Morocco is considered fairly liberal compared to most of its neighbors, but what liberality there is may be more formal than real.

There’s that 2004 revision of the family code that raised the legal age of marriage from 15 to 18. The trouble is it allowed for “exceptions” where a judge could rule that young Miss 15 was actually old enough – and guess what. Lots of judges are ruling just that.

A 2014 World Bank report entitled “Ten Years After Morocco’s Family Code Reforms: Are Gender Gaps Closing?” indicates that of the 44,134 underage marriage petitions in 2010, 99 percent involved underage girls and 92 percent of said requests received judicial approval.

As the World Bank report succinctly states: “If the aim of this reform was to decrease the number of underage marriages, it is failing.”

Bouzekri, who is also a Gender Studies professor at Moulay Ismail University in Meknes, cites the loophole allowing underage and forced marriages as a recurring example of the inadequacy of Moroccan authorities and lawmakers to implement the new moudawana.

“Today we routinely find that judges marry girls that are either 15 and 16, especially in the rural areas. The judge will accept that she looks like a woman, that she is capable of being a woman but (she’s only) 15 or 16. There should not be a distinction: Marriage should happen at the age of 18. That’s it. No exceptions,” says Bouzekri.

And then there’s the whole “marry your rapist” problem.

In 2012, 16-year-old Amina Filali, consumed rat poison after being “…forced by her parents and a judge to marry the man she said had raped her at knife point…” according to The New York Times. Filali’s tragic death inspired protests across the country and global ire from feminist and human rights organizations. In January 2014, the Moroccan Parliament voted to expunge the clause of Article 475 of its penal code that allowed a man accused of rape to avoid jail time if he married his adolescent victim, the clause that failed to protect girls like Filai.

Again, good, but again, it’s only on paper.

A 2013 BMC International Health and Human Rights report entitled “Determinants of child and forced marriages in Morocco” interviewed 22 “stakeholders” in Moroccan gender reform such as government officials, NGO works and health care professional. The report indicates that judges rule in an attempt to shield underage or sexually abused girls from the shame of divorce or familial abandonment.

“In these rural areas, the look of the neighbor is very important. The father, the mother, they will say, ‘I know my daughter was raped but I want him to marry her’. The judges hear that, especially in rural areas,” said Bouzekri.

Because of the neighbors.

There’s a vocal #BringBackOurGirls protest outside the Nigerian Mission at the UN right now.

Via braden@detroitred9

Texas Freedom Network points and laughs at David Barton’s views on why the Constitution forgot to say that women could vote. He says it’s because the family is one, not many.

And you have to remember back then, husband and wife, I mean the two were considered one. That is the biblical precept. That is the way they looked at them in the civil community. That is a family that is voting and so the head of the family is traditionally considered to be the husband and even biblically still continues to be so …

See? It makes perfect sense. The family is one, and that one is the husband. Everybody else doesn’t count (until the male children grow up of course, but Barton forgets to explain about that), because the husband is the head and the family is one. It eliminates all confusion and arguing.

The movie IJTIHAD: Feminism and Reform is available on Vimeo.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

I’ve started with Part 2 because it has my friend Tehmina Kazi in it.

There’s a woman in South Dakota, Annette Bosworth, who is hoping to be a Republican candidate for the Senate. She has a campaign page on Facebook. On it she posted this attractive item:

Subtle, the comparison to animals, isn’t it.

The post shows 61,789 shares at the moment. There are a lot of hostile comments, so many of those shares must be of the “do you believe this bullshit?” variety.

I get facetious in the afternoon…

Alexis Okeowo at the New Yorker blog on the kidnapped schoolgirls in Borno, Nigeria.

“I thought it was the end of my life,” Deborah Sanya told me by phone on Monday from Chibok, a tiny town of farmers in northeastern Nigeria. “There were many, many of them.” Boko Haram, an Islamist terrorist group, kidnapped Sanya and at least two hundred of her classmates from a girls’ secondary school in Chibok more than two weeks ago. Sanya, along with two friends, escaped. So did forty others. The rest have vanished, and their families have not heard any word of them since.

Sanya is eighteen years old and was taking her final exams before graduation. Many of the schools in towns around Chibok, in the state of Borno, had been shuttered. Boko Haram attacks at other schools—like a recent massacre of fifty-nine schoolboys in neighboring Yobe state—had prompted the mass closure. But local education officials decided to briefly reopen the Chibok school for exams. On the night of the abduction, militants showed up at the boarding school dressed in Nigerian military uniforms. They told the girls that they were there to take them to safety. “They said, ‘Don’t worry. Nothing will happen to you,’ ” Sanya told me. The men took food and other supplies from the school and then set the building on fire. They herded the girls into trucks and onto motorcycles. At first, the girls, while alarmed and nervous, believed that they were in safe hands. When the men started shooting their guns into the air and shouting “Allahu Akbar,” Sanya told me, she realized that the men were not who they said they were. She started begging God for help; she watched several girls jump out of the truck that they were in.

It was noon when her group reached the terrorists’ camp. She had been taken not far from Chibok, a couple of remote villages away in the bush. The militants forced her classmates to cook; Sanya couldn’t eat. Two hours later, she pulled two friends close and told them that they should run. One of them hesitated, and said that they should wait to escape at night. Sanya insisted, and they fled behind some trees. The guards spotted them and called out for them to return, but the girls kept running. They reached a village late at night, slept at a friendly stranger’s home, and, the next day, called their families.

She couldn’t tell him any more than that. She’s not doing well. Nobody there is. Her father isn’t; the other parents aren’t.

Sanya’s father, a primary-school teacher named Ishaya Sanya, is struggling with conflicting emotions: gratitude that his daughter has returned to him; guilt that the daughters of his siblings, friends, and neighbors are still somewhere in the bush; and an angry frustration that there seemed to be no effort to rescue the girls.

“We don’t know where they are up until now, and we have not heard anything from the government,” he told me. “Every house in Chibok has been affected by the kidnapping.” The only information that the families had been able to gather about the kidnapped girls, he went on, was from the girls who had escaped.

He remembers the exact time that Deborah appeared in front of him after her escape—4:30 P.M.—and how he felt: “very happy.” But his despair soon returned. “Our area has been affected very seriously,” he told me. Parents had fallen physically ill, and some were “going mad.”

There are no signs of progress in rescuing the girls.

In the meantime, as in so many other ways in Nigeria, each community has to fend for itself. For a while after the abduction, girls trickled back into town—some rolled off trucks, some snuck away while fetching water. That trickle has stopped. “Nobody rescued them,” a government official in Chibok said of the girls who made it back. “I want you to stress this point. Nobody rescued them. They escaped on their accord. This is painful.”

A pastor in Chibok whose daughter is missing told me that he set out with friends on the morning after the abduction to find the girls. “I was forced to come home empty-handed,” he told me by phone. “I just don’t know what the federal government is doing about it. And there is no security here that will defend us. You have to do what you can do to escape for your life.”

I asked the pastor about rumors that Boko Haram has taken the girls outside of Nigeria’s borders, into Cameroon and Chad, and forcibly married them. He paused, and then said, “How will I be happy? How will I be happy?”

How will his daughter? How will any of the girls? How will any of their parents? How will they be happy? How will they be happy?

Another one it would be good to sign.

Tell Iraq: Don’t Legalize Forced Child Marriage

Any minute now, the Iraqi Council of Representatives will vote to legalize forced child marriage.

The specifics of the legislation (part of the Jaafari Personal Status Law) are terrifying:

• There will no longer be a minimum age to legally marry (it’s currently 18) but the law provides policies for divorcing a 9-year-old;
• A girl’s father would legally be able to accept a marriage proposal; and
• The girl would be legally prohibited from resisting her husband’s advances and leaving the home without his permission. It’s a recipe for a life in domestic and sexual slavery.

Currently, Iraq has one of the most progressive policies on women’s rights in the Middle East — setting the legal marriage age at 18 and prohibiting forced marriage.

Brave Iraqi women have been fighting against removing the minimum age for marriage, for their sake and for the sake of their daughters. Last month on International Women’s Day, countless women attended demonstrations in Baghdad protesting the Jaafari Personal Status Law. They called it the “Day of Mourning”.

We may not have much time to stop Iraq from legalizing forced child marriage and a lifetime of domestic and sexual slavery for girls and women. Call on the the Iraqi Council of Representatives to vote “no” to the Jaafari Personal Status Law today.

In partnership with the Arab Human Rights Academy (AHRA).

It’s not a recipe for slavery, it is slavery.

The Irish Times reports:

The Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams has been arrested in connection with the 1972 abduction, murder and disappearance of Jean McConville.

Detectives from the PSNI’s serious crime branch are questioning Mr Adams at Antrim station about the murder of the widowed mother of 10 children.

Mr Adams remained in police custody overnight following his arrest yesterday.

The BBC gives some background.

Mrs McConville, one of Northern Ireland’s Disappeared, was kidnapped in front of her children after being wrongly accused of being an informer.

The claim that she was an informer was dismissed after an official investigation by the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman.

The widow was held at one or more houses before being shot and buried in secret.

The Disappeared are those who were abducted, murdered and secretly buried by republicans during the Troubles.

The IRA admitted in 1999 that it murdered and buried at secret locations nine of the Disappeared.

She kidnapped in front of her children. That’s a nice touch, isn’t it.

In more tooth-grinding news from Pakistan, a mosque in a suburb of Islamabad has been named after the guy who murdered Salmaan Taseer.

Taseer was shot and killed by Mumtaz Qadri, a member of his own security detail, at the Kohsar Market in Sector F-6 on January 4, 2011. The shooter Qadri has become a divisive figure in Pakistani society. He is hailed as a ‘hero’ by some and denounced as a cold blooded murderer by others. Clerics from the Barelvi school of thought are among those proclaiming Qadri’s ‘heroism’.

Perhaps this is why a mosque in the suburbs of the very city Taseer was killed in, has been named after Mumtaz Hussain Qadri. The mosque is constructed on a 10-marla plot of land, next to a girls’ seminary, the Jamia Rehmania Akbaria Ziaul Binaat. Even though the housing society is not fully developed and several houses in the neighbourhood are still under construction, there are already four mosques, catering to people from different schools of thought, in close proximity to each other.

The mosque’s prayer leader, Mohammad Ashfaq Sabri, told Dawn: “The mosque was built to pay tribute to the services of the man who taught a lesson to a blasphemer,” adding that the name was chosen in consultation with religious scholars and residents of the area.

“A lesson to a blasphemer” is it. What did the “blasphemer” Salmaan Taseer do? He tried to give support and comfort to a Christian woman accused of “blasphemy” by some hateful neighbors. What a world, where you have to watch what you say about imaginary or long-dead religious heroes, or be killed.

But those living in Ghori Town say no one asked them. In fact, several residents Dawn spoke to refused to be named for fear of reprisals.

“I know who Qadri is and what he did. I have a very different opinion of him, but I can’t speak out because I’m afraid something might happen to me or my family,” said one of the mosque’s neighbours.

Another Ghori Town-resident, Mohammad Tufail, said: “Have you ever heard of clerics consulting anyone in the neighbourhood before naming a mosque? But I figure, what’s in a name? We just go there, pray and come back. I don’t want to get involved in the politics of these Maulvis.”

“I cannot comment on whether this is right or wrong. I work to provide for my family and I don’t want religious fundos beating down my door because they don’t like something I said,” said Faisal Rasool, another resident of Ghori Town.

That’s what their world is like – they’re hemmed in by violence-loving religious fanatics, and they’re afraid to say a word.

From CFI:

30-year-old Raif Badawi, a Saudi Arabian writer and activist, was sentenced last year to seven years in prison and 600 lashes. Badawi’s crimes? Founding a website, Liberal Saudi Network, dedicated to fostering open discussion of religion and politics; and calling on his country to respect freedom of religion, belief, and expression, and women’s rights.

According to the Saudi court, Badawi was guilty of ridiculing Islam. In the midst of his appeals process, Badawi could soon be charged with apostasy. The penalty for apostasy in Saudi Arabia is death.

To make matters worse, a Saudi court recently jailed Badawi’s lawyer, Waleed Sami Abu Al-Khair, for his human rights activism.

There are global protests May 3.

In support of Badawi, the Center for Inquiry joins Muslims for Progressive Values in organizing a protest at the Saudi Arabian Embassy on Saturday, May 3, at 3:00 p.m. The embassy is located at 601 New Hampshire Ave NW, Washington, D.C. 20037, near the Foggy Bottom stop on the Metro.

The D.C. protest is part of several demonstrations set to take place May 3, organized under the banner of “Stand for Raif Badawi on World Press Freedom Day.” Other locations include Ottawa, Canada; Madrid, Spain; Bern, Switzerland; Tunis, Tunisia; and London, UK.

If you can attend, please join our Facebook event or email Michael De Dora at mdedora@centerforinquiry.net. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own signs, though some signs will be provided.

Please come out on Saturday, May 3 to demand the release of Raif Badawi and be part of a global movement standing up for fundamental human rights!

From the Washington Post, more on those “marriages” in Nigeria.

Village elder Pogo Bitrus told Agence France Presse locals had consulted with “various sources” in the nation’s forested northeast. “From the information we received yesterday from Cameroonian border towns our abducted girls were taken… into Chad and Cameroon,” he said, adding that each girl was sold as a bride to Islamist militants for 2,000 naira — $12.

The Washington Post could not independently verify such claims, and the Nigerian defense ministry didn’t immediately return requests for comment Wednesday morning. But if true, the news would add another terrifying wrinkle to an already horrifying set of events…

Oh I’m sure they were just grabbed to do a little mending for Boko Haram, and will be set free any day now.

Parents have grown increasingly frustrated by what they perceive as a feckless governmental response. Some relatives have launched their own search, riding motorcycles deep into the surrounding forests in search of their girls. “My wife keeps asking me, why isn’t the government deploying every means to find our children,” relative Dawah said.

“All we want from the government is to help us bring our children back,” one father named Pogu Yaga, wept.

It’s been 16 days.

The sultan of Brunei is going ahead with the introduction of ferocious punitive “sharia” despite objections from people who aren’t savage theocratic monsters.

“With faith and gratitude to Allah the almighty, I declare that tomorrow, Thursday 1 May 2014, will see the enforcement of sharia law phase one, to be followed by the other phases,” the absolute monarch said in a royal decree on Wednesday.

Plans for the sharia penalties – which will eventually include flogging, severing of limbs and death by stoning – triggered condemnation on social media sites in the tiny sultanate earlier this year.

Well, Mohammed didn’t say anything about social media, so fuck all that.

67-year-old Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah – one of the world’s wealthiest men – said in his decree that the move was “a must” under Islam, dismissing “never-ending theories” that sharia punishments were cruel in comments clearly aimed at detractors.

“Theory states that Allah’s law is cruel and unfair but Allah himself has said that his law is indeed fair,” he said.

Imbecile. How does he know that? It’s in a book. In other words he doesn’t know it, but he’s too stubborn and pious to realize he doesn’t.

The initial phase beginning on Thursday introduces fines or jail terms for offences ranging from indecent behaviour, failure to attend Friday prayers, and out-of-wedlock pregnancies.

Oh, brilliant – you’re not even allowed to not go to Friday prayers in Brunei.

A second phase covering crimes such as theft and robbery is to be implemented later this year, involving more stringent penalties such as severing of limbs and flogging.

Late next year, punishments such as death by stoning for offences including sodomy and adultery will be introduced.

Why stop there? Why not stone children to death for crying when they fall and skin their knees?

The UN’s human rights office said this month it was deeply concerned about the changes, adding that women typically bore the brunt of punishment for crimes involving sex.

Well they should have thought of that before deciding to be women.

The true meaning of nobility.

H/t Ray

That Telegraph article mentioned a “Sharia Law event at the Law Society’s headquarters on Chancery Lane, central London on June 24″ and provided a link but the link is a dud. However I found a link that works, and thus the event.

Developing services for Muslim clients – An introduction to Islamic Shari’a law for small firms

It’s not law. It’s not law. It’s not law. Stop calling it law. It’s not law.

Does your sole practice or small firm have a Muslim client base and practice in the following areas of law?

• Wills and inheritance.
• Family and children.
• Corporate and commercial (non-listed firms).

Do you want to better understand and serve the needs of your Muslim clients and build your business?

Designed as a forerunner to a planned future seminar series on Islamic law, this event will set you thinking on an important area of client service as our expert and authoritative speakers highlight some basic concepts and requirements of the Islamic Shari’a applicable to these practice areas.

That’s actually alarming. If they’re serious, and they really think “basic concepts and requirements of the Islamic Shari’a” are applicable to laws relating to for instance family and children – then they’re a fucking menace.

The event is fully booked.

The Telegraph reported a few days ago that the Law Society will be giving a training course in sharia this summer.

Wtf?

A new training course being run by the Law Society this summer is described as an “introduction to Islamic Sharia law for small firms”.

What the hell. Sharia is not law in the UK. Period. In the UK, law is what is enacted by Parliament, it’s not any old thing that’s called “law” by one group or another. Sharia is a religious thing, not a legal thing. It’s not something the Law Society should be giving “training” in.

Critics said the fact that the Law Society was offering training in Sharia law created the “perception” that it was now “a legal discipline”.

Exactly; I say the same thing.

The Sharia Law event at the Law Society’s headquarters on Chancery Lane, central London on June 24 has already sold out.

It offers training in Sharia law covering wills and inheritance, family and children and corporate and commercial law.

The course is billed as “a forerunner to a planned future seminar series on Islamic law”, the Law Society said.

The Society said: “This event will set you thinking on an important area of client service as our expert and authoritative speakers highlight some basic concepts and requirements of the Islamic Sharia applicable to these practice areas.”

Some basic “requirements” – which are not requirements at all unless you buy into the religion and into the idea that the religion’s laws are “requirements” for you. Religious “laws” have no powers of enforcement to back them up; they are wholly dependent on the religions that purport to issue them, thus they have nothing to do with the Law Society and the Law Society should not be meddling with them.

The Telegraph apparently asked Charlie Klendjian about it.

Charlie Klendjian, a spokesman from the Lawyers’ Secular Society said: “It creates an ever increasing perception to the public and also to the legal profession that Sharia law is a legal discipline.

“Sharia law is not a legal discipline, it is theology and we can’t constantly keep giving it this credibility and it is certainly not for the Law Society to be doing that.

“It is damaging to the perception of the primacy of English law, and that is what the Law Society don’t appreciate.”

Which is quite astonishingly obtuse of them. Is the sharia training going to deal with how old a girl should be before she can marry? Is it going to deal with forced marriage? “Honor” violence? Children’s rights? Women’s rights? It will be interesting to find out.

At the protest yesterday. Via Chris Moos.