issued a Home Office refusal letter that very afternoon and told he would be deported to Afghanistan in a couple of days. The authorities initially tried to force him to sign his removal order and refused him any calls until he persisted…[Anonymous]’s removal to Afghanistan will create yet another Perwiz Kambakhsh with far worse consequences because of the severity of his ‘crime.’

He didn’t just read some material about women’s rights under Islam, he explicitly rejected Islam. The HO can’t send him to Afghanistan – it’s not their policy to deport people to be executed.

Join the Facebook group; get your friends to join; get them to get their friends to join. Write to Phil Woolas. Blog about it. Make a stink.

Karen Armstrong is irritating in a great many ways, but one of the major ways is her passion for stringing together resounding words that sound vaguely impressive but don’t actually mean anything that one can figure out – that are carefully chosen not to mean anything. That is a habit that always makes me want to hit things, and she has a really severe case of it.

In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call “God” is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

What on earth is a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence? What does she mean by an indescribable transcendence? What exactly is that?

Whatever you want it to mean, right? After all, she did say it’s indescribable. But if it’s indescribable – why is she talking about it? Why does she do both? Why does she lay down the law about this stuff but choose her language in such a way that she avoids saying anything exact that one can get to grips with?

Well that’s a stupid question; we know why; because she can, because it works, because it sells lots of books, because it wins her an undeserved and indeed ridiculous reputation as an expert on religion among hordes of people who don’t know any better. Because it’s a good wheeze. There’s very little reason (apart from intellectual honesty) for her not to do it, because it does work such a treat.

And yet it surprises me all the same; I suppose it surprises me that she doesn’t make herself sick. It always surprises me that people who peddle meaningless jargon don’t make themselves sick in the process.

The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry. Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and which cannot easily be put into words.

Says Armstrong. But the trouble with that is, it isn’t true. It’s apparently what Armstrong thinks should be true, it’s apparently what she wishes were true, but she expressed it in the indicative, not the conditional or the subjunctive. It would be nice if she were right about what religion is – it would be great if it were a kind of art form. But she isn’t right – she’s just confusing her wishes with reality.

As you may or may not know, Marie-Therese O’Loughlin, survivor of the nightmare of Goldenbridge Industrial School, has been working hard to get the education that the ‘Sisters of Mercy’ denied her. She took her first exam, in English, last June. She wasn’t sure she’d done terribly well, but was determined to re-take the exam next year if necessary.

She got her results a few days ago.

She got an A.

Boris Johnson said a fatuous thing.

“There are valuable lessons people of all backgrounds can learn from Islam, such as the importance of community spirit, family ties, compassion and helping those less fortunate, all of which lie at the heart of the teachings of Ramadan.”

Obviously meant to be a very kind inclusive generous outreachy thing, but fatuous nevertheless, because if that were true, wouldn’t it show up somewhere? Wouldn’t there be at least one country run according to ‘Islamic principles’ or just plain sharia that was unusually good at compassion and helping those less fortunate? A city on a hill, a beacon to the rest of the world? Or at least a well-known and much-discussed example of compassionate and egalitarian governance? And as far as I know there isn’t. Do correct me if I’m wrong. Sudan? No. Pakistan? No. Afghanistan? Don’t make tasteless jokes. Malaysia? No. Northern Nigeria? No. Saudi Arabia? Please.

So the question becomes, what exactly are the ‘valuable lessons’ that ‘people of all backgrounds can learn from Islam’ about compassion and helping those less fortunate? I don’t dispute that there are words about compassion and helping those less fortunate in Islamic sources, but one, do they say anything unique to Islam? And two, have they made any difference to ‘Islam’ as it actually plays out in the world?

As far as I know the answer is no and no. Do correct me if I’m wrong. In the meantime I will go on wishing political figures would stop sucking up to religion in this way. Be kind and inclusive and generous and outreachy to people, by all means, but skip the religion-flattering.