Fight Hudood, Protect Women

#80 nonsense. if it criminalized consensual sex outside marriage, how many landlords, how many military officers, how many rich businessmen, how many maulvis, how many pedophiles, how many women from wealthy families, how many tribal sardars, how many red-light district visitors (I could go on) have been jailed under this law??? zero. zilch. The vast majority is women from poor families!!


You and the rest of your kind in pakistan - foremost among them the pagan priests (maulvis) who have done their best to prolong this satanic law, as well as these badmaash maulvis - may escape justice in the Pakistan (where the law applies only to those without means), but will not escape God`s justice.

#71 by bulleya

“blacks fought for their rights on their own and eventually got them”

O Man! In one phrase you just discarded the sacrifices of a whole generation. The American Civil War was fought for the abolition of slavery, and the blacks were only peripheral to the contest. This war split the nation, friends, neighbors, even brothers, with each side resolute in its commitment to its cause. You have stories of friends hugging each other before pledging that they would not waver to kill the other on the battlefield. A nation fought for its conscience, their belief in virtue, in justice and finally in redemption.

#81 urstruly: you have ignored my question about why the maulvis have opposed removal of the hadood ordinance tooth and nail if, per your own post, the 4-witness provision has not been applied. Read my post #82 below and have some fear of God, if common sense is not enough.

tehsinabbassi #83: ``O Man! In one phrase you just discarded the sacrifices of a whole generation. The American Civil War was fought for the abolition of slavery, and the blacks were only peripheral to the contest.``

....i was refering to the later struggles of martin luther king etc.......

...having said that, there is quite a bit of debate about the real motivations of the us civil war....i think it is quite simplistic to say that a whole generation sacrificied to free slaves.....i think a lot of political and economic factors were involved, in which slaves may well have been a similar shuttlecock as women are in political issues in pakistan.....even after the civil war, only slavery ended.......barely any rights were given to the blacks....apparently the whole generation which sacrificied was not too interested in giving too many rights to the freed slaves.....a case of limited moral corrections....

.....blacks received full rights only after the civil rights movement, in which no doubt a lot of whites participated.......however, the leadership and the leading lights were, themselves, black........

Re: # 80 Khurram

``The Hudood Ordinance does not deal with the procedure of arrests, FIR or any such thing.
What it did was criminalize consensual sex.``

You are absolutely correct. It is not the law but the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) that addresses the issues like procedures of arrests, FIR, collecting and documenting evidence by police, and methods of prosecution by the court. At least you are honest about your disapproval of Hadud Laws for the reason that you do not consider consensual sex as a cognizable offence. I respect your integrity even though I do not agree with your reasons. Most others lack that integrity.

#75 by Mantolives

You see – you just caught me violating my own rules. I hate it, when others make invalid assumptions. You are right! I should have known better, yes Zia had already dissolved assemblies at the time. But that was peripheral to my argument. What I wanted to know was, what are the remedies provided in the law as written.

Re #71, bulleya
``in the end, if a community/group wants rights, it has to fight for it on its own ........led by the more affluent amongst their own communities..``

Don`t you think you are describing Beena, WAF, Asma Jahangir et al ? If you think all they do is hold marathons, then you are mistaken.

Re #82, tahmed
``how many landlords, how many military officers, how many rich businessmen, how many maulvis, how many pedophiles, how many women from wealthy families, how many tribal sardars, how many red-light district visitors (I could go on) have been jailed under this law??? zero. zilch``

Well, how many of them were jailed for murder, theft, embezzlement or any other crime? Hudood or no Hudood, the poor will always suffer disproportionately.
For context, please see posts #49 & 65.

....speaking of taqi usmani.........he sits on the shariah boards of islamic banking for quite a few western banks and middle eastern banks........all these banks are getting into islamic banking and one of the requirements of such a bank is a shariah board which declares transactions to be kosher.......

taqi usmani sits on the shariah boards of hsbc, islamic bank of britain, abu dhabi islamic bank and many more........if he gets paid for all this, he must have made quite a fortune.....on the other hand, if he is doing it out of the goodness of heart to spread islamic banking, then i don`t see any ethical conflict........

Re: # 84

I did not understand your question on bioth occassions. Could you be more specific.

In your 82 you have listed a whole bunch of people upon whom hadud law has not been applied in your opinion. I hope you are not making an argument that since law is not applied uniformly therefore there is reason for it to be abolished. If this is your argument then it is not the failure of the law you should be talking about but the implementation and application of the law - which are two distinct animals. hence I do not understand your questions.

#90 urstruly: You wave aside the glaring oppression of women from poor families under hadood laws that I pointed out by reducing it to a simple ``law is not applied uniformly``!! Resort to such legalistic arguments indicates how blind you are to the evil these laws have done in Pakistan.

#90 urstruly: and on that other point, I am not sure how much more specific I can be, but let me try.

In one of your earlier posts you had written that the requirement of 4-witnesses was never applied in practice. I had then said, that if that was the case, why are the religious parties so insistent in retaining these laws? That is the question I had posed to you for which I still have no answer.

Re: # 83

`` The American Civil War was fought for the abolition of slavery, and the blacks were only peripheral to the contest.``

As a historian you should know better. The American Civil War was NOT fought to abolish slavery. The core reason is that Abraham Lincoln intiated an unconstitutional aggression upon the citizens of United States to supress the scessionists in the Southern states. What really takes the cake is the fact that, at that time US constitution did recognize the right of any state to seprate itself from the union. The issue of slavery was brought into this equation for two reasons:

1. Abe had to justify his unconstitutional war, so what better to give it a moral dimension, just as they give their justification to Iraq war (as if not having democracy is a moral shortcoming of a nation). In those days British philosophers had just realized that ``slavery` was a bad thing and idea had become fad in Europe at the time when in rest of the world they were colonizing and subjugating countries after countries. Funny that no philosopher ever considerd that s an abomination.

2. Slavery was the backbone of Southern economy. Becuse of the reason cited above European capitalists were having hard time competing with Southerners while miscreant philosphers were breathing on the back of their necks inciting unruly subalterns.

Untruly has shut up finally on his erroneous claims...

Now... I am too far out of my station to respond in detail... but this is a letter I have sent to all newspapers of Pakistan a few minutes ago...


Dear Sir,

I note with distress that Taqi Usmani, a former Shariat Appellate Bench judge, has taken to referring to himself as Supreme Court Justice Grand Mufti Taqi Usmani in public appearances.

The Shariat Appellate Bench is constituted - under article 203 F of the Constitution- of three Supreme Court Judges and 2 Alims. Please note that Taqi Usmani was appointed to Shariat Appellate Bench by General Zia as an Alim Judge. He was never appointed to the Supreme Court Bench which requires -under Section 177 of the Constitution - 15 years of High Court practice or 5 years of experience as a Judge of the High Court.

While one cannot comment on his claim to the post of Grand Mufti, the Supreme Court of Pakistan must stop Taqi Usmani from calling himself a Supreme Court Justice, which he was never eligible to be.

Yours sincerely,

Yasser Latif Hamdani

Re: # 92

I still do not understand your question but let me try.

The requirement of four witnesses applies to a very specific circumstance and not upon every occassion when a man and woman are caught, accused, or reported having sex. Suppose a couple is caught, accused, or reported having illicit sex then court prosecutes the case based on evidence. The evidence is of four types or a combination of the four:

1. Human witnesses
- A minimum of two witnesses are required

2. Circumstantial evidence
- this alone is not enough; evidence # 1, 3, 4 must corroborate.

3. Forensic evidence
- that includes medical reports, DNA, video etc.

4. Pregnancy.
- Pregnancy out of wedlock

Based on the type of evidence available the prosecution can recommend two types of punishment:

1. Hadd
2. Ta`azir

Hadd:

The Hadd punishment comes from Qura`n and Hadith and it is stonning to death of adulterers and 100 lashes for single fornicators. But Hadd punishment is ONLY applicable when four adult male Muslims of good reputation must have seen the act of penetration through their own eyes. If this condition is not met the Punishment is addressed by Ta`azir.


Ta`azir;

Ta`azir is an arbitrary punishment chosen by the society, which must be less in severity than Hadd.


There are some exceptions to the above rule too. For eaxmple, neither hadd nor ta`azir is applicable when a spouse accuses other of infidelity and have no evidence to prove their case. The issue is resoved through a procedure called L`aan, which results in the separation of the couple by court.

Re: # 94

Oye iblees mirzai. Catching the train is a good excuse to disappear. Where are you posting these messages from - from your tonga enroute railway station?