Posted on 06/01/2005 10:12:48 PM PDT by CHARLITE
Within an hour, the entire village would learn that the 25-year-old married woman had been discovered in a darkened nearby hut with her lover. Within two days, Amina was dead -- killed by her fellow villagers April 20 after the men of the community ruled that she had violated Islamic law by having an affair with a neighbor....
Soon Amina's father, the elders and a crowd of villagers had gathered outside. Mohammad unlocked the chain and flung open his front door. At the back of the room sat his son, Karim, on a floor cushion.
Next to him sat Amina. Her expression was once again blank, Aslam said.
It threw Aslam into a rage.
"I shouted, 'What is she doing here? Give her to me! I will kill her!' " he recounted last week. "I was so shocked, and my Islamic dignity was so offended."
But the other villagers restrained him, Aslam and other witnesses said.
"We told him, 'No, no! This should be handled by sharia now,' " his brother Hashem recalled, referring to the Islamic legal code.
"Fine, I will give her over to sharia then," Aslam said he responded. "Whatever sharia says, I will do it."...
Under sharia, the punishment for adultery is death by stoning. But the code requires that there be undeniable proof of the crime -- for instance, multiple witnesses to the sex act, a confession, or other signs such as an inexplicable pregnancy....
But no one involved disputes that the villagers were unanimous in their view that according to the dictates of Islam, the proper resolution of the case would be for Karim, as an unmarried man, to be lashed and Amina, as a married woman, to be stoned to death.
Early that afternoon, one of the mullahs went to fetch a stick with which to whip Karim as Yousaf took his leave of the villagers.
Then they watched Yousaf's turban slowly vanish over a mountain path and, along with it, Amina's last hope.
Punishment
There are two, conflicting accounts of Amina's death.
According to her great-uncle Assan, after the shura reached its verdict, a group of villagers came to the dark storage room and took her away to be stoned.
"She knew what was going to happen to her," Assan said softly. "She was screaming and sobbing."
Amina's paternal uncle, Mohammad Azim, said he watched as the villagers forced Amina down a muddy path toward a patch of soft earth along a riverbank surrounded by stones, a few yards from the edge of the village.
It was a beautiful spot, shaded by an enormous tree and offering a charming view of the village clinging to the mountainside.
It was also an ideal place for a stoning.
"They dug a hole in the ground right here," Azim said, pointing to a spot in the clearing six days later. "Then they buried Amina up to her waist, with her arms pinned by her side."
Azim said Amina's hair was covered in a head scarf, and that she was crying in terror as nearly a hundred men gathered in a circle around her and began throwing small rocks at her head.
"I couldn't watch for more than a few minutes," Azim said. Instead, he said, he walked up to Amina's parents' house and waited with them in silence during the two hours it took to kill her.
Several villagers and Amina's mother said that they, too, believe she was stoned. And a few said they had seen the bloody hole after she was removed from it.
But no one else would admit to witnessing the actual stoning, much less participating in it. And the ground where Amina was allegedly buried to her waist showed little sign of disturbance six days after her death -- possibly because, as Azim and other villagers contend, they had refilled the hole and then the river had flooded over it, or possibly because the stoning never happened.
Several other villagers, including Amina's uncle, Hashem, tell a very different story.
Hashem said the villagers handed Amina over to her uncles, including himself and Azim. Their original intention was to hang her, Hashem said. But as they were leading her away, they became increasingly angry and started to beat her with their fists.
"It was dark," he said. "All of us were striking her, and then she fainted and we saw that she was on the ground and not breathing. Maybe she had a heart attack."
Whatever the means of her death, Amina's parents said her bruised corpse was returned to them sometime between afternoon and evening prayers that day.
Amina's mother, Nessa, said she did not grieve.
"My daughter was a criminal and a sinner who brought dishonor on my name," Nessa said hotly several days later. "And I should be blamed for her death, not anyone else, because I told my tribe they could kill her. I forgave them for spilling her blood."...
If Amina had been allowed to live, Nessa added, the shame of it would have forced Nessa to leave the only home she had ever known and a valley in which her family had lived for generations.
"But now I can walk everywhere in the village with my head high. . . . I'm happy. Extremely, extremely happy," she shouted. The tone in her voice betrayed no joy.
Then Nessa covered her face with her hands....
Amina's father Aslam, however, was released from police custody in Faizabad after a night of questioning, on grounds that he was not directly responsible.
Just before embarking on the long walk back to Gazon, he sat on a metal chair in a room in the police station, reflecting on all that had happened in the last several days.
Unlike the feelings of his wife Nessa, Aslam's anger at Amina had by now given way to sorrow.
"I feel so sad for her. She was so young," he said, as his eyes grew glassy with tears. "I really miss her now. . . . I will miss her voice, and our conversations in the evenings."
There was much he wished he could go back and change. "If only she had told me that she did not want to go back to her husband," he said. "I would have done something about it. I would have counseled her."
But he said he harbored no doubt that she deserved to die after she admitted to committing adultery.
"There was no option. This is what Islam commands us."
Gross hypocrisy
Ethnic cleansing of Black Muslims by Arab Janjaweed militias
August 5, 2004 iranian.com
We are silent spectators of a demise of a vision, that of true egalitarianism and fraternity enjoined within the Prophet's last sermon. "Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab!" The Prophet's wisdom and teaching, binding for all times, has been indifferently ignored by the Islamic world:
"O People, just as you regard this month, this day, this city as Sacred, so regard the life and property of every Muslim as a sacred trust. All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over black nor does a black have any superiority over white except by piety and good action."
Sudan, the latest tragedy that the world has just woken up too, has from long-standing tensions between nomadic Arab tribes and their African neighbours over water and farmland. It is a conflict between Muslims but the manner of its conduct has brought ignominy to the Islamic world. Dotted alongside the charred Sudanese locations are unharmed, populated and functioning Arab settlements.
In some locations, the distance between a destroyed Fur (black Muslims) village and an Arab village is less than 500 meters. The Arab killers and rapists in Darfur are Muslims, and so are the victims -- Black African farmers.The Arab street has displayed a striking indecisiveness when ever it has come to the fate of non Arab Muslims and considered the fate of non-Arab Muslims as peripheral to the integral cause of Arab nationalism.
In Bosnia, the Serbian minority rapidly gained the upper hand against the Muslims with arms supplied mainly by the government of neighbouring Serbia. Despite significant humanitarian and military support to the Bosnians from non-governmental organizations and individuals in the Arab world, Arab politicians maintained their cozy ties with Serbia.
They viewed Milosevic not as the mastermind behind the cold-blooded massacre of 7000 Muslim men in Saberenca but the savior of the crumbling Yugoslav republic. The steady flow of Yugoslav arms to the Arab world was of greater importance than the fate of distant Muslims in the far-away Balkan region.
Now whilst the Arab press is hysterical over civilian casualties in Iraq it flagrantly ignores the genocide of Muslim population in Sudan. In this case it is Arabic northerners who are systematically wiping out the black Muslims in the Darfur region. It is hard to think of a more blasphemous act for a Muslim than to consciously defy the edict of the Prophet. But in Sudan this has been going on for the more than a decade.
Whilst the Arab street affirms its Arab nationalism and hatred for America, with headlines such as "America will pay the price sooner that it thinks. There are no limits to American injustice and highhandedness. Despite its power and tyranny America will not win because it has no humanitarian values."
What comes to an enquiring mind is where were these condemnations for Saddam, 5,000 dead in the chemical attack on Halabja in a single day, or Assad, 30,000 shelled to death in Hama, or pretty much any other autocratic Arab ruler.
Some Arab governments led by despots -- and their press and public -- should first practice moral judgment on themselves and each other, before turning their outrage on the United States. And, before they grumble about a new-fangled intimidating colonialism, they should first show they're competent to govern themselves by some means other than torment and carnage.
While the Muslim world has suffered, they have blamed everyone but themselves. This state of denial and extreme "hypocrisy" means Muslims are ill-equipped to deal with problems of endemic terrorism. In the Islamic terminology, the word "Hypocrisy" is a substitute for "Nifaq". This word Nifaq has been mentioned in the Qur'an thirty-one (31) times in different forms.
"The hypocrites will be in the lowest depths of the fire-no helper will thou find for them;-" (4:145)
This "gross hypocrisy" resident within mainstream mores of Islamic polity has led the nation of Islam into a collective rage of vanity and powerlessness. The enemy within is rarely ever found to be the culprit, the deviation from injunctions so explicitly enjoined is leading us to a decay. There is no moral equivalence of crimes against humanity.
To rub salt on the wounds Arab League issued a statement "reaffirming the 'Arab states' solidarity with the sisterly Republic of Sudan and their keenness to preserve its territorial integrity and sovereignty and reinforce all peace initiatives started by the Sudanese government with the international and regional parties."
To express support for a rogue government that has been the instigator in this unfortunate tragedy is not only disappointing but true to form for these Islamic regimes. While we loudly condemn Israel, why are we hushed when Islamic regimes slaughter thousands of Muslims and eradicate their presence from the face of the planet? Does any "League" cares about rights of the black Muslims being slaughtered!
The present cycle of horror and devastation in Sudan continues to prompt more concern in Western countries than in the Arab world. Sudan was recently elected to serve a three-year term on the U.N. Human Rights Commission. What a reward to Sudan's government active support to the Arab Janjaweed militia's ferocious intent to make Darfur, in the west of Sudan, "Zurga-free". They have been largely successful and to compound their sin the Janjaweed milita have been massacring fleeing exile population, sparing no man, woman or children. The Arabic militants' quest to rid Darfur of the darker-skinned Black population is every respect a throwback to systematic ethnic cleansing.
None of the Muslim parliaments have articulated a single utterance of denunciation, the credit goes to the United States Congress who declared the killings of tens of thousands of black civilians by Arab militias in Sudan's Darfur region amount to genocide and urged the president, George Bush, to call the situation in Sudan "by its rightful name". America willingness to stand up to the injustice in Bosnia, Kosovo Albania and now Darfur is in sharp contrast to the reluctance of the Arab world to stand up and show solidarity for their fellow non-Arab Muslims.
Undoubtedly it is the plight of contemporary Muslims aggravated by "vicious global" meddling in Muslim affairs that has made both Islam and America a victim of radical Muslims. The term "Rip Van Winkle" of a nation fits the present definition of the state of Islamic nations oblivious to social change and "frozen in time"
Thanks, Fred. The pathology became evident in your post.
Islamites will never attain that level of complexity.
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