Sharia-Sanctioned Marital Rape In Britain...And North America

From The American Thinker:

October 15, 2010


Sharia-Sanctioned Marital Rape in Britain -- And North America

Andrew G. Bostom

As reported in the UK Independent, president of the Islamic Sharia Council in Britain, Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed, has reiterated alarming comments made during a March, 2010 interview, sanctioning marital rape.





Sheikh Sayeed was in fact responding to an inchoate effort at modernizing the contracts which govern Muslim marriages in Britain. The good Sheikh, representing Britain's main Islamic Sharia court, the Islamic Sharia Council, promptly published a rebuttal of the contract, which including a statement on sexual abuse (page 6 here). He opined in the March interview:





Clearly there cannot be any "rape" within the marriage. Maybe "aggression", maybe "indecent activity."





He further rejected both the characterization of non-consensual marital sex as rape, and the prosecution of such offenders as "not Islamic." Sheikh Sayeed, who came to Britain from Bangladesh in 1977, also brazenly expressed his Sharia-supremacism and accompanying disdain for Western, i.e., British Law, stating





...to make it exactly as the Western culture demands is as if we are compromising Islamic religion with secular non-Islamic values.





Sayeed re-affirmed these sentiments to The UK Independent:





In Islamic sharia, rape is adultery by force. So long as the woman is his wife, it cannot be termed as rape.





Crowing with pride during his March 2010 interview, Sheikh Sayeed maintained,





No other sharia council can claim they are so diverse as ours because other sharia councils, they are following one school of fiqh [Islamic jurisprudence]. Ours is diverse -we are hanafi, shafi'i, hanbali.we have Bangladeshi...we have Pakistani, we have Indian, we have Palestinian, we have Somali scholars on our board.



At present there are 16 main sharia courts around Britain, located in Birmingham, Bradford, and Ealing in West London. These institutions are "complemented" by more informal sharia-based tribunals-the think tank Civitas asserting that up to 85 tribunals currently exist in Britain.





But for those who naively-and smugly-proclaim such phenomena are absent within the Muslim communities of North America, consider AMJA, the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America. AMJA's mission statement claims the organization was, "...founded to provide guidance for Muslims living in North America...AMJA is a religious organization that does not exploit religion to achieve any political ends, but instead provides practical solutions within the guidelines of Islam and the nation's laws to the various challenges experienced by Muslim communities."

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