Sharia…

The following article made me think of something MJ said a while ago

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040529/COWENT29/TPNational/Canada

Around the time that she mentioned it, we were dealing with a  teenage girl who was not meeting the expectations of her family who also happened to be Muslim. Her father tried to kill her because she had stayed away very late, and the suspicion of her family was that she had been ‘despoiled’.

In the PC environment that we live in, an arrangement was made for her to live with another Muslim family.

The family she went to live with appeared much stricter in terms of following the dictates of Sharia. This was based on the pressure of her family, who no longer enjoyed unsupervised contact with their child because there were attempted murder charges pending against them.

Her mother had been betrothed to her American husband from Lebanon, and she had been released to his family based on her own families misinformed idea that she was marrying into ‘wealth’. This girl reported that her mother was treated very badly by her inlaws, and any complaint she might have about her situation was greeted with beatings by her husband(or any of his family members that she might have offended with her ‘outspokeness’).

I wonder about this. We have had other Muslim women at our facility, grossly disturbed by schizophrenia, that required our appeals to the local Iman to mediate…..their husbands wanted them home to care for the house and children in spite of their absolute craziness. The Iman told their husbands that these women needed care. Their husbands backed down in the face of the Iman’s words.

I wonder about this in the context of this young girl.

She was not ‘crazy’….only infected by the freedoms that she saw around her in her American peers. She was brought to the hospital by the police because her family had tried to kill her.

There was an interesting appeal made by a women recently who was seeking political asylum in the US based on the fact that her culture condoned domestic abuse. Several changes were made in the immigration law in the US that provided for this discrimination based on gender . This is a change in the focus of the asylum system, which generally comes into play when there is a regieme change and people are persecuted on the basis of their political affiliation.

Example:

http://www.rreeves.com/pub_216.htm

I wonder how this application of the laws of Sharia will play out in Canada, the country so dedicated to upholding human integrity and multiculturalism.

I just hope it doesn’t come back to haunt them…..