Sign here against Sharia in Britain: One law for all!

"Faith-based arbitration, where people agree to settle disputes in by the judgement of a religious figure is a highly problematic form of privatising law: using laws which are not publicly enacted, in forums which are not monitored, with no right of appeal, often within environments where women's rights are routinely subordinated to traditional and patriarchal cultures and beliefs which threaten the welfare of women and children.
Arbitration is an acitivity which should be entered into willingly: yet the ability to make an independent choices within a relationship is based in equality in social and economic choices, which is rare in society generally, is even rarer amongst those who cleave to traditional gender roles. Some women face violence for resisting pressures put on them in the name of religion or culture; many others face rejection from the family or community, isolation, financial hardships and other pressures.
The rights of equality between men and women, gay and straight, the rights to divorce and child custody on equal terms, and the criminalisation of domestic violence and marital rape have been hard-fought for by human rights activists over centuries, and continue to be fought for across the world. It is a deeply backward step for human rights to withdraw rights from the weakest and most powerless sectors of society. Women's, and children's, powerlessness will be legitimized and enforced, codified into law.
Given the central role of family in most societies, religious elites seek to strengthen their control and influence over their communities by controlling family relationships. Religious laws—especially in family matters—have long been a battleground. For many women, the family is the source of patriarchal oppression, and those forces which seek to normalise religious interference into private life are often the same ones which seek the control of women and girls.
Fundamentalism in all major religions involves similar views on gender relations and sexuality. Among other things, it seeks to establish and strengthen male-dominated control over the family and restrict women's sexual and social freedoms. Recognising a right for religious figures to intervene in family affairs priveleges the fundamentalist forces by definition, strengthening the worldwide growth of fundamentalism, and eroding women's hard won rights.
We ask our political representatives to respect and protect women’s constitutionally and internationally protected human rights by ensuring access to a single, uniform family law regime. Equally, we ask that religious freedoms of the majority not be confined to the interpretation of a limited few."

Middle-eastern women's campaign against faith-based arbitration and sharia law

Notice that you can sign under at "UK" and "Worldwide".
I urge all Atheist bloggers with any sense of justice to sign and pass this around.

Sweden: Muslims required to divorce according to Sharia law

"The social services in Karlshamn are apparently discriminating against Muslims. Muslims who apply for welfare support need to show a certificate that they've been divorced, not only from a court, but also from an imam.
Susanne Loveheim, head of the welfare services in Karlshamn says that it isn't a strange procedure since Muslim custom requires them to go through an imam for the divorce to be considered complete.
The discrimination ombudsman (DO) is critical of this procedure since it discriminates against Muslims. Katri Linna, discrimination ombudsman, says that it's clear that they've been divorced according to Swedish law, and there's no reason for a special certificate. The DO wants the municipality of Karlshamn to stop the special requirement from Muslims. They will continue to take up the matter with the National Board of Health and Welfare and will make sure that they tighten up their guidelines.
Sweden Radio has discovered that Örebro also requires a divorce certificate from an imam. The DO is now considering to start a nation-wide investigation to see how wide-spread this procedure is and whether it's discriminatory against Muslims.

Islamineurope.blogspot.com, February 20, 2008

Now, apart from the shock-horror factor, this poses an interesting problem. Firstly, it shows how unfair a multiculturalist interpretatation of sharia is. There is one law for muslims and one for others. Some nominal Muslims may not feel the need for an Imam to bother, and should not have to deal with him.
However, there's the welfare thing. What if you are a more or less devout Muslim, who do not think that you are properly divorced unless you are divorced by an imam. Technically, a secular divorce then, is no divorce. Yet, you get welfare benefits.
Of course, a proper divorce means you don't live together, but I'm starting to think that this isn't really a multiculturalist invention, it's someone trying to save money by making sure Muslims are through and through divorced.
But it's completely wrong. The only way to deal with this is to make sharia divorces completely irrelevant. Who on earth brought this up in the first place? It should be outlawed.
Muslims must all recognize Swedish law. And Swedish law must recognize Muslims when they do.

Johann Hari: Rowan Williams has shown us one thing – why multiculturalism must be abandoned

"We don't need to speculate about what these British sharia courts would look like. They already exist in some mosques across Britain, as voluntary enterprises.

[...]

These are the courts that Rowan Williams would give the stamp of British law. In his lecture, he worries that this could harm women – before serving up a theological gloop, saying that sharia could be reinterpreted in a way compatible with the rights of women. But if that happens, why would you need different courts? What would be the point?

The argument that women will only have to enter these courts if they freely choose to shows a near-total disconnection from the reality of Muslim women's lives. Most of the women who will be drawn into "consenting" are, like Nasirin, recent immigrants with little idea of their legal options. Then there are the threats of excommunication – or violence – from some families. As the Muslim feminist Irshad Manji puts it: "When it comes to contemporary sharia, choice is theory; intimidation is the reality."
These courts highlight in their purest form the problem with multiculturalism. It has become a feel-good doctrine mindlessly celebrating "difference", without looking at what that difference actually means.

[...]

Multiculturalism was formed with good intentions as a counter-reaction. But it has become a mirror-image of this old racism, treating Muslim women – and others – as so different that they do not deserve the same rights as the rest of us. As the European-Iranian feminist Azar Majedi puts it: "By creating different laws and judicial systems for each ethnic group, we are not fighting racism. In fact, we are institutionalising it."
When people talk about defending Muslim culture, ask them – which culture? The culture of Irum and Nasireen, or the culture of their abusive husbands? Multiculturalism patronisingly treats immigrants as homogenous blocks – when in fact they are as diffuse and dissenting as the rest of us.

[...]

The job of a liberal state is not to stamp The True National Essence on its citizens, nor to promote "difference" for its own sake. It is to uphold the equal rights of every individual – whether they are white men or Muslim women. It has one liberal culture, with freedoms used differently by different people."

Johann Hari, Independent, 11 February 2008

Here's the same piece on his website.

I'll throw in a comment that Irshad Manji made earlier this year:

"Superficial diversity reduces all of us to external markers of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and the like. Far more meaningful to elevate ourselves to different ways of thinking. It’s high time to popularize the distinction between diversity of thought, which recognizes individuality, and diversity of appearance, which glorifies only the group."

Why the Archbishop of Canterbury is not a bleeding heart liberal

"Yet what is truly significant about the Archbishop’s statement is not his apparently liberal tilt towards respecting the customs of a competing faith. Although the focus of Williams’ speech was on the place of Sharia law in Britain, its main purpose was to argue for the re-legitimation of the role of religion in British society. As head of the Anglican Church, Dr Williams is painfully aware of the diminishing significance and influence of his institution. In Britain, there are now more Christians practising Catholicism than Anglicanism. Islam appears to motivate and inspire people in ways that many ordinary Anglicans find difficult to comprehend. The Church of England is haunted by dissension over sexual and lifestyle issues and continually struggles to uphold its international authority over the world’s 77million Anglicans.
The Anglican Church faces a crisis of authority. It finds it difficult to assert its role as the ‘established church’. And instead of looking within itself and asking probing questions about its own meaning and purpose, it prefers to blame the onward march of materialistic secularist culture for its institutional demise. Sometimes it presents itself as a beleaguered minority faith victimised by a cruel secular crusade. Some Anglicans have joined with their Catholic colleagues to decry the attempts by anti-religious forces to ban Christmas and other religious customs. Dr Williams’ speech was only the latest attempt to win more space for the exercise of religious authority in Britain. But instead of asking for greater recognition of Anglican sensibilities, Williams instead chose to put the case for the exercise of ‘religious conscience’ through demanding greater recognition of Sharia law.

[...]

In other words, he is not simply demanding more recognition for Sharia but for all forms of religious law."

Frank Furedi, Spiked, 11 February 2008

With all the right-wing paranoia about the archbishop, it is apt to get some other views.
(Ironically, not from the left)

"Many commentators are mistakenly seeing demands like the Archbishop's as “liberal”, “progressive” or “PC gone mad”. They are anything but.
Properly understood, the effect of devolving national law and national morality to local and group level is profoundly conservative. Dr Williams's ideas really represent the wilder fringes of a bigger idea: communitarianism. Communitarianism can come in a surplice, a yarmulka or from a minaret and is all the more dangerous because armed with a divine rather than a local loyalty. It almost always proves a repressive and reactionary force, fearful of competitors, often anti-science, sometimes sceptical of knowledge itself, and grudging towards the State.
There is absolutely nothing “left-wing” or woolly-liberal about empowering it. A Britain in which Muslim communities policed themselves would be more ruthlessly policed, and probably more law-abiding than today. But it would be a Britain in which the individual Muslim - maybe female, maybe ambitious, maybe gay, maybe a religious doubter - would lose their chances of rescue from his or her family or community by the State.

Matthew Parris, The Times, February 9, 2008

Btw. I really loved the introduction of Matthew Parris' article:

"You say,” said Lord Napier (confronted as Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in India by locals protesting against the suppression of suttee) “that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”"

I have no respect or tolerance for Sharia

"But what has been particularly nauseating has been the British government's handling of the affair. According to the Foreign Office, they were "very disappointed" at the verdict. Really? Why didn't they simply say that the next aid bundle to Sudan, worth nearly £200m, was off the table and if anything further happened to the woman then crippling sanctions would be applied? But no, instead we got a load of mealy-mouthed rubbish about how this was a localised incident, that it didn't represent Islam and hopefully we can all hold hands and sing songs around the proverbial camp fire. But the problem is that this is representative of Islam." Ian O'Doherty, Irish Independent, December 03 2007

A hard hitting comment here and he goes on to list lots of Sharia episodes around the world.

The unfortunate teacher in Sudan has been freed, btw.
Protestors mob British embassy in Sudan as teddy row teacher is freed

I saw someone had used this teddybear below as an avatar at Richarddawkins.net and thought it was rather funny. The guy even had a very apt comment on the Pope's latest attack on Atheism( i.e. Marxism.)

Collection of gender and religion stats from Barna.org

51% of women have read the Bible in the past week, compared to 42% of men who report reading the Bible in the past week. (2006)
Women are more likely than are men to attend church on a given Sunday (50% to 44%, respectively). (2006)
Women are more likely than men to attend a Sunday school class at church (27% to 21%) or to participate in a small group (26% to 20%). (2006)
In general, women pray more often than do men, with 89% of women versus 79% of men reporting that they have prayed in the past week. (2006)
Women are more likely than men to be born again: 49% of women have accepted Christ as their savior, compared to 41% of men. (2006)
Women are 55% of the adult born again population. (2006)
Women are more likely than are men to believe that the Bible is totally accurate in all of its teachings. (55% versus 41%). (2006)
Women are more likely than are men to believe that God is the all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect creator that rules the world today (78% to 64%). (2006)
74% of women compared to 64% of men say that their faith is very important to them. (2006)
68% of women describe themselves as "deeply spiritual" compared to 55% of men who say that "deeply spiritual" describes them accurately. (2006)

barna.org

Oh, and Norwegian Muslim women are more inclined to support the introduction of Sharia in Norway than Muslim men.(In English)

I have a lot of respect for feminists who have been at the barricades against religion. The fight for women's rights have weakened the churches a lot, and will now continue to weaken Islam.

But after having seen statistics after statistics showing how more women than men support repressive religions it seems to me that the feminists can not cast the blame solely on the "patriarchy". They will have to deal with their sisters too.

How multiculturalism is betraying women

"The crux case centres on a woman called Nishal, a 26-year-old Moroccan immigrant to Germany with two kids and a psychotic husband. Since their wedding night, this husband beat the hell out of her. She crawled to the police covered in wounds, and they ordered the husband to stay away from her. He refused. He terrorised her with death threats.

[...]

But Judge Christa Datz-Winter followed the logic of multiculturalism instead. She said she would not grant an early divorce because - despite the police documentation of extreme violence and continued threats - there was no "unreasonable hardship" here.

Why? Because the woman, as a Muslim, should have "expected" it, the judge explained. She read out passages from the Koran to show that Muslim husbands have the "right to use corporal punishment". Look at Sura 4, verse 34, she said to Nishal, where the Koran says he can hammer you. That's your culture. Goodbye, and enjoy your beatings."

Johann Hari, The Independent, 30 April 2007

Updated with new link.
See also his archive against religion.