You have just proved that you know nothing about the English Defence League. A closed mind is like a closed book you learn nothing.
In the U.K.a Muslim woman is entitled to the same rights as everyone man or woman. Sharia Law stops Muslim woman from enjoying these equal rights. Under Sharia Law a woman is treated as less than a man
Is your argument that Sharia Law is 20 years behind UK law - that was the point at which, for example, rape in marriage became illegal in the UK. Or are you arguing Sharia Law is several decades behind UK law - when property ownership and voting rights became equal?
You do know that we are talking about 2000 year old religions and societal change at varied speeds?
This pair o sentences is among the most ironic I have seen on this board in a very long time. Getting one’s opinions from a bunch of bigoted football hooligans does not seem to be the best way to gather information.
meh
There are a small number of Pakistani immigrant enclaves where the culture clings to some of the traditions they brought in with them. I support efforts to encourage them to recognize the culture in which they now live that is more open, urban-oriented, and tolerant.
And it is not Sharia law that is the issue, but the particular rural cultural interpretation of Sharia law that presents problems. There are several versions of Sharia, not one monolithic controlling phenomenon.
The claim that “Muslim women” who happen to be in Britain, (meaning some overwhelmingly large number of Muslim women in the U.K.), are being oppressed by Sharia law is a fantasy proposed by the EDL and a few other uninformed groups that is an attempt to claim that there is some Muslim mafia-like association that is suppressing all British Muslim women. This is nothing more than standard nativist drivel used to attack all new immigrant groups, in this case in the context of religion.
You want to reject the use of “falsifiable” by science as tautological because its own axioms reject the supernatural, and preserve the use of “falsifiable” within alternate epistemological constructs as a “pretty important and meaningful concept,” when those alternate constructs are unable to falsify anything at all, in any sense beyond wordsmithing silliness.
LOL.
This is why Yali is left wondering why the west has more cargo than his black pards in New Guinea. When you decide you can assign the possibility of existence to anything and everything because it’s non-falsifiable, you are not left with anything important or meaningful. You are left with an approach that leaves you armed with sticks, exposed to the ravages of disease, and trying to build things with dirt. I’m pretty sure Yali is one of my best candidates for buying into the Tooth Houri, if I can figure out what kind of upgrades he’d like. Without science, he is unarmed to figure out if anything is meaningful or important.
The scientific approach kills my Tooth Houri with its approach; in the only useful sense of the word proof, it proves the utility of its axioms every day.
This notion that you are promoting that philosophic musings about how my Tooth Houri might just exist is somehow either important or meaningful applies only to those who eke out a living promoting the supernatural, or whose lives are otherwise so wretched they need to take refuge in a makebelief afterlife where they get to sexually pleasure themselves at will for eternity.
I guess if that helps you get up in the morning, it’s “meaningful.” But it has not a shred of meaning beyond the letters on a page. And, in fact, in that epistemologic paradigm, there is not even a mechanism by which to prove there are any letters, on any page. This leads to hoping dead ancestors will come to the rescue, but it leads you rather bereft of cargo. 
Rise of religion in China: dead cat bounce, and diminished punitive government reaction. But pretty far afield of the thread. I’ll still bet on science in the long term.
(Sticking with a Qur’anic-based Sharia law):
والسارق والسارقة فاقطعوا ايديهما جزاء بما كسبا نكالا من الله والله عزيز حكيم
(Sahih international)
“[As for] the thief, the male and the female, amputate their hands in recompense for what they committed as a deterrent [punishment] from Allah . And Allah is Exalted in Might and Wise.”
Either you are way more conservative than I realized, or you haven’t read the Qur’an, or you aren’t familiar with either Sharia or British law.
Care to tackle Sharia law and adultery next?
LOL.
PS: I’m not claiming the Pedant is opposed to hand amputation for the guy who stole my bicycle. But I think British law is, unless the amputation is done very professionally, with general anesthesia and very good technique.
But I’m not saying that science should “encourage or allow for relevance of epistemologies that are not evidence based”. In fact, I state right there in the sentence you’re responding to that I think science should dismiss them as irrelevant, or scientifically meaningless, or non-scientific.
But I don’t think that dismissal should be phrased in terms like “science declares that all supernatural phenomena do not exist, according to scientific criteria for existence.” That sounds too creed-like to me.
What, you think Tolkien fans actually believe in the existence of elves? Even the most hard-core fantasy nerds I know don’t go that far.
If that’s not what you’re claiming, then your analogy is inapplicable. People who like fiction about elves but have no personal belief in the reality of elves are not comparable in this context to people who have a personal conviction of the reality of a supernatural deity.
No, I’m not rejecting the use of “falsifiable” by science. The ability of science to falsify hypotheses that conform to scientific premises about the nature of reality is a very crucial and deeply meaningful concept.
What I’m rejecting is your peculiar idiosyncratic definition of “falsification” to mean “declaring hypothesized supernatural phenomena, which do not conform to scientific premises about the nature of reality, to be nonexistent-according-to-scientific-criteria-for-existence”. That’s the tautology.
Uh, no, I am not arguing for using “falsifiable” within “alternate epistemological constructs”. I already noted that falsifiablity is a scientific concept that isn’t valid in non-scientific contexts:
Look, Chief, at this point you’re just responding to my explanations with slightly revised misinterpretations and misunderstandings of things I already stated, in most cases more than once. There is no point to my trying to clarify or explain them any further if you’re still not getting it. Especially since they don’t seem to be seriously confusing anybody else in this thread.
A small number? How do you make this determination?
Oh this is rich. So sharia courts enforcing sharia have nothing to do with sharia. Impeccable logic!
“rural cultural interpretation of Sharia law”? Where do you get this crap? You should realize that your denialist assertions such as this are no closer to the truth than those who learn about Islam from the EDL, and harp on and on about “taquiya”. You are every bit as misinformed as they are, you too have been manipulated into a state of ignorance by those with a political agenda.
Tell me, which of the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence used in sharia courts is “rural”. How could you possibly imagine that the different treatment of women and men under sharia is “rural” when those interpretations emanate from religious institutions in cities like Mecca, Cairo, and Islamabad?
Also, keep in mind that most Pakistanis who live in rural areas do not speak English, while most Pakistani immigrants to the UK do.
You are wrong again, using the same reasoning that has made you wrong countless times in the past. Muslim women are being oppressed in Britain if Muslim women are being oppressed in Britain. Not “meaning…” something else that you have fabricated as an additional condition.
Who has claimed that “all British Muslim women” are being suppressed? Considering the history of your responses when you are called out on these kinds of manipulations, which are a staple of yours, I think we can pretty easily predict how you will respond to this…
No, it is not “drivel”. Sharia courts in Britain contribute to the continuation of abuse of Muslim women in Britain.
Panorama - Secrets of Britain’s Sharia Councils Part 1
The denialist rhetoric that you regularly propagate contributes heavily to the popularity of politicians and parties like the EDL, Le Pen, Trump, ect. When they are the only ones discussing such a serious and obvious set of problems, it is entirely predicable that a percentage of the unsophisticated electorate will be attracted to the message, and will disregard the messages of those who purport to advocate human rights but dismiss, deflect, and minimize violations of human rights when the violators make inconvenient political enemies.
Drop the outdated tribalism, it is well past time.
Grin! Ya never know! I know of a neo-pagan circle that has incorporated “Elbereth” into their worship ceremony!
By looking at the actual numbers from organizations such as the Pew and Gallop pollsters.
Sharia is the word to identify judicial philosophy. There is no one “Sharia” that guides all Islam. People who want to natter on about the subject should be aware of this. The version of Sharia that a few immigrant communities look to is one that came into Britain with rural Pakistani refugees. Any realistic study of Islam in Britain in the early 21st century will demonstrate that fact.
Nope. You are the one displaying utter ignorance of the topic or politically motivated “information.”
The topic was the imposition of (some form of) sharia on Muslim women in Britain. The reality is that this only occurs within the communities of Muslims who recently immigrated from rural Pakistan. Do try to actually follow the discussion.
You appear to have based your claims that Pakistani uimmigrants are not from rural communities on your impression that they speak English. However, a review of the actual immigrant populations notes that largest number of immigrants are actually form rural areas surrounding cities, rather from the cities, themselves.
Did you see any qualifiers such as “Some Muslim women” or “women in Pakistani immigrant communities” in the posts by T.M.? His claim was that Sharia was preventing Muslim women from enjoying the rights of inhabitants of Britain. He made no distinction regarding which women were being oppressed.
This is ludicrous. I do not deny the presence of problems with the use of Sharia within communities and explicitly noted that it occurs. You, on the other hand, support the EDL and Trump and others who want to issue broad-based condemnations with no nuance and no examination of the actual reality.
Prominent Sunni Muslim leader Kanthapuram Aboobacker Musliyar Saturday said gender equality was “against Islam”.
Addressing a Sunni students’ camp in Kozhikode, the orthodox Sunni leader said, “Where has man-woman equality taken place? It is not going to happen. Gender equality is against Islam, society and human kindness.”
“The world is controlled by men. Women have strength in other areas… They can deliver babies. Only women can nurture babies. Her duty is to rear children and feed the husband,’’ Musliyar said.
Claiming that women do not have “courage”, Musliyar asked if there is a woman doctor who can perform a major surgery.
“Women doctors can do general medicine or manage pediatrics. But they don’t have the courage for big surgical interventions,’’ he said.
Referring to a recent controversy over segregation of girls and boys in a Muslim-run college, the orthodox Muslim leader said the demand that girls and boys be allowed to sit together was meant to destroy Islam.
He said that the allegation of a Muslim woman journalist that children used to be sexually abused at madrasas was baseless, and added that those who raise the allegation should bring forth evidence.
Musliyar has a history of making controversial observations over women issues and their role in society.
He had recently come out against women reservation in local governing bodies. He had also advocated marriage of minor girls to ensure morality and discipline in society.
Once again you have managed to drench a discussion about Islam in a torrent of wrongness.
Suhaib Hasan is a judge of the ISC: (and the same judge who in Panorama - Secrets of Britain’s Sharia Councils asks a woman who seeks his help because she is being abused if the abuse is because of her cooking.)
*"Short Biography of Dr Usama Hasan:
Since his childhood, Usama has been associated with Masjid al-Tawhid, a community-based mosque in Leyton, East London and a bastion for one strand within Sunni Islam, which is self-described as being ‘Salafi’ which means following closely the example of the first three generations of Islam. Another self-description is as ‘Ahl al-Hadith’, or followers of the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings, example and way of living.
Usama’s father Sheikh Suhaib Hasan is a respected Islamic scholar and leader at Masjid al-Tawhid. Mentored by his own father as well as by other Islamic religious scholars, Usama holds traditional certificates of scholastic learning (ijazas) in both the Qur’an and in the Hadith, the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad.
Usama also went on to obtain degrees in Physics and Artificial Intelligence from the Universities of Cambridge and London.
After graduating, Usama worked for five years in industry before returning to academia, and is currently a senior lecturer at Middlesex University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and was formerly Planetarium Lecturer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. He has served as a part-time imam at Tawhid Mosque in London for over 20 years, has translated a number of Islamic works from Urdu and Arabic in English, and has been a long time activist within the Muslim community at local and national levels.*"
Not rural. Not recently immigrated either.
Masjid al-Tawhid Leyton:
*The history of the Masjid goes back over 26 years ago to 1984. A small building was purchased at 34 Francis Road, by the Grace of Allah, through a generous donation from the noble Shaykh Abdul-Aziz bin Baz (Head of Presidency of Islamic Research, Ifta, Dawah and Guidance, Saudi Arabia).
In less than 10 years the congregation outgrew the building and the committee decided to look for another building.
The current building at 80 High Road Leyton was found and purchased in 1991. An independent Waqf (trust) was setup to supervise the purchase and renovation of the building. The foundation stone of the new masjid was laid by the esteemed Shaykh Muhammad bin Abdullah al Subayyil, President of Affairs of the Sacred Mosques of Makkah and Madinah. The Masjid was completed in July 1997.*
Not rural. Not recent. Not Pakistani.
Just stop.
I am following it, which is how I know that there is nothing to indicate that this is true.
The description, in your cite, of Pakistani immigrants as being from rural areas is talking about the post war period, as in seventy years ago. Not recent.
No. Nor did I see the qualifier “all”.
And in the case of this particular point, he is correct.
The ones who are subjects of Sharia courts, obviously. If I say “today, potatoes are being harvested” it is understood that I am talking about some potatoes, not all potatoes. Similarly, when one tells you that, say, Muslim women are undergo female genital mutilation, or Muslim women in the UK are being oppressed by Sharia courts, they are telling you the truth regardless of the fact that not *all *women undergo FGM and not all women in the UK are suppressed by Sharia courts. Rather than try to find a way to squirm away from the truth by crudely manipulating language, someone with a true concern for human rights should confront the reality of the situation.
You claimed that Sharia isn’t the problem, that instead it was the application of “the particular rural cultural interpretation of Sharia law that presents problems”. This is the kind of nonsense that Islamists the world over use to respond to criticisms of sharia and Islam. The implication being that the sharia that emanates from Lal Masjid, Al-Ahzar, and Al-Medina is acceptable.
No, I do not. You are living in a fantasy world, and this statement of your’s simply indicates yet another realm that you have constructed for yourself there.
Equating criticisms of Islam with bigotry against Muslims is a betrayal of Muslim reformers and ex-Muslims, because that is exactly how Islamists respond to their efforts. The large chorus of supposedly liberal people in the West spreading this same falsehood give rhetorical aid those who are oppressing the “minorities within minorities” of their own communities: The liberal reformist Muslims, feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, dissenting Muslims, and minority sects.
Ooh. Look! You found one of the various Islamic courts that was not Pakistani.
How clever.
Of course, that does not actually address the fact that while such a court is located in London, it has nothing to do with the majority of Pakistani Muslims who live in the North. London does have a sizable community, (not all Pakistani). However, most of the problems against which the EDL whine occur in the northern industrial cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, etc.
You first.
No. The point is that Sharia is not uniform. You attack Sharia and claim it is the problem. You then hunt up a Salafist to hold up as an example of Sharia, which is rather like quoting Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham, or Pat Robertson as representative of Protestant Christianity. They represent a faction within it as Suhaib Hasan represents a (Salafist, i.e., ultra-conservative) faction within Islam. When you engage in that sort of cherry picking, you demonstrate that you are only interested in blanket condemnation and not genuine analysis.
Your straw man argument is not impressive. Criticism of Islam is fine if it is rooted in legitimate observations rather than in fantasies invented by the likes of Mark Steyn, Christopher Caldwell, and their ilk.
Your approach is not to support the reformers, but to condemn the entire religion, ignoring every non-religious factor that plays a role in any phenomenon in which a Muslim is involved so that you can blame every problem on the religion.
Have you read the Qur’an or have you just read certain snippets of it handily available on certain sites with a certain bent?
It’s a very short book, and an easy read. Reading it is nowhere near the challenge of reading the Bible or the Book of Mormon. It’s a little longer than the Book of Psalms.
Arguing against Islam without having read the Koran is far more foolish than arguing against Christianity without having read the Bible, yet vastly more common.
What do you mean, “not Pakistani”? None of them are Pakistani, they are in the UK.
The Islamic Sharia Council is not “one out of the various” it is one of two such services, and the much larger one at that:
“the council states that it has dealt with an average of between 200 to 300 cases monthly as of January 2012” while Muslim Arbitration Tribunal: “As of 2008, the courts had dealt with around 100 cases dealing with issues such as inheritance and nuisance neighbours”
Why would it “address the fact”?
All of the claims I am addressing are about the UK generally, remember?
So what?
Here you demonstrate that you just don’t know what you are talking about. I didn’t “hunt up a Salafist”, we are talking about Sharia courts in Britain. I am referring to the senior judge of what is, by far, the largest Sharia Council in Britain. And this court doesn’t use some backwoods, “rural”, ultra-conservative outlier faction of Islam. Not at all. It provides legal rulings and advice to Muslims in accordance with its brand of Islamic Sharia based on the four Sunni schools of thought. This is mainstream, orthodox Islam. Salafism is a dominant strain in Islam, it is arguably THE dominant strain, depending on how you define it. And it’s not like the non-Salafist strains have a bunch of respect for human rights. The Sunni ones still use the same four schools, mostly.
I have no clue who they are or why you are bringing them up. What I know about Islam and Muslim communities is based on friendships with Muslims, reading the Koran and Hadith, visiting and studying in mosques, and mostly by studying the works of ex-Muslims, Muslim rationalists, and Muslim secularists and reformers. Some examples: Pervez Hoodbhoy, Tarek Fatah, Kunwar Khuldune Shahid, Ali Rizvi, Ibn Warraq, Majid Nawaz, Maryam Nawazie, Muhammad Syed, Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, Asra Nomani, Ani Zonneveld.
Fiction.
You just made this up. It is baseless.
No. In my interactions with* you* I am responding to your persistently over the top denialism of the negative influence of Islam. You seem to have picked up the idea somewhere that every time someone makes any criticism of Islam whatsoever, that you might happen to read, that they owe you a mention of every other possible factor, as well as a mention of every other similar incident that has ever occurred that was not influenced by Islam. But that’s not how this works.
The position that science actually does hold sounds too creed like for you so we shouldn’t phrase the dismissal like that? Really? Because religious scientists would stop doing science if so? You have to be kidding me right? You realise that phrasing the dismissal as I do(and there is nothing incorrect in my phrasing) does not stop anyone else from valuing any epistemologies in their personal life as they will. It just establishes the relative importance of what goes in the public sphere.
The analogy is applicable in as much as there is no difference between Tolkien and Muhammed where science is concerned. If science can declare elves to be non-existent fantasy, and Allah to be the same, people are free to believe what they like in their personal lives. The strength or degree of their belief is not a factor in what science can or should declare. Even if it is, the relationship needs to be an inverse one. The stronger your non-scientific belief, the more likely you are to take it seriously, the more important it is for the pre-eminence of science to be reaffirmed vis-a-vis that belief. Even if there is a cost to be borne in religious people then not participating in advancing science(and I would really have to see some evidence that they would, instead of just believing, in their personal capacity, that religion provides them value and carrying on with their jobs), then I say that cost is probably worth it.
So, is there some liberal and enlightened form of Sharia where a woman’s word is worth the same as a man’s?
Sadly the answer is no. BUT there are liberal and enlightened Muslims who have cast of the shackles of Sharia Law, intergraded within the U.K. community and in many cases are a blessing.
The population of the U.K. is very diverse made up of many race creeds and colours and on the whole we get on well together. The Estate where I live is a mix of Christian, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, assorted Pagans etc The one group that seems to be missing are Muslims who prefer to live in areas where they can dominate and rule the roost, because of the diversity of our estate that cannot happen. How do I know this? Because I work with other Volunteer’s who want to improve life on our estate. Far from being a keyboard warrior I am an activist who gets involved
I have to say to tomndebb I haven’t seen an American get remotely close to the realities of modern British cities - it’s not a criticism and it’s not patronising but holy smoke … way, way off the pace.
This is a different world now. It’s like listening to Woodie Guthrie after the Rolling Stones broke out - noble, decent but 30 years ago. Hell, there isn’t even a basic understanding of ‘institutional racism’ on this message board.
#youaintnomuslimbruv
Laudable as that sentiment is, the grammar pedant in me can’t help but point out that “Ain’t no Muslim” is actually a double-negative, so technically…
[sub]I’ll get my coat.[/sub]