Iraq leaders demand Islam be the source of law
Iraq's Shiite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and another top cleric staked out a radical demand that Islam be the sole source of legislation in the country's new constitution.
One cleric issued a statement setting out the position and the spiritual leader of Iraqi Shiites made it known straight away that he backed demands for the Koran to be the reference point for legislation.
Recent applications of Islamic law
March 1996, Afghanistan. A woman is stoned to death for trying to leave the country with a man whom she was suspected of having sexual relations with.
February 2000, UAB. An unmarried housemaid is found pregnant. For the crime of adultery she was sentenced to death by stoning.
August 2000, Zamfara. A woman sentenced to 100 lashes for having premarital sex.
October 2000, Nigeria. A woman asked the court to force a man she alleged had reaped her to pay for her daughter's naming ceremony. The court refused and then charged her with engaging in intercourse outside of marriage. She was sentenced to death by stoning.
The Iraq election results suggest a Sistani mandate
Partial returns from about 35 percent of the 5,200 polling centers showed the Alliance, which was endorsed by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, with about two-thirds of the votes to 18 percent for Allawi, a secular Shiite. Shiites are believed to make up two-thirds of Iraq's 26 million people.
Under a democracy governments are free to impose brutality upon society, if that's the will of the people. People who do so must believe in legalistic extremism with great faith. That great faith will stand firm against opposing rationale, to the point of seeing evil in those who disagree. Especially if the imposed brutality is applied through the word of Allah, God, or any other inspiration of religion. In this pre- elections post, I discussed measuring success or failure in the Iraq elections.
The measuring stick (for success or failure) has to be the hard predictions of the naysayers, pacifists, and realists, who said:
- The war in Iraq will not make us safer, and will spawn terrorism.
- We'll create and get caught up in an unnecessary civil war.
- Iraq will become a theocratic democracy opposed to the US.
On item three, I suggested, if after all this bloodshed, we helped create a government filled with hatred for us, not interested in doing business with us, fiercely opposed to Israel, aligning with other outposts of tyranny or anti-US interests, then that is indeed a failure in the war on terror.
Moqtadr al-Sadr seems to be a winner in the Sistani mandate.
A leading contender to become Iraq's new prime minister has offered to welcome Moqtadr al-Sadr, the demagogic Shia cleric behind bloody uprisings against coalition forces, into a new government expanded to include those who boycotted the election.
Dick Cheney has the talking points.
"They will do it their way," Cheney said. "They will do it in accordance with their culture and their history and their beliefs and whatever role they decide they want to have for religion in their society. And that's as it should be."
It's all good. Just like they planned. Freedom marched peace into Iraq to advance democracy, and that democracy is free to let Sharia march human rights violations throughout Iraq and advance anti-Americanism. When some say "freedom isn't free," I doubt they realized that it could apply to the definition of "free" attached to freedom not to cost. There's a Newspeak update they didn't count on.
Updated: Sistani issues denial:
That's good news, but there's still a long way to go before this constitution is complete.
-- Zap
Zap,
Using examples of Sharia application under Wahabist regimes to predict what's going to happen in Iraq is rather like using the Great Depression as one's sole predictor for the stock market. Particularly, even the fundamentalist Shiite notion of Sharia is far less strident than Wahabist interpretations.
While Iran is not exactly an example of a free society (ask any Baha'i), it's far more free than, say, Afghanistan was in March of 1996.
Moreover, Ali Sistani is far less of a hard-liner than the clerics in Iran, so there is a legitimate reason to hold at least a cautious optimism for the prospects of democracy in Iraq.
Posted by: Rick Schaut | February 08, 2005 at 10:14
Rick, of course you're right, and I need to curb my tendency to sensationalize. I'm working on it. On one hand, I want to shine a light on an issue by showing how far off the corporate media is, and in so doing, I am prone to exaggeration or overshooting the point myself. On the other hand, I do want to inform the uninformed on situations like Sudan and Nigeria, and should probably use a better topic to do so. So many topics, so little time. Thanks for the input.
Clearly, here I should have used Iran for more pertinent examples of applied Islamic Law. For a look at that situation, there's six pages of examples here:
http://hrw.org/doc/?t=mideast&c=iran
Posted by: Zap | February 08, 2005 at 11:48