New kangaroo court outrage
Ginny mentioned a report about yet another incident involving the oppression of a Muslim woman by a kangaroo court full of ignorant local elders, this time in India. The local assembly demanded that a woman raped by her father-in-law separate from her husband and marry the rapist, after leaving home and staying away for seven months and ten days. Where they got this bizarre ruling from is unknown to me, but the All India Muslim Personal Law Board overturned the ruling, saying it had no basis in the Shari’ah.
The councilâÂÂs order is totally against the teachings of Islam, which rule that a victim of rape should remain in her home and defend her rights along with her husband to whom her marriage is still valid, according to IOLâÂÂs Shari`ah Section.
The councilâÂÂs order to the woman to stay away for seven months and 10 days to become âÂÂpureâ was also baseless and has no backing in the Noble QurâÂÂan or the Sunnah (Prophetic tradition).
Islamic teachings also call for inflicting no punishment on the raped woman. Rather she should be treated with dignity and honor.”
In the Hanafi school, the main school of Islamic law followed in India (with the exception of some southern and coastal regions), including Uttar Pradesh where this incident happened, sexual advances automatically make the ancestors and descendents of both participants (willing or otherwise) unlawful to each other. Thus, the rape of the woman by the father-in-law would make the marriage invalid automatically. However, by unanimous consensus (not just in the Hanafi school), the consummated marriage between this woman and her husband would in any case make any marriage between this woman and her father-in-law unlawful – which means that the council has no business ordering to marry the man who raped her.
People may assume, because there is an order in the Old Testament for rape victims to marry their attackers, that Islam has the same provision – it doesn’t. Neither is it lawful for anyone to accuse a woman of fornication if she doesn’t bleed on her wedding night. It seems that some people assume that religions and religious laws must invariably be full of irrational and oppressive statements, and this assumption is sometimes found in Muslims also – notice in Shaikh Nuh Keller’s book Port in a Storm that, in advocating a south-western qibla in North America, people seem to posit a “fiqh world” which is flat, knowing that the real world is a sphere. Islam just is not like that.
