Posted on 03/17/2008 1:10:47 PM PDT by reaganaut1
...
In some sense, the outrage about according a degree of official status to Shariah in a Western country should come as no surprise. No legal system has ever had worse press. To many, the word “Shariah” conjures horrors of hands cut off, adulterers stoned and women oppressed. By contrast, who today remembers that the much-loved English common law called for execution as punishment for hundreds of crimes, including theft of any object worth five shillings or more? How many know that until the 18th century, the laws of most European countries authorized torture as an official component of the criminal-justice system? As for sexism, the common law long denied married women any property rights or indeed legal personality apart from their husbands. [...]
In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world. Today, when we invoke the harsh punishments prescribed by Shariah for a handful of offenses, we rarely acknowledge the high standards of proof necessary for their implementation. Before an adultery conviction can typically be obtained, for example, the accused must confess four times or four adult male witnesses of good character must testify that they directly observed the sex act. The extremes of our own legal system — like life sentences for relatively minor drug crimes, in some cases — are routinely ignored. We neglect to mention the recent vintage of our tentative improvements in family law. It sometimes seems as if we need Shariah as Westerners have long needed Islam: as a canvas on which to project our ideas of the horrible, and as a foil to make us look good.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Sauron
The Dhimmi Noah Feldman seriously needs to read some works by Bat Ye’or, Robert Spenser and others.
We might also direct him for a daily perusal of LGF:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/
But he might be such an over-schooled fool that it’s hopeless.
BRILLIANT! CHAUCER WOULD BE PROUD!
Here's a clue - they're still stoning people under Shari'a. All the moral relativism in the world won't make up for that fact. While Feldman is accurate in celebrating the return to barbarism as "vibrant" I might point out so was Nazism. That doesn't make it superior.
We stopped that nonsense several hundred years ago - Islam hasn’t ......
Too bad the website administrator removed it.
Thank you!!! Great work! It will help us irritate a few hippies on Friday night!
Keep up the great work!
I’ll look into it.
That’s what I get for buying it off of eBay. ;-)
Feldman is a moron. I couldn’t read past the first page without feeling ill.
Good, I wear a US flag pin - that identifies me as an American. Obama does not, therefore he’s not ....
Now, that would make you a prosthetute.
Comparing current Sharia law to Western laws of hundreds of years ago is like saying, “A lot of people think that much of the Middle East is dirty because they lack indoor plumbing. Did you know that many Western nations did not have indoor plumbing hundreds of years ago ?”.
See THIS THREAD. Sorry.
I believe this is inaccurate. Common law is the old traditional law. It had comparatively few capital crimes.
The massive number of capital crimes, including for minor offenses, were largely brought in by stature during the 18th century (the height of "The Enlightenment"), as the upper classes controlling the country attempted to deal with an explosion in crime rates.
Executing everybody in sight actually didn't work all that well, at least partly because there weren't really all that many executions. Most people convicted of capital crimes were instead transported, first to the American and then to the Australian colonies.
The myth of large numbers of executions doesn't even make any sense. Execution days were party days in England. If they were really common, they would pretty quickly have become routine and stopped drawing large crowds.
Quite a few men are executed for adultery in Saudi.
I suspect this is often because they were shtupping the wrong guy’s wife, but still...
Ping
Excellent, that title gave me a new assignment. Gotta write a parody song to “My Sharona” called “Why Sharia”.
Or maybe Paul Shanklin will be me to it....
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