Comment Central - Times Online - WBLG

What parallel Sharia means in practice

I wonder whether the Archbishop of Canterbury has heard of Lina Joy?

Since Rowan Williams made his extraordinary intervention I have been in correspondence with Malaysians with direct experience of living under a parallel system of state and Sharia.

There have been numerous disputes concerning the correct courts to be used in different cases.

One of the most famous controversies concerns Lina Joy. Actually that's only her name now, her Christian name. Her birth name is Azlina Jailani, and she was born a Muslim.

In 1981 Lina Joy became a Christian and she is trying to have herself declared as such on her identity card, her MyKad. One reason is that she wishes to marry her Christian boyfriend and it is illegal for her to do this while she remains classified as a Muslim.

However her attempts to have her conversion recognised have failed.

The civil courts, and finally the highest court - the Federal court - have ruled that she can't decide on her religion for herself. She has to to be given approval by the Islamic courts. Which, of course, is not forthcoming.

As the decision was announced last May, outside the federal courts a crowd chanted Allahu Akhbar.

This is not the only type of case, by any means, where the joint jurisdiction poses fundamental problems of human rights. Another type concerns what is known as body snatching.

The conversion of non-Muslims near death without the knowledge of their families has caused fierce rows. One reason, according to my correspondents, is that conversion changes the destination of any inheritance with Islamic courts deciding and inherited assets flowing only to Muslim relatives or the community.

Divorce battles raise similar questions. Conversion by the father in the run-up to a divorce gives him crucial advantages - he gets custody, turns the children into Muslims and prevents his wife using the civil courts.

Running a dual court system produces extraordinary practical difficulties and the opportunity for human rights abuses. Just ask the campaigners in Malaysia.

Protecting Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Charles Moore writes this in his Spectator Notebook:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali lives in daily danger of murder. Since she wrote the script for Submission, the film about Islamic abuse of women directed by the Dutchman Theo Van Gogh, she has been on Islamist death lists. When Van Gogh was stabbed in the street in Amsterdam, her name was mentioned on the note left pinned to his corpse.

If you look on jihadi websites, you can see invitations to anyone knowing her whereabouts to post them on the internet. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was spasmodically protected by the Dutch authorities, until the beginning of this month. Now, because she is in the United States and has a green card there, that protection has been withdrawn, even though she is still a Dutch citizen.

The Americans refuse to help, saying that such protection cannot be given to private citizens. Only the Danes have stepped forward, offering her a sort of cultural asylum. If you think about it, the Dutch behaviour is scandalous, the American scarcely less so. The authorities considered the threat to her life in the Netherlands there so great that they effectively confined her to a safe house. So a country that upholds free speech refuses, in practice, to defend it, and so makes it impossible for her to make a living there.

She is, in effect, a refugee — from a country which prides itself on looking after refugees. Next month, Ayaan Hirsi Ali will visit Britain as the guest of the think tank the Centre for Social Cohesion. Wouldn’t it be an earnest of our government’s commitment to human rights if it offered this brave woman the protection which would enable her to live here?

Quite right.

Jihad - The Musical: less fallout than a Danish cartoon

Jihad – The Musical is causing an uproar I really didn’t predict when I posted this video a couple of weeks back. In that time I’ve heard a number of heated discussions about it on radio phone-in shows. The existence of a petition on the Downing Street website denouncing the musical is used as evidence of deep-seated rage.

The petition fulminates that:

The idea of making light of muslim extremism is extremely offensive, most especially for its victims. The Edinburgh Fringe Festival promotes such 'artistic license' without due consideration for those parties who may be offended by this 'musical.'

So incensed is the petition creator, he refuses to recognise the show as part of the genre - putting the word musical in quotation marks. A bit like the way Saudi Arabia doesn't recognise Israel as a state. It's that level of anger.

But as Joanna Sugden reports over at the ever-readable Faith Central:

The 25 people protesting against Jihad - The Musical include "Osama Bin Laden", "Abu Hamsa" "The Prophet Mohammad", "Ayman al-Zawahiri",  "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad" and "Osama Bin Laden's goat"

Some of the other signatories, I should warn you, are even more offensive. I know I shouldn’t laugh but...

Murad Ahmed

Jihad - the musical

This is un-Islamic in so many ways.

Murad Ahmed

(Hat Tip: Hugo Rifkind)

UPDATE: If, like me, you're into tasteless musical comedy, you can see Jihad - the musical at the Edinburgh Fringe.

The world's stupidest fatwas

Foreign Policy offers the definitive list.

Comment Central interviews...

As part of the new all singing-all dancing Times website I hope to interview some of our columnists, pressing them on issues you raise here on Comment Central and in reply to our op-ed articles.

Here's the first one.

The Comment office of The Times comprises a Jew, a Muslim, a gay man and an Anglican called Timothy. Time to take advantage of our diversity, I think. So the interview is with my colleague Murad Ahmed about this morning's column on being a British Muslim.

Real freedom means being able to wear a veil

There has been a vibrant debate about whether Muslim women should be entitled to wear a veil in public. Now the debate has reached a new pitch with this story:

A man who was being hunted for the murder of a policewoman is understood to have escaped from Britain by disguising himself as a veiled Muslim woman.

Does this conclude the argument?

I don't think it does.

Despite my opposition to all kinds of fundamentalism, I think that a liberal society ought to be able to withstand a few people exercising their free choice to wear a veil. And it is important to understand that, difficult though it is for many us to comprehend, it is a free choice.

This story is not about the veil, it is about airport security. It is unbelievable that they are busy checking my 6 year old son's bottle of still water, causing huge queues, while letting a wanted man waltz through security dressed as a woman, without having arrangements in place to check his face.

Veil of silence

Phil Woolas's comments about the veil-wearing teacher seemed to me highly incautious. Should a Government minister wade in and call for an individual teacher to be sacked? Isn't the school in the best position to decide this, perhaps with help from the local authority?

And does the Prime Minister agree with me? The exchange at this morning's Downing Street press briefing was comically evasive (PMOS, incidentally, is the Prime Ministers Official Spokesman):

Asked if the Prime Minister agreed that the teaching assistant at the centre of the current debate regarding the wearing of veils should be sacked, the PMOS replied that what the Prime Minister believed was that there was a debate going on, and that these were matters which should be resolved locally.

Asked if that meant that the Prime Minister thought that Phil Woolas should not have spoken his mind about it, the PMOS said again that there was a debate going on, and people were perfectly entitled to contribute to that debate from all points of view.

In other words, the Prime Minister is arguing that he shouldn't express a view because the issue is going to be decided locally, while also saying that it is fine for ministers to express a view because there is a debate going on.

Which is it?

Stocking remark

My favourite comment so far on Jack Straw and the veil?

Shahid Malik MP had this to say:

There have been many hundreds of cases where robberies have been committed by men wearing women’s stockings on their heads — but no one is talking about banning stockings.

Well, no. But I don't think we exactly encourage people to wear them on their heads either.

Beyond the veil

I'm with Jack Straw. If I wasn't already, then the fact that George Galloway has called on him to resign tips the balance.

If I have understood correctly, most Muslims feel that the full veil is not a religious requirement and Jack Straw does not insist on its removal. The issue is therefore very different from that of the headscarves ban in France.

You'll want to make up your own mind, of course. To help you, here is Jack Straw's original article, and a Muslim writer arguing that he is wrong. The BBC also provides this useful analysis of why the veil is worn.