A friend rather reluctantly emailed this to me this morning thinking I’d be interested in the topic if not the actual opinions of the author. But Mr. Bell Jar had already pointed out to me a Trib story on the same subject, which, while lacking the Telegraph article’s virtue of containing its own refutation of the implied superiority of all Westerners in such news items, does highlight the interesting news that they apparently don’t have free speech in Italy. (Nor freedom of religion in France, where Muslim headscarfs have been banned in schools). This has all been news to me, and I’m beginning to think there’s a lot I don’t know about what Europeans think democracy is.
FWIW, I think Mustafa’s reading of the wife-beating sura is pretty orthodox as far as it goes, apart from the weapon specs. I think Amina Wadud mentioned a hadith that has Muhammad advising husbands to beat their wives very lightly with slender reeds (or possibly feathers? I’ll have to look this up later, as it apparently is not in the online hadith collection, but I did find this one: “How does anyone of you beat his wife as he beats the stallion camel and then he may embrace (sleep with) her?”), but the point is supposed to be that they cannot inflict much pain or damage, rather than that they are good for hiding abuse from the police. Or so she would like to argue, the plain meaning of the sura itself being uncrackable, apparently. Unless you accept the notion of a trajectory towards social justice, in which Muhammad’s invention of prior steps before beating are meant to eventually move Muslims towards non-violence in domestic matters entirely. Or this argument that the sura has been mistranslated and doesn’t refer to beating at all.
In sum: the meaning of this sura is a matter of dispute among Muslims; Mustafa is presenting one fairly well-established interpretation so far as I know. The article didn’t quote the other parts of the book relating to women that the court found "intolerable and criminally reproachable," but I do have a notion of what the court might have been looking at, since I’ve been reading “fundamentalist” Mustlim tracts on the status of women lately, as the stomach permits. They’re pretty darned sexist all right.
Is it really possible to declare an entire form of religious belief illegal? If so, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to just declare Jerry Fallwell and the whole Christian Coalition out of order, and put them in jail, or at least confiscate their publications and shut down their websites? Why oh why haven't we thought of this sooner?
Just what the hell is going on over there anyway? I thought we were supposed to be the ones overreacting and oppressing Muslims and suspending civil liberties all over the place. Europeans are supposed to be the smart ones.