Her Lawyers asserted the following in the complaint:
"Defendant forced plaintiff to have sex with him while she cried. Plaintiff testified that defendant always told her "this is according to our religion. You are my wife, I c[an] do anything to you. The woman, she should submit and do anything I ask her to do."
Judge Joseph Charles refused the restraining order as, he asserted, her husband had acted in accordance with his muslim beliefs.
On February 17 of 2008, the New York Times published the follwing article which helps us understand the issue from the perspective of western law:
When God and the Law Don't Square
In it, the existence of the Texas Islamic Court is revealed, and it is explained that it is for use in Arbitration in which both parties agree, including Family Law.
The part that is interesting is this passage:
The hard questions, as the archbishop (of Canterberry, Rowan Williams) learned, arise in the area of family law, where the agreement to arbitrate may be uninformed or obtained by duress. State courts have occasionally refused to enforce separation agreements reached through bet din arbitrations on the ground that the woman involved had been pressured into participating.
In The Overlooked Costs of Religious Deference, Professor Robin Wiloson (Washington and Lee University School of Law) questions the wisdom of allowing religious arbitration in family law. She focusses almost exclusively on Islamic Arbitration.
All of these articles seem to agree on the surface that Religious Arbitration in Family law, in General, can be problematic. Both the New York Times and Professor Wilson seem to agree that the problem is religious arbitration in general, but, again, the only examples given are Islamic.
In the Koran (or Qu'ran), Allah, through Muhammed, declares that "Your Women are as your tilth undo you, so approach your tilth when and how you will" (Sura 2:223)
Islamic Scholars tend to agree that this passage gives men dominion over the bodies of those women in their posession, whether as wives or as slaves (Sura 4:3).
Consequently, the underlying, if unspoken implication of every article refferenced here is based on the very solid premis that women, in Islam, are considered property.
The question must therefore be asked: How can this be true today? How can a book, written in the early seventh century, be considered any but alegory today?
The Koran itself, any true Muslim will assert, is, in fact, the word of god. It is not divinely inspired the way most of the Judeo/Christian Bible is. The Koran, in its entirity, it has the weight, to Muslims, that the Ten Commandments have to Jews and Christians. The lesser known aHadith, the commentaries on the Koran are thought of by Muslims in the same fashion as the Bible is by Jews and Christians (divinely inspired, rather than divinely dictated). The most authoritative of the aHadith (there are several) would be the Sahih Bukhari Hadith, available online at USC.EDU. Experts on Islam such as Robert Spencer assert that it is nearly impossible to understand the Koran in context without making referrence to the aHadith.
In his explanation of Sharia, Khurram Murad notes the following:
Adroitly manipulated exposure to the imagery of a whip cracking on a naked back and a veil enshrouding a woman’s face has led many to believe that the Shari’ah , the divine code of Muslim conduct, is in reality no more than a collection of values and practices that are primitive, uncivilized and barbaric. What to a Muslim is the object of his longing and endeavour has been very subtly projected as a relic from the dark ages which enslaves the woman and inflicts punishments on the criminal which are cruel, inhuman and degrading.
The Qur’an most certainly does prescribe corporal punishment for certain serious social crimes and it does lay down the principle of retribution, or qisas; it is very emphatic, too, about the crucial role of the family in human society and therefore insists on assigning different well-defined roles to men and women; and it does lay down many other regulations and laws and expects Muslims to obey the eternally valid injunctions of God and His Prophet.
Certainly, anyone who reads Sura 4 of the Koran will find that the ideal of family is paramount. But this in no way contradicts the idea that women, in Islam, are property. Islamists seem to consistently skirt the issue.
In that Allah (God) and His Messenger, Muhammed (Piss Be Upon Him), have carved the word of God in the Unerring pages of the Koran, Sharia Law, or God's Law, can only come directly from it (and its divinely inspired Sunnah). Women as Property (be they Muslim Wives or Dhimmi Slaves) must factor into God's Law as God has ordained that such may exist.
Is "Islamophobia," therefore, irrational?
It should be of interest that, in Oklahoma, a proposed ammendment to the State Constitution seeks to ban Sharia Law. The issue will be voted on by Oklahomans on November 2 of this year. Call it "Islamophobia"...
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