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http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2927/sharia-law-secular-law-rabbinical-courts

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Laaroussi was questioned by police but refused to answer questions because he does not recognize the legitimacy of the Spanish state. According to one estimate, 75% of all babies born in Spain on January 1, 2012, were born to immigrant parents, primarily from Morocco.

A radical Islamic preacher in Spain has been arrested for calling on Muslims to use physical and psychological violence to "discipline" errant wives who refuse to submit to Islamic Sharia law or obey their husbands.

Spanish public prosecutors say Abdeslam Laaroussi, a charismatic imam from Morocco who preaches at a large mosque in Terrassa, an industrial city situated 30 kilometers north of Barcelona, is guilty of "incitement to violence against women" for "providing concrete examples of the manner in which wives should be beaten, how to isolate them inside the family home and how to deny them sexual relations."

Police say witnesses provided them with recordings of sermons Laaroussi preached at the Badr Mosque in downtown Terrassa (where more than 1,500 people attend prayers services each Friday) in which he instructed his listeners to "hit women with the use of a stick, the fist or the hand so that no bones are broken and no blood is drawn."

Laaroussi was questioned by police on March 6 but refused to provide evidence because he does not recognize the legitimacy of the Spanish state. If he is found guilty, Laaroussi could face up to three years in prison.

The incident is just one of a long and growing list of Islam-related controversies in Spain, where the number of Muslims has jumped to an estimated 1.5 million in 2011 from just 100,000 in 1990. As their numbers grow, Muslims in Spain are becoming more assertive than ever before.

In January 2012, for example, two radical Islamic television stations began 24-hour broadcasting to Spanish-speaking audiences in Spain and Latin America from new studios in Madrid. The first channel, sponsored by the government of Iran, will focus on spreading Shiite Islam, the dominant religion in Iran. The second channel, sponsored by the government of Saudi Arabia, will focus on spreading Sunni, Wahhabi Islam, the dominant religion in Saudi Arabia.

In December 2011, some 3,000 Muslim immigrants took to the streets of downtown Terrassa to protest recent cuts in social welfare handouts. The size and spontaneity of the protest, which was organized and attended by Moroccan immigrants, caught local officials by surprise.

Also in December, Islamic Sharia law arrived in the Basque city of Bilbao when a Chechen immigrant tried to murder his 24-year-old son-in-law, a Christian, for marrying his 19-year-old daughter, a Muslim.

In September, Muslim immigrants were accused of poisoning dozens of dogs in the city of Lérida, where 29,000 Muslims now make up around 20% of the city's total population. Local residents say Muslims killed the dogs because according to Islamic teaching dogs are "unclean" animals.

Also in September, the regional government in Catalonia revealed that during the first six months of 2011, it prevented 14 forced marriages and the genital mutilation of 24 Muslim girls.

In August, the municipality of Salt, a town near Barcelona where Muslim immigrants now make up 40% of the population, approved a one-year ban on the construction of new mosques. It is the first ban of its kind in Spain. The moratorium follows public outrage over plans to build a mega-mosque financed by Saudi Arabia.

In December 2010, a high school teacher in the southern Spanish city of La Línea de la Concepción was sued by the parents of a Muslim student who said the teacher "defamed Islam" by talking about Spanish ham in class.

Also in December, Lérida became the first municipality in Spain to ban the burqa head covering in all public spaces. Women found violating the ban will be fined up to €600 ($750).

In November 2010, the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla, two enclaves in northern Africa, officially recognized the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha (Festival of Sacrifice), as a public holiday. By doing so, Ceuta and Melilla, where Muslims make up more than 50% of the total populations, became the first Spanish municipalities officially to mark an Islamic holiday since Spain was liberated from Muslim captivity in 1492.

In October 2010, the Islamic Association of Málaga, in southern Spain, demanded that Television Española (TVE), the state-owned national public television broadcaster, stop showing a Spanish-language television series because it was "anti-Muslim" for criticizing certain aspects of Islam, such as forced marriages and the lack of women's rights in Muslim countries.

That same month, residents of the Basque city of Bilbao found their mailboxes stuffed with flyers in Spanish and Arabic from the Islamic Community of Bilbao asking for money to build a 650 square meter (7,000 square feet) mosque costing €550,000 ($735,000). Their website states: "We were expelled [from Spain] in 1609, really not that long ago. … The echo of Al-Andalus still resonates in all the valley of the Ebro [Spain]. We are back to stay, Insha'Allah [if Allah wills it]."

In September 2010, the Watani Association for Freedom and Justice, a local Moroccan activist group, submitted a letter to the Lérida city council in which they asked the mayor to provide them with free land so that they can build a mosque in the city center. The mosque would be financed by Morocco and would compete in Lérida with another mosque project, financed by Saudi Arabia.

Also in September, a discotheque in southern Spanish resort town of Águilas (Murcia) was forced to change its name and architectural design after Islamists threatened to initiate "a great war between Spain and the people of Islam" if it did not.

In January 2010, Mohamed Benbrahim, an imam in the city of Tarragona near Barcelona, was arrested for forcing Fatima Ghailan, a 31-year-old Moroccan woman, to wear a hijab Islamic head covering. The imam had threatened to burn down the woman's house because, according to him, she is "infidel," works outside of the home, drives an automobile and has non-Muslim friends.

In December 2009, nine Islamists in the city of Reus, also near Barcelona, kidnapped a woman, tried her for adultery based on Sharia law, and condemned her to death. The woman just barely managed to escape being executed by fleeing to a local police station.

In another case, a court in Barcelona found Mohamed Kamal Mustafa, a Muslim cleric at a mosque in the southern Spanish city of Fuengirola, guilty of inciting violence against women after he published a book entitled "Women in Islam," in which he advised men on how to beat their wives without leaving incriminating marks. An unrepentant Mustafa characterized his 22 days in jail as a "spiritual retreat."

These conflicts -- and hundreds more like them -- are a harbinger of things to come, especially as the Muslim population in Spain is poised to skyrocket.

Muslim fertility rates are more than double those of an aging native Spanish population. Spain currently has a birth rate of around 1.4, which is far below the 2.1 required for a population to replace itself. At the current rates, demographers say the number of native Spaniards will be reduced to half in about two generations, while during that same period, the Muslim population in Spain will quadruple.

The first child born in Spain in 2012 was Fatima, whose parents are Muslim. According to one estimate, 75% of all babies born in Spain on January 1, 2012 were born to immigrant parents, primarily from Morocco.

Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.

Related Topics: Soeren Kern

Sharia Law, Secular Law and Rabbinical Courts

by Michael Curtis
March 9, 2012 at 4:45 am

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2920/islam-tradition-breaking-cross

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Some Muslim sharia have pressed for their decisions to carry legal force in the national law. In contrast, no similar pressure has been exerted by the rabbinical courts. A fundamental principal in democracies is that equality before the law must refer to all citizens, [and] take care to maintain the wall of separation between church and state. By contrast, sharia law has been used to justify breaches or defiance of national, secular law.

The Archbishop of Canterbury in a speech in February 2008 inaugurated a controversial discussion on the existence and place of religious law and courts in Britain. His challenging premises were that adopting parts of Islamic sharia law into the British system would help maintain social cohesion, and that Britain should find a "constructive accommodation " with some aspects of Muslim law, as it had already done with some aspects of other religious laws.

In a passing reference to other religious laws, he mentions Jewish rabbinical law. However, the Archbishop was imprecise in his casual analysis, seeming to equate sharia courts and law, which are drawn from the Koran, the Sunna, Ijima, and Kiyas, with the Orthodox Jewish rabbinical courts and Jewish regulations (halakhah), stemming from the Bible, oral law, and rabbinical explications in the Talmud and the Mishnah. He did not draw any distinction between the nature of the two sets of courts and law, or their claims for their jurisdiction.

The Archbishop raises important questions in the United States relevant to the concept of separation between church and state, enunciated by Thomas Jefferson in a letter of January 1, 1802, and the first amendment, the Establishment Clause, of the Constitution. One is the role of, and the rule of, law in ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse contemporary plural societies, in which individuals have overlapping identities. Another is whether adherents of religious faiths can or should opt out of national legal provisions where their religion differs from those provisions.These general issues are important in democratic societies.

Some Muslim sharia courts in Britain and Canada have pressed for their decisions to carry legal force in the national law. In contrast, while a complicated and developing relationship exists in the United States between decisions of rabbinical courts and the secular court system, no similar pressure has been exerted by the rabbinical courts. Unlike the claims of sharia courts, decisions in Jewish rabbinical courts are limited to the very small number of Jews who resort to them, not to the whole Jewish population.

Both parties going to the rabbinical courts attend voluntarily and both must accept its judgments in order for them to be binding. The rabbinical courts have no coercive power over the Jewish community as a whole whereas sharia law is imposed on the entire Muslim population. Furthermore, sharia law appears inflexible when compared with rabbinical law which is constantly changing. The different branches of Judaism, Orthodox and non-Orthodox, have their own rabbinical authorities and therefore issue pluralistic, different interpretations of halakhah. Moreover, the procedures, rules, schedules, and requirements, used in rabbinical courts fluctuate at different times and in various places.

Jewish communal judgment and adjudication of disputes in accordance with halakhah goes back to Biblical times, and operates today in many European countries and in the United States. The rabbinical court which performs this function is called a Beth Din (plural, batei din). These Jewish courts, used voluntarily by Jews to settle disputes, have been in use for over two centuries in Britain as arbitration panels.

A Beth Din is generally composed of three observant Jews, usually rabbis, who decide cases on the basis of Jewish law. Its functions have for long focused on divorce and business affairs, but the Beth Din also deals with issues of the Jewish community such as certifying caterers and restaurant businesses as kosher; deciding on medical ethics for Jewish patients; issuing verdicts on breach of contract in disputes between traders as well as in tenancy cases; ruling on who is a Jew; and deciding on the legitimacy of religious conversions. Some of these are decrees on personal issues of faith; these are non-binding.

At least in Britain, if a dispute relates to a contract under British law, the Beth Din can incorporate some rules of that civil law into Jewish law. Most arbitration decisions by the Beth Din are legally binding and can be enforced by the secular courts if both parties agree that the Beth Din can settle the issue. The parties use this arbitration procedure not only for religious and other reasons but also because it is quicker and cheaper than litigation. Decisions by Beth Din do not pose a challenge to the national law. Their decisions are subordinate to domestic (municipal, national) law.

Can Islamic sharia courts and tribunals be legitimately equated with Jewish rabbinical courts (Beth Din, or House of Judgment)? The two are similar in that both depend on religious faith and apply religious law, the sharia based on Islam, and the Beth Din on Jewish law supplemented by the Torah and the Talmud. But the differences are vastly more important than this similarity and a number of them are apparent. Jewish law, though the law of the Jewish people, does not dictate the political life of Jews, nor does it seek to be incorporated into the national secular law. Indeed, interpretation of halakhah, decided by argument and vote, differs in Beth Dins.

Generalization about the work of the Beth Din is perilous. As already described, no one Jewish individual or institutional body determines conclusive interpretation of halakhah, and its regulations on issues of relationships between people and between people and power change constantly as the law is applied to real problems encountered in life, as well as in issues of religious practice.

The Beth Din is concerned only with civil cases. Above all, there is for the most part, if not complete, gender equality in its proceedings, contrary to the patriarchal nature of sharia courts and sharia law which discriminates against women and places them in an inferior position.

A fundamental principle in democracies is that equality before the law must refer to all citizens. The rabbinical courts do not seek to be in disharmony with national law. By contrast sharia law has been used, on the basis of religious principle to justify breaches or defiance of national, secular law, the question of polygamy being a notorious example.

Feminist writers such as Susan Okin have pointed out, without specifically alluding to Islam, that the values of some cultures or religions clash with the norms of gender equality endorsed in liberal democracies, even if democratic countries sometimes violate them in practice. Sharia law, but not halakhah, illustrates a major problem of multiculturalism in democracies in which there is a certain tension between commitment to equal rights and dignity for women, and the commitment to allow groups, such as Muslims, to claim the right to govern themselves according to their own culture.

The functioning of rabbinical courts also differs in different countries. In Israel they are part of the Israeli judiciary. In Britain they operate as alternatives to secular court action within the context of the Arbitration Act (1996). As an arbitration tribunal, the Beth Din is limited in Britain by law to civil proceedings nor is it recognized as a substitute legal court. Its process of arbitration functions within, not outside, the secular law.

In other countries as well as Britain, the Beth Din does not deal with criminal law, but primarily with personal law; marriage, divorce, custody of children, and family property. In complex issues the Beth Din panel consists of dayanin (arbitration judges) who are authorities in Jewish law. Unlike the sharia courts, women have sometimes been included in these panels.

The most familiar major function of the Beth Din is jurisdiction in divorce proceedings. Some Jews feel they must acquire a Jewish religious divorce, a Get, as well as a civil divorce to end marriage. It is true that the Get, when awarded, and written by a scribe is presented by a husband to a wife, and some husbands may hold their wives hostage to obtain this from them, but usually, both parties must agree if the divorce is to go ahead. The decision in effect is made by the participating couple, not by the Beth Din. And the parties must still obtain a civil divorce to change their secular legal status. Aspects of the Get are somewhat complicated and controversial. Women have been denied a Get by the Beth Din if husbands refuse to divorce whereas the reverse is not true. Reform Judaism, at least in Britain, has tried to alleviate this problem by granting religious divorces to women without the husband's consent on the grounds that an unethical law cannot be a Jewish law.

The nature of the interaction between the Beth Din and the secular court has changed from time to time. The secular courts may be asked to approve or disapprove decisions based on halakah, thus giving the secular courts a limited appellate function over the rabbinical courts But, contrary to sharia courts, the Beth Din has never suggested that its decisions be incorporated into secular law. The Beth Din remains a significant institution for those Jews who choose to use its role to arbitrate on the basis of religious law. One can conclude that the legal decisions emanating from the rabbinical courts interact with those of the secular courts in various ways while the Beth Din takes care to maintain the wall of separation between church and state.

Related Topics: Michael Curtis

Islam's Tradition of Breaking the Cross

by Mark Durie
March 9, 2012 at 3:30 am

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2929/turkey-parliament-syrian-threat

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This was no "furious mob" on a "rampage," reacting to Koran-burning. These men are methodically, deliberately, and in an organized fashion going about destroying crosses and objects marked with crosses. Their mood seems happy.

In the recent destruction of Commonwealth war graves in Benghazi, Libya (YouTube Video), you can see not just the desecration of graves, but attacks on crosses.

The radical Muslims who are kicking over and smashing headstones marked with crosses (and one with a Star of David), also took pains to demolish a tall "Cross of Sacrifice" standing at the edge of the cemetery.

This was no "furious mob" on a "rampage," as a Daily Mail report put it. Nor was there any evidence in what they were saying that they were angry or reacting to Koran burning by the US military.

The men are methodically, deliberately, and in an organized fashion, going about destroying crosses and objects marked with crosses. Their mood seems happy. Every now and again the cry Allahu Akbar rings out, or a chuckle of joy. They pass comments on the graves as they kick them over: "Break the cross that belongs to those," "This is the grave of a Christian," and, "This tomb has a cross on it: a kaffir [disbeliever]."

An Australian government minister, Craig Emerson, whose father served in Libya in World War II, commented, "There is nothing in Islam that would warrant this sort of behavior."  But is this true? Or just wishful thinking? Certainly many Libyans and Muslims of other nationalities have expressed their abhorrence of these acts. It would be completely wrong to attribute sympathy for such an attack to Muslims as whole. But all the same, was this attack on war graves truly senseless and without foundation or precedent in Islam? Regrettably, the answer is "No."  The phenomenon of cross-destruction goes back to the life and example of Muhammad. A tradition reported by al-Waqidi said that if ever Muhammad found an object in his house with the mark of a cross on it, he would destroy it. (W. Muir, The life of Muhammad. Volume 3, p.61, note 47.)

In the YouTube video, when one of the men says, "Break the cross that belongs to those dogs," he uses the same classical Arabic phrase – "break the cross' (the Arabic root is k.s.r 'break') -- which is found in a famous hadith (tradition) about Jesus — understood in Islam to be a Muslim prophet — who will return to the earth as a cross-destroying enforcer of Islamic Sharia law:

Narrated Abu Huraira: "Allah's Apostle said, 'By Him in Whose Hands my soul is, surely [Jesus,] the son of Mary will soon descend amongst you and will judge mankind justly [as a Just Ruler]; he will break the cross and kill the pigs and there will be no jizya [i.e. no taxation taken from non Muslims: because they will all be forced to convert to Islam]. …'"

(Sahih al-Bukhari: The Book of the Stories of the Prophets. 4:60:3448.)

This phrase 'break the cross' is religious and ritualistic in its overtones, invoking the canon of Islam. It is like a Christian saying 'forgive us our trespasses' in reference to the Lord's Prayer. This is a clear reference to the words of Muhammad, and invokes his authority for the deed being performed.

To pious Muslims, Muhammad is regarded as the "best example" for Muslims to follow, so it is hardly surprising if his enmity to the cross is shared by at least some Muslims today. The following are just some of many examples of cross destruction which can be culled from media reports of recent years:

Two days before Christmas in 1998, a Catholic church in Faisalabad, Pakistan had its crucifix pulled down by a Muslim leader.
On March 18, 2004, an Albanian mob attacked and desecrated the church of St Andrew in Podujevo, Kosovo. Photographs distributed to the international media show Muslims, who had climbed up onto the roof, breaking off the prominent metal crosses attached there. There have also been many instances of Muslim mobs smashing crosses in Christian graveyards across Kosovo.
In April 2007, in the Al-Doura Christian area of Baghdad, Muslim militants instructed Christians to remove visible crosses from atop their churches, and issued a fatwa forbidding Christians from wearing crosses.
When Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, some of its militias went on a cross-destroying rampage. The Rosary Sisters convent and school in Gaza was ransacked and looted by masked men and crosses were specifically targeted for destruction. A Christian resident of Gaza also reported having a crucifix ripped from his neck by someone from the Hamas Executive Force, who said, "That is forbidden."
On Monday 29 October 2007, in the Malaysian Parliament, a parliamentarian, Tuan Syed Hood bin Syed Edros complained about the "display of religious symbols' in front of church schools: 'I, as a responsible person to my religion, race, and country, I state my views that … these crosses need to be destroyed …'"
Michael Yon has reported on a poster found in Afghanistan ("Destroying the cross is an Islamic obligation") which instructs Muslims to destroy objects with crosses on them.

Antipathy to the cross among Muslims is not limited to Islamic societies: In November 2004, Belmarsh Prison in England was reported to have plans to spend £1.6 million on a mosque. The facility already maintains a multi-denominational chapel, but this has been rejected for use by the Muslim inmates, some of whom had been convicted on terrorism charges, because the chapel contains crosses which have to be covered up when the Muslims say their prayers.

No less a figure than the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, was compelled to remove his pectoral cross when he had to make a forced stop in Saudi Arabia in 1995. The incident is described by David Skidmore in the Episcopal News Service:

Carey's flight out of Cairo for Sudan was forced to make an intermediary stop in Saudi Arabia. On the approach to the Red Sea coastal city of Jidda, Saudi Arabia, Carey was told to remove all religious insignia, including his clerical collar and pectoral cross.

There is another pattern at work here, which is the destruction of non-Muslim (infidel) graves and religious heritage. The Taliban's destruction of Buddhist sites in Afghanistan is a well-known example, as was the deliberate destruction of around 38,000 Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives, some of which were over 1,000 years old, during Jordan's occupation of Jerusalem from 1948 to 1967.

It must also be acknowledged that radical Sunni Muslims have a long history of destroying Muslim graves as well, if they have become sites of pilgrimage or veneration. The Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia have been known for more than one hundred years for destroying venerated gravesites, including those of some of Muhammad's own relatives (see a Shi'ite lament here). In Libya, Salafists have also been busy destroying graves of Sufi saints. Likewise, in Somalia the al-Shabab movement has been destroying Sufi graves (as well as war graves of Christians: see here). In the light of other parallels, the destruction of this cemetery cannot be regarded as simply a senseless act done by a "rampaging mob." It was a thoughtful, deliberate act, which conforms to a widely attested pattern, namely the destruction of crosses, support for which can be found in canonical Islamic sources and the teaching of Muhammad. It also conforms to a pattern of destruction of gravesites, of both non-Muslims and Muslims, by radical Muslims -- not with Koran-burning by the US military.

Mark Durie is an Anglican vicar in Melbourne, Australia, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum.

Turkey Seeks Parliamentary Authorization to Avert Syrian Threat
And more from the Turkish Press

by AK Group
March 9, 2012 at 3:00 am