Friday, July 22, 2011

Sharia Law and Polygamy in America

The column below (highlights added) by Andrew Bostom zeroes in on one aspect of the threat of sharia to the West: Islamic polygamy. An NPR article in 2008 cited sources estimating that as many as 100,000 Muslims live in polygamous families in the U.S.

Note that the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America has issued fatwas sanctioning polygamy, in keeping with sharia law. One ruling declares American law prohibiting polygamy “against Islamic law.”




http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2011/07/21/australia-sharia-sanctioned-polygamy-and-child-marriage/

Australia: Sharia-Sanctioned Polygamy and Child Marriage
Posted By Andrew Bostom On July 21, 2011

[1]

Despite an overall apologetic tone borne of transparent obeisance to cultural relativism, two legal academics, Dr Ann Black and Dr Kerrie Sadiq from The University of Queensland TC Beirne School of Law are “suggesting [2]” in their research publication, “Good & Bad Sharia: Australia’s mixed response to Islamic Law” (due to be published in the University of New South Wales Law Journal on Monday July 25, 2011) that,


Australia is right to act with caution in dealing with Sharia law.

Why are even these obviously [2] devout votaries of the academic social religion of cultural relativism concerned about the practice of Sharia in Australia at all, or what they term, with revealing euphemism, “legal pluralism?”

One reason was extracted from the forthcoming paper of Drs. Black and Sadiq, and cited by The Australian’s legal affairs editor, Chris Merrit [3]:


Valid Muslim polygynist marriages, lawfully entered into overseas,
are recognised, with second and third wives and their children
able to claim welfare and other benefits.

Merrit’s background article on Black and Sadiq’s findings also noted [3] how this practice of Muslim polygamy in Australia involved “marriages where one party is under the lawful marriage age.” And Merrit provided this additional context [3]:

The findings come soon after Ikebal Patel, president of the
Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, triggered a backlash
inside the Islamic community when he called for Australia to
compromise with Islam and embrace legal pluralism …The
latest research has found that while polygamy is unlawful,
mainstream law accommodates men who arrive in Australia
with multiple wives and gives some legal standing to multiple
partnerships that originate in Australia.

More alarming “context” not addressed by the report of Drs. Black and Sadiq, and in fact dismissed by Dr. Black [2] in these words, “The ‘foreignness’ of Sharia law is increased by media reports which highlight ‘differences’ and feed into fears about the Muslim presence in Australia,” was provided by The Australian Daily Telegraph [4]:

On Sunday, a recent convert to Islam in Sydney was allegedly
lashed 40 times with electrical cable by men from his mosque,
in a terrifying home invasion, as punishment for drinking
alcohol – forbidden under Shariah law. Two people have been
arrested in connection with the attack.

The staid report by two Australian cultural relativist academics should (but won’t) make our mainstream media talking heads curious about how mainstream Islamic opinion views polygamy in the United States. For example, what have the esteemed mainstream Islamic clerics of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA) opined regarding polygamy? The AMJA [5] mission statement maintains:

[The AMJA was] founded to provide guidance for Muslims living
in North America. … AMJA is a religious organization that does
not exploit religion to achieve any political ends, but instead
provides practical solutions within the guidelines of Islam and
the nation’s laws to the various challenges experienced by
Muslim communities.

A report in The Muslim Observer [6] published October 21, 2010, highlighting AMJA’s “seventh annual American conference of imams,” confirms that the organization is accepted [6] as such by the mainstream American Muslim community. AMJA and its recent “training” conference for American imams were described [6] in these banal terms:

The organization AMJA (Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America)
has a list of scholars associated with it which stretches from
Al-Azhar University to Virginia’s Open University, and back
across the ocean to the professors at Saudi universities. Its website,
 amjaonline.com, provides fatawa on many issues and promises
24-hour access to scholars who can give legal opinions on the
issues people face. AMJA focuses on providing fatwas to
Americans, and believes it is able to provide culturally appropriate
fatwas although many of their scholars are not American–because
they have some American scholars and because of the technological
ties that bind AMJA’s American scholars with those abroad. AMJA
just had, in Houston, its seventh annual American conference of
imams, and two local Michigan imams attended, namely Imam Musa
of Bloomfield’s Muslim Unity Center, and Imam Ali of MCWS. Mr.
Sadiqul Hassan of AMJA explained that “the event was the 7th
annual imam workshop.” Mr. Hassan said that AMJA is “a fiqh
council basically,” with “scholars who live abroad and inside the
U.S.; we have experts in different fields to educate about life in the
U.S. — fatwa are based on life in the U.S.”

Not only does AMJA extol polygamy in accordance with the Sharia, AMJA endorses its extra-legal (i.e, vis a vis US law) application here in America, as can be readily gleaned from these two “fatwas” or Islamic legal rulings:

Fatwa 2134 [7] Dr. Main Khalid Al-Qudah Date 2006-10-27


Polygamy in Islam is permissible for different reasons, like:
1- The sexual energy of men is more than that of women in general.
So, in some cases, one wife is not enough to fulfill the conjugal
 desire of her husband
2- Pregnancy and delivery negatively affect the shape and physical
attraction that women have.
3- World wide, the percentage of females is always more than that
of males, eventually, there must be a solution, either to permit adultery
and prostitution, or to allow polygamy
4- One husband could take care of more than one wife at the same time;
socially, financially, and even sexually as I mentioned above. However,
the opposite is not right because of the physical and psychological
capability that Allah the all mighty gave men.

Fatwa 3370 [8] Scholar Dr. Hatem al-Haj Date 2007-08-08

Comment from Muslim questioner: We know that polygamy is against
USA law. But I heard from my friend that as long as you don`t register
your marriage to the registrar, it is okay to have more than one wife
here in the states, i.e., all the wives are living here. The argument
that he made was that the law that prohibits marrying more than one
 is against the shaariah so, it is okay for us to break it…There are
some scholars in the USA are practicing polygamy without the
knowledge of the authorities using that argument….

Dr. Hatem al-Haj’s response: Polygamy is halal in Islam and may
be highly recommended when the number of females is bigger than
that of males to afford all females a decent life that suffices their
physiologic, emotional and other needs. The US law about polygamy
is against the Islamic law, for no one can make prohibited that
which Allah specifically made allowable.

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