Sentence was issued by the head of Neka’s justice department, upheld by the mullahs’ supreme court and carried out with the approval of judiciary chief Mahmoud Shahroudi.
Ateqeh Sahaleh Rajabi did not have benefit of a lawyer and defended herself. Accused of unchastity, she told the religious judge, Haji Rezai, that he should punish the main perpetrators of moral corruption, not its victims. Apparently this plea did not go down very well and the judge personally pursued the death sentence.
Afterwards Rezai admitted Ateqeh’s offence did not merit death, but he had her executed for her sharp tongue. Any outspoken woman, or indeed child, might like to note that a burqa isn’t the worst fate awaiting her, nor will it protect her from the mullahs’ disapproval.
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Rowena Hurst
London NW11
EMOTIVE: Imagine my surprise as I read Amiel’s description of “the summer softness of suburban lawns with their gentle irrigation systems” being “at odds with the spiritual toughness of the elderly Islamic scholar Syed Mumtaz Ali”.
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Amiel tries to make the case that using the sharia law to settle civil disputes has absolutely no place in democracy, but she compromises her argument by her lack of knowledge of Islam and sharia law and her desperately emotive language.
If she had researched the topic she would not have made such outrageously racist and ignorant statements as “flogging and amputation feature prominently in sharia law”, as if these elements are written in capital letters, underlined in red and awaited eagerly by Muslims everywhere.
In addition, Amiel considers the sharia law to be “incompatible with women’s rights”, even though Islam champions women’s rights in a number of ways. Islam does underline in red the fact that women are to be respected and treated with equality in all matters, including suffrage, divorce and business. Amiel should note that women in Europe have only more recently been granted access to such rights and that the sharia law granted them automatically many centuries ago.
Amiel should not confuse Islam and the way it is exploited by certain despotic regimes.
Moreover, Amiel claims that “Muslim fundamentalists are self-evidently more vigorous than their evangelical Christian or their ultra-orthodox Jewish counterparts” and that “this sort of fundamentalist comes to a country more like an invader than an immigrant”.
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I had the impression that the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq resulted from neo-conservative Christian ambitions and that the slaughter of Palestinians and the systematic theft of Palestinian land were the handiwork of over-zealous Zionists — these people clearly have fundamentalist tendencies and are arguably “invaders” but they are not Muslims.
Finally, Amiel predicts that the female population in Europe will be “trailing behind the men in our full-length burqas”. She should know that the burqa is not compulsory under sharia law and that it is for women to choose whether they wish to cover themselves to this extent.
Leila Nadir-Jones
Bristol
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INTEGRATION: For generations immigrants have integrated into the fabric of the society of their host countries, while managing to keep alive the customs of their countries of birth within their homes, places of worship or cultural centres. Why should the Muslims of Canada be different?
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Angela Klemer
Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex