"There Is None Without Her"

I just added a Sikhtoon to the previous post. Before that, I put the new Sikhtoon lamenting discrimination against turbandharis (I love the versatility of the English language!). I am procrastinating. I do not want to write this post.

First, I need to admit an error. While I don't mean to make a mistake, I don't mind being corrected. A few days ago, I posted a story about the stoning of Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow. Unfortunately, that story is true and accurate. I have discovered, however, that the picture is of some other girl being stoned. I don't think that changes anything, but I strive for accuracy.

Here is another picture that I roached from a site reporting the same story. Is that her? Or some other victim? Does it matter?

Still another site reporting on that stoning contained this picture. I can't be sure that this was taken at the stoning, but, again, it doesn't matter. To the average person - Sikhs are never average, of course - those guys with hatred in their eyes and turbans on their heads look a lot like us. Who aside from us know the difference between a Sikh turban and a Muslim turban? Point made?

Then today, I just heard about taliban in Kandahar, Afghanistan, driving by on motorcycles and using squirtguns spraying the faces of schoolgirls and their teachers with battery acid. The girl in the picture is named Atifa Bibi. It makes it more real, I think, to have a name.


What is all this hatred and disrespect of women? Where does it come from? Do the some Muslims, taking the story of Eve literally, blame women for all the evil of the world? (Please go to the end of this post where I have posted a response.  It was in comments, and I moved it here, so it would not be missed.) Or are they secretly ashamed of their natural, God-given attraction to the opposite sex? Or is it simply that women are smaller and, on the whole, less aggressive than men, and hence easier targets than men?

We Sikhs pray, using Dhan Guru Nanak Dev ji's words in praise and appreciation of womankind:

"We are born of woman, we are conceived in the womb of woman, we are engaged and married to woman. We make friendship with woman and the lineage continued because of woman. When one woman dies, we take another one, we are bound with the world through woman. Why should we talk ill of her, who gives birth to kings? The woman is born from woman; there is none without her. Only the One True Lord is without woman" (Guru Nanak Dev pg. 473)

Our beloved founder understood and loved woman at a time when we were, without question, considered and treated as subhuman. I am so happy and proud to be a Sikh. I am so happy and proud to belong to a religion and a people who have outgrown misogyny, who know that the sexes are of equal value, partners in life, a people where all are treated as individuals of infinite value, where women and men are equal, boys and girls equally loved and welcomed into this life.

Well, we do, don't we?


The promised comment:


Hi, I just want to clarify a few things.

Firstly, Muslims do not believe that Eve was responsible for the sin which brought her and Adam to earth.

In fact, reading through the Quran, we will get the impression that it was Adam who was more responsible.

We don't believe that Eve was the temptress of Adam.

Secondly, the Quran instructed both men and women to be modest.

In fact the Quran mentioned men first. Muslim men are instructed to lower their gaze and guard their private parts.

Therefore any assumption that Islam places the responsibility on women not to arouse male sexual feelings is incorrect.

Thirdly, Islam does not say to hurt or injure anyone who does not conform to its mode of modesty, be they Muslim or non-Muslim, male or female.

What happened in Afghanistan is a reflection of that society's continuing failure to understand Islam correctly.

Indeed, if the Afghans are good Muslims, they wouldn't be killing each other after sending the Russians packing.

Fourthly, the stoning of the woman needed clarification.

a ) For someone to be accused of adultery, there must be four adult witnesses who saw the sexual act without any doubt.

This means that they actually seen the male sexual organ entering the female sexual organ i.e sexual intercourse.

If they had merely seen the man on top of the woman but did not see penetration, then the charges of adultery cannot be levelled.

b ) Both man and woman are recognised as equal under the law. What applies to the man applies to the woman.

The question is - where is the man being stoned to death ?

There are many things which are wrong in these instances - and only by knowing what Islam actually says in these matters, can one sees the wide schism between Islam and the community which claims to practice it.

Not all Muslims practice Islam in the like manner not all Sikhs practice Sikhism.

Death By Torture Of Innocent Girl, 13

ADULT ALERT!

WARNING! THERE IS CONTENT IN THIS POST THAT MAY BE INAPPROPRIATE FOR CHILDREN. THE OBJECTIONAL CONTENT IS NOT SEXUAL, JUST UGLY, VIOLENTLY BRUTAL AND HARD FOR ANY CIVILISED PERSON TO TAKE.

Once in a while, something comes to my attention that seriously threatens my chardi kala. This in one such story. It is brutal. It is ugly. I warn you, I shall not spare your feelings. I shall be as merciless to you, my readers, as these "men" were to this young girl.

Let me start with a picture. Her name is - was - Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow. In this picture, she is being buried up to her neck in the ground, to be executed by stoning. Her crime? She was raped!

I know this girl's face will haunt me for a long, long time.

The English story here is from Al Jazeera. I am following it be a Babel Fish translation from Spanish of the same story. The Spanish version contains many more details, more emotionally written. It is worth wading through the bad translation to read its meaning.

Take a long, hard look at the terror on her face.

Amnesty: Rape girl, 13, killed for adultery

Somali fighters stone 'rape victim'


In recent months the Islamic Courts' al-Shebab group appears to have gained strength [EPA]

A Somali girl who said she had been raped has been stoned to death in Somalia after being accused of adultery, a human rights group has said.

Amnesty International said in a press release on Friday that the victim, Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, had been 13 years old - not 23 as earlier reports had suggested.

Duhulow was stoned to death on October 27 by dozens of men in a stadium packed with 1,000 spectators in the southern port city of Kismayo, Amnesty International and Somali media reported, citing witnesses.

The armed group in charge of Kismayo had accused her of adultery after she reported that three men had raped her, Amnesty said.

"This child suffered a horrendous death at the behest of the armed opposition groups who currently control Kismayo," David Copeman, Amnesty International's Somalia campaigner, said in a statement.

Initial local media reports said Duhulow was 23, but her father told Amnesty International she was 13.

The Islamic Courts took control of much of Somalia in 2006, triggering an intervention by neighbouring Ethiopia, which propped up the UN-backed transitional government and ousted the Islamic Courts fighters.

While the group's political leadership largely fled the country, the movement's military and youth wing, the al-Shebab, switched to guerrilla warfare.

In recent months the group appears to have gained strength, taking over the port city of Kismayo, and dismantling pro-government roadblocks.

/span>

And now, the translation of the Spanish version:

They violate the girl they judge, it in an Islamic court they stone and it by… adulterous!


(PS). - It is the horror. And those that promote smiling the “Alliance of Civilizations” would have to be asked, in silence, if a society as ours it can be allied with those who they perpetrate - endorsed by his law and its governments crimes like the one of Asha.

The news that it had been stoned until the death, untied a lukewarm wave of world-wide rejection one week ago, but the details that arise now cause the vomit.

Asha Ibrahim Dhuhulow neither was a woman, nor was 24 years old, nor was an adulteress. Its crime was to be born and to suffer in a country dominated by the Islamic fanaticism, the piracy and the violence as it is Somalia.

Asha only was 14 years old. It had not committed adultery. It had been violated by three men of the most powerful clan of the city. Helped by the Islamic court imposed by the integrist militias of The Shabab, the death to pedradas of the minor has served the twigs to erase all sign of the crime.

Ash, like many children of countries like his, was born victim already. It came to the world in the field of refugees of Hagardeer, in the south of Kenya, in 1995, where her family had to take refuge three years before, fleeing from Mogadishu from the attacks against his clan, the one of the Galgale, a minority in Somalia.

She was the last one in being born, thirteenth of six brothers and six brothers.

The young, that went to the school in the field of refugees, suffered epilepsy, reason why the family decided to send it with her grandmother in Mogadishu, where she could receive better medical attention. Kismayo was in its way.

From the past August, the integrist militias of The contral Shebab that coastal city.

Asha, “a very sweet girl, very humble”, remained catched in Kismayo, and sobrevió thanks to the charity of some neighbors and people that knew in its winding way towards the north.

where it could survive these two months thanks to the known ones that had done in the way. The money to arrive at Mogadishu finished, according to said to him to its father by telephone. The night of Saturday, three men approached to him they forced and it to accompany them to the beach, they violated where it.

Under paternal advice, it went to the courts and denounced her rapists. And there the suplicio begins that would end the girl tied and buried until the neck, list to be burst to pedradas.

Amnesty International (AI) reveals that the girl was stoned by a group of 50 men in a stage of the harbor locality, before near 1,000 spectators.

The islamists had taken a truck filled with stones - “greater than an egg and smaller than the fist of an adult man” - to the stage, so that people added themselves in the execution.

No of the facinerosos that participated in the violation and torture of Asha has been accused nor arrested.

Young agony d ela was frightful. After being stoned and when already they took it - supposedly dead a nurse discovered that still he breathed and returned to place it in the hole, buried until pechp, so that he continued the lapidación.

AI mentions a subject, call Sheij Hayakalah, that declares proud that “the tests were presented/displayed on the other hand and she confirmed her fault officially”:

“In addition it said to us that he was happy with his punishment by virtue of the Islamic law”.

Several witnesses mentioned by Amnesty count another thing: that the girl tried to fight against her detectors and had to be taken by the force to the stage.

Once there, the militiamen - partners of the three rapists shot against several people who tried to save the girl and killed a boy who was in the neighborhoods.

A spokesman of The Shabab apologized later by the death of the boy and assured that the one that shot to him would be punished.

“This is not justice, nor was an execution, this girl underwent a horrible death ordered by the armed groups competing that at the moment control Kismayo”, it affirms to butcher the person in charge for Somalia de Amnistía, David Copeman.

“Its murder is even another one of the abuses of the Human rights committed by the combatants in the conflict of Somalia, and again demonstrates the importance of the international action to investigate and to document those abuses, through an international commission of investigation”.