WAR ON WOMEN MUSLIM STYLE

For months I have been maintaining that the real war on women is being waged by Muslim men against Muslim women primarily through the strict application of Sharia law. One of the oddest and most preposterous applications of Sharia law to Muslim women is the case of Meriam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag. Meriam was born in Sudan in 1987. Her father is a Sudanese Muslim, but he abandoned the family when Meriam was 5 years old. She was raised by her Catholic mother. Catholicism is the only religion she has ever known. She married Daniel Wani, an American citizen living in Khartoum in 2011 and joined the Catholic church. For all intents and purposes, she was Catholic, not Muslim.

Nevertheless, and despite the fact that she was pregnant with her second child, she was tried and convicted under a Sharia law that prohibits apostasy under penalty of death. The case against her had been brought by a group of men that she had never seen before who claimed to be her relatives. One of them, who claimed to be her brother, threatened to carry out the death sentence even if she were acquitted. She was convicted and sentenced to death. She was imprisoned along with her one year old son.

Her case caught the imagination of the world. Almost 1 million persons petitioned to save her life through an online web site. Additionally, foreign officials from various countries, including the US, assisted by bringing pressure on the Sudanese government. At one point she was released from prison, but then on June 24 she and her husband were re-arrested at the Khartoum Airport for attempting to use forged documents to leave the country. Now, she is free again but still in fear for her life. Even in the US she will not be completely safe from retribution by her male relatives.

CONCLUSION AND PREDICTION

This is but the latest example of Muslims’ harsh treatment of women – second-class status, kidnapping children, rape, honor killings. The list goes on and on. We have even seen examples of this in the US. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to maintain that many Muslim men value their camels more highly than their women. This is the real war on women. Although conditions may not be as consistently extreme as they were in the past, I do not this second-class status to disappear entirely.