Tel-Chai Nation

The Toronto Star (via Lost Budgie Blog) reports on an important bill that's being worked on that can protect Muslim women from having Shari'a law imposed upon them:

After a two-month winter recess, the Ontario Legislature gets back to work on Monday for a brief, three-week session in which it will be asked by the government to pass three significant pieces of legislation: Bills 27, 36 and 206.

Bill 27 is the Family Statute Law Amendment Act, which would deny legal status for the arbitration of custodial and marital disputes by religious tribunals. The government introduced the bill in response to an uproar over the proposed use of sharia (the Muslim legal code) to arbitrate such disputes.

While the bill has encountered flak in committee hearings during the recess, there is wide public support for its thrust.

This is good to know, because under Shari'a law, women usually end up prisoners without genuine rights. And while Jews and Christians may lose some of their legality in things like this out of "fairness", since the Ontario legislation cannot exclude other religions at this point, like in France, some would surely nod in agreement that it's a small price to pay to help crack down on Muslim-based crimes, not just in schools, but also in religiously based custody and marriage matters.

Now here's something I'd like to take a moment to comment on from National Geographic, which is actually quite often tilted in favor of Muslims:

There is nothing in the Koran, the book of basic Islamic teachings, that permits or sanctions honor killings. However, the view of women as property with no rights of their own is deeply rooted in Islamic culture, Tahira Shahid Khan, a professor specializing in women's issues at the Aga Khan University in Pakistan, wrote in Chained to Custom, a review of honor killings published in 1999.

Whoa now, not so fast. How exactly do we know that there's nothing, if we don't have any paragraphs from within the Koran to help back up what NG is saying at the beginning of the above paragraph? If, as told in Sura 4:23-24, rape, for example, is totally allowed, then isn't it possible that honor murders, as I call them, are allowed as well? And even if it doesn't actually say that it sanctions honor murders, that doesn't mean the Koran actually says anything against it. So NG really isn't making much sense to just say what they are without providing some genuine facts.

Labels: Canada, islam, misogyny