Hena Akhtar, victim of shari'ah law.
Hena Akhtar, also known as Hena Begum, deserves to be remembered and not to be just another statistic in a Third World country. Look into her eyes: she was just a child who despite poverty and a culture that offered no real future in the view of those reading this blog, could smile and enjoy life. She was innocent and she committed no crime by any reasonable definition of the word. Her only crime was that she was a female who would have had to have four male witnesses to swear that she had been raped if she was to avoid the penalty that was sure to be meted by Islamic religious authority in her hometown of Shariatpur, Bangladesh. Her testimony, or the testimony of any number of female witnesses, would be inadequate under shari'ah. The village elders met, the imam issued a fatwa, and she was publicly whipped to death. There is no defense for such brutality. We can cluck our tongues and avert our eyes while talking about the ignorance and poverty that allows such inhumane actions; and, we can piously point out that the imam was not truly following the Koran but that only makes us as guilty as the one holding the whip. For those who would apologize for Islam, the apology cannot be accepted unless accompanied by proactive steps of change and we aren't seeing that. What we see instead is a perfunctory statement that "it's wrong but that's not the true religion" and a quick change of the subject. What we think is "Fail!"
The body of evidence available in the world today clearly shows that Islam has developed into a worship of brutality and death such as was the norm in the 10th century. In other words, it hasn't developed or, if it ever did, ill-educated, religious leadership has devolved it to its current state of religious bigotry and violence. Under the guise and guidance of its religious law--shari'ah--it justifies the subjugation of women, slavery, stoning, beheading, death for having the temerity to leave the religion, the cutting off of limbs for petty crimes and, in this case, the absolutely inhumane whipping to death of a young girl who committed no crime at all just because she was a female and that's what shari'ah law prescribes. If the ummah can allow such atrocities to happen and go unchallenged and unpunished because those responsible are religious leaders--imams--or just because they are men who are supreme under shari'ah, then the ummah is as guilty of the crime as are the perpetrators.
There are those within the Muslim community who don't follow this medieval brand of Islam but they are a minority little followed by the media and few have been able to effectively speak out let alone begin to wrest control of the religion from the cretins who currently control it. I pray that those few will eventually be successful because the bottom line is that if Islam wants respect from all humanity then it must give respect to all humanity. Its current course is a blasphemy that if not corrected make its practice correspond more closely with a brutal criminal organization masquerading as a religion rather than a true religion that worships God.
Follow the title link for a truly stomach churning story about the criminal rape and subsequent religious, but no less criminal, murder of a young girl.
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