| by Izeth Hussain
( February 21, 2013, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The murder by the Saudi authorities, in the gruesome form of a public beheading, of the innocent Sri Lankan maiden Rizana Nafeek is now in the past, and it might be thought that no good will come of dwelling on it. I believe on the contrary that certain aspects of that murder still merit consideration. In this article I want to comment mainly on that murder in relation to the Sharia, which is regarded as the Divine Law of Islam. I want to show in the process that this is a matter of importance not just to the Sri Lankan Muslims but to the Sri Lankan nation as a whole.
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There is much to be said about the spread of Islamic fundamentalism through the use of Saudi petro-dollars. As that will take too much space I will conclude this already lengthy article by making a few observations on why Saudi inspired – and funded – Islamic fundamentalism is antipathetic to Sri Lanka’s nationalism.
But first I want to comment on an important aspect of the reactions to that murder in Sri Lanka. The murder was a horror story, to which the appropriate reaction should have been disgust and indignation. Instead a tsunami of compassion swept over the nation. Parliament which was sitting at the moment the news of the murder broke stood up spontaneously for a minute of silence; later Kandyan municipal councilors visited Rizana’s parents to offer their help, and so on. The story of an insignificant girl, who had gone abroad to face a life of toil and tears in the hope of bettering the prospects of her poverty-stricken family, had touched the nation deeply. It was experienced by the nation as a tragedy. I am reminded of Yeats’ account of the experience of tragedy: it breaks the dykes that separate man from man and brings them together. In this case the Sinhalese came together with the Muslims, as well as with the other ethnic groups, over the tragedy of a Muslim girl. At the time an anti-Muslim hate campaign was mounting to a horrible crescendo. We must recognize the fact that there is in Sri Lanka racist insanity. But we must also recognize that there is among the Sinhalese a deep well of compassion – a central Buddhist value – that can bind the nation together.
However, while noting that compassion as something of great value, there was a shadow lurking in my mind. All ethnic groups have a capacity to feel compassion, but there was a suspicion in my mind that the Muslims would experience compassion over the Rizana tragedy to a significantly lesser extent than the Buddhists. My expectation was that they would be confused by misconceptions about the Sharia, which would make them believe that the beheading was after all dictated by the Divine Law, and therefore compassion would be out of place. My worst fears were confirmed by Amal Senalankadhikara, the Chairman of the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment, who said in the course of an interview with Ceylon Today (January 27) that he had gone to Muttur expecting brickbats from the villagers, “But nothing happened. All the people believed in the Sharia Law. They said it was the correct thing to behead Rizana according to Sharia.”
Before establishing that the death sentence on Rizana was contrary to the Sharia, I want to make one point, and I want to make it most emphatically: Saudi and other fundamentalist barbarism are utterly contrary to the precepts and the spirit of the Sharia. Otherwise the Sharia would not have roused the admiration of civilized scholars all over the world. I have particularly in mind what Count Leon Ostrorog wrote in his book The Angora Reform published in 1927. A quotation from it is a staple in practically all writing on Islamic Jurisprudence, including Weeramantry’s book of that name. The following is the quotation: “Considered from the point of view of its logical structure, the system (Islamic Law) is one of rare perfection, and to this day it commands the admiration of the student. Once the dogma of the revelation to the Prophet is admitted as postulate, it is difficult to find a flaw in the long series of deductions, so unimpeachable do they appear from the point of view of Formal Logic and of the rules of Arabic Grammar. If the contents of that logical fabric are examined, some theories command not only admiration but surprise. Those Eastern thinkers of the ninth century laid down, on the basis of their theology, the principles of the Rights of Man, in those very terms, comprehending the rights of individual liberty, and of inviolability of person and property; described the supreme power in Islam, or Caliphate, as based on a contract, implying conditions of capacity and performance, and subject to cancellation of the conditions if the conditions under the contract were not fulfilled; elaborated a Law of War of which the humane, chivalrous prescriptions would have put to the blush certain belligerents in the Great War; expounded a doctrine of toleration of non-Moslem creeds so liberal that our West had to wait a thousand years before seeing equivalent principles adopted.”
I come now to the death sentence on Rizana, which I hold should properly be regarded as a murder. No Muslim can question the imposition of the death sentence for murder because that is strictly in accord with the Sharia. But the murder has to be proved, and in the case of Rizana it was manifestly not proved, at least not according to norms prevailing in the rest of the world except for Saudi Arabia and perhaps just a few other places. We are asked to believe that Rizana, who was in the employment of that family for just one week, plotted and killed a baby. Does that sound credible? True, she was scolded that morning by the lady of the house. Can we believe that that drove Rizana to murder? We must remember that she had no record of criminality or juvenile delinquency, or of misbehavior of any sort, and was evidently regarded in her village as just another normal child. Normally a murderer would take every precaution to ensure that no clue whatever pointed to her. In this case we are asked to believe that Rizana strangled or smothered or choked the baby with all the evidence pointing only to her as the possible murderer. Only a lunatic would have plotted a murder in that way, but there is nothing pointing to lunacy or even eccentricity in Rizana’s life of sixteen years. Surely everything points to an accidental death. I myself wrote a letter published in the Island in which I pointed out that I and my wife, both aged 27 and both graduates, were so ignorant of the facts of life that we did not know that a baby had to be burped after imbibing milk. The consequences could have been very terrible for our first-born child. Rizana was a village girl of just sixteen, with scant education and scant experience of life. The Saudis will hold of course that she had confessed. I dismiss the claim that that constitutes proof with total contempt as she withdrew that “confession” as having been made under duress. All the circumstances point to her having been absolutely veracious on that point.
What does the Sharia have to say on proof? I have no expertise on Law and therefore I will depend on what Weeramantry says in his book Islamic Jurisprudence. Before proceeding further I must say that his book contains a Message from the Grand Sheikh of Al- Azhar University in Cairo. Al-Azhar is widely regarded in the Islamic world as having the most authoritative voice on Sunni Islam, and therefore we can take it that the book has the imprimatur of orthodox Sunni Islam on it.
Under the heading The Presumption of Innocence, Weeramantry quotes the Prophet as saying, “Had men been believed only according to their allegations, some persons would have claimed the blood and properties belonging to others, but the accuser is bound to present positive proof.” The court proceedings in the Rizana case have not been made available, possibly because they don’t exist. From what is known, it appears that the judgment of murder was made on no more than the allegations made by the accusers, namely the parents of the baby.’ Plus her alleged “confessin”. It is known that no autopsy was performed to establish whether the baby was murdered or died of other causes, and it is difficult to see what positive proof could have been provided by the accusers. For reasons that I have already given, the case for murder had to be regarded as doubtful in the extreme, and for that reason – in terms of the Sharia – Rizana should have been acquitted. For this is what Weeramantry writes: “Islamic criminal law consequently throws the onus of proof heavily upon the prosecution and in the absence of such proof the accused must be acquitted.”
Weeramantry is worth quoting more fully to establish that what prevails in Saudi Arabia is in some ways not the Sharia but a perverse misapplication of it, amounting to an ugly and brutish caricature of the Sharia. Weeramantry writes: “There are further dicta of the Prophet on the standard of proof. Doubt was to be resolved in favour of the accused, for the Prophet’s instructions were: ‘Prevent punishment in case of doubt. Release the accused if possible, for it is better that the ruler be wrong in forgiving than wrong in punishing.’ … The ‘golden thread that runs through the English criminal law’, namely that an accused is presumed innocent until proved guilty, and also the wisdom of the common law that it were better that a hundred guilty persons be acquitted than that one innocent person be wrongly convicted – ideas that have now become part of universal human rights – were thus anticipated in Islam.”
I believe that nothing further is required to establish, beyond any reasonable doubt, that strictly in terms of the Sharia Rizana should have been acquitted, and that therefore in effect the Saudi authorities murdered her. I want now to establish the point made in my first paragraph above that the Rizana case is of importance to the Sri Lankan nation as a whole, and not just to Muslims and lawyers who may have an interest in the Sharia. My case flows from this initial premise: the judicial murder of Rizana should be understood not in terms of a paradigm of Islam, or more specifically of Wahabism, but in terms of a paradigm of power. Lord Acton wrote that “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely”. I believe that the following can be said with equal validity: “Power tends to make the holders of power mad; absolute power makes them absolutely mad”. The evidence in support of this proposition is to be found overwhelmingly in the pages of history, right down the ages. Saudi Arabia has not just a monarchy – which many Muslims think is inconsistent with Islam – but an absolutist monarchy in which absolute power is exercised by the very extensive royal family and the Saudi power elite. Furthermore, they are backed in a very close alliance by the most powerful state of all time, the US, notwithstanding the fact that that power elite is notoriously Islamophobic and pro-Zionist. That Unholy Alliance has made the Saudi power elite quite mad.
I have to turn again to Weeramantry to show how remote from and alien to both the precepts and the spirit of the Sharia the Saudi power elite is in its practice. Islam is widely acknowledged to be the most egalitarian of the four world religions. This is understandable because Islam rose out of the socio-economic matrix of the development of Mecca as an international trade centre, under its merchant-aristocracy of which the Prophet himself was an impoverished member. It was a process in which traditional social bonds were weakened, and there was an impoverishment of the people as never before. This, according to historians, is the explanation for the emphasis on helping the poor and the egalitarian spirit shown in the early Meccan suras (chapters) of the Koran. This why there arose a figure such as Abu Dhar, the archetypal socialist in early Islam, and this is why Muslims such as myself hold with much conviction that the only properly Islamic form of government has to be both democratic and socialist. It had to be expected therefore that the Sharia would place much emphasis on the rule of law and equality under the law.
Before turning to Weeramantry’s text, I must clarify that I am here concerned not only with equality under the law but also with equality of the sexes. He writes, “‘The aristocracy of yore is trampled under my feet’, said the Prophet in his final sermon. There was no room for privilege under a system which subjected all equally to the identical law.” There is no need to elaborate further on that succinct and precise statement. On the rights of women he makes the essential point as follows: “Against the background of the preceding era, the teachings of Islam regarding the rights of women stood out dramatically.”He quotes approvingly from Ameer Ali’s book The Legal Position of Women in Islam (London University Press 1912): “But the Teacher who … in a country where the birth of a daughter was considered a calamity, secured to the sex rights which are only unwillingly, and under pressure, being conceded to them in the nineteenth century … deserves the gratitude of humanity. If Mohammed had nothing more, his claim to be a benefactor of mankind would have been indisputable.”
I will now provide some details to show that the Saudi power elite, so far from being scrupulous in the observance of the Sharia, have shown disregard for it. There have been widespread allegations that the Saudi authorities have been giving more lenient treatment to erring Europeans than to Asians, suggesting that what they really respect is money and power, not the principle of equality under the law. In the interview to which I referred above Chairman Senalankadhikara said this: “When it comes to Saudis they have a superiority complex and they think that Asian countries are good for domestic workers.” There are suspicions that there has been a peculiar readiness to award the death sentence to Indonesians and other Asians. Was that why Rizana was convicted on such absurdly flimsy grounds? But of course the Saudis will insist that they have always acted scrupulously in observance of the Sharia. In connection with the Rizana case many observers have brought out a blatant contradiction in Saudi practice. Foreign females are not allowed entry into Saudi Arabia to perform the Haj unless they are chaperoned by male next of kin. But foreign female domestics are allowed entry without their being chaperoned. The explanation for the contradiction is quite simple: The Saudis need foreign female domestics for their comfort, not foreign female Haj pilgrims. Saudi scrupulosity over the Sharia seems to be plain bunkum.
I have stated above that the judicial murder of Rizana should be understood not in terms of a paradigm of Islam, or more specifically of Wahabism, but in terms of a paradigm of power. I have also stated that power tends to make its holders mad; absolute power makes them absolutely mad. I believe that excess of power leads to two consequences: a wakened grasp of reality, and an inability to distinguish between right and wrong. Those two consequences could be seen very clearly in the most power-obsessed of our leaders, J.R.Jayewardene, which was why he brought disaster to Sri Lanka. I will now illustrate my argument by giving examples of how rape charges are dealt with in some Muslim countries.
I have no information on how such charges are dealt with in Saudi Arabia. I will therefore cite examples from Pakistan and Nigeria, both of them countries where Islamic fundamentalism, emanating originally from Saudi Arabia, has been powerful. In a seminar paper later published in 2000 I referred to the case of Safia Bibi, a blind Pakistani girl, who complained of having been raped but could not prove her charge. She was therefore brought to trial on the ground that in charging rape she had confessed to having had sex outside marriage. She was convicted for adultery and sentenced to imprisonment, and also lashings which were suspended only because she was pregnant. The case led to an international outcry, the judgment was reversed, and Safia was freed. Unfortunately that case was not an aberration, as I found by a recent reading of Robert Spencer’s book The Truth about Mohammed published in 2006. It states that as many as 75% of the women behind bars in Pakistan are there because they have committed the crime of being raped. He adds that several recent high-profile cases in Nigeria revolve around charges of rape being turned around into charges of adultery, resulting in death sentences that were only modified under international pressure.
That is not the way rape cases are dealt with in the vast majority of Muslim countries. There rape will be seen – except by a small percentage of perverts – as one of the most traumatic experiences that a female can undergo, and the idea that a rape victim can be charged with adultery, be convicted, and be sentenced to imprisonment, lashings, and even death, will horrify most Muslims. It seems evident that in a few places such as Saudi Arabia a highly aberrant form of the Sharia is in application. That aberration has to be explained in terms of the dynamics of power, as I have emphasized, not in terms of Islam and the Sharia. My thesis would be along the following lines. The absolutist Saudi monarchy and the power elite have imposed near-total subjugation on the people. That can be dangerous as even the most subjugated can rise in revolt, as shown in the Arab world by the prolonged slave revolts of the Zanj and the Carmathians So, it would be prudent to provide an outlet for the power-drive immanent in a substantial proportion of human beings. Hence the peculiar Islam of the Taliban, according to which females should wear the niqab with only the eyes showing, be deprived of all education, be confined to the home, and in the event of their being raped be imprisoned, lashed, and beheaded. The economy of power in Saudi Arabia allows males to take it out on their females, and as for the Saudi females – poor things – I suppose they have no alternative to taking it out on their foreign domestics such as Rizana. That would explain why the mother of the dead baby seems to have been the most ferocious in demanding death for Rizana and nothing else.
The above cases show that the power elite in certain Muslim countries where Islamic fundamentalism is a strong force are unable to distinguish between rape and adultery. They genuinely cannot grasp that the former is involuntary and the latter voluntary, and that sane humanity all over the world consider that punishable crime applies to what a person does on his/her own volition and not to what is done to him/ her by others. Clearly they have a weakened grasp of reality, and they cannot distinguish between what is normally regarded as right and wrong. At this point we have to face up to a problem. It is that they are not being hypocritical, but genuinely believe that in treating females in horrendous ways they, unlike others, are practicing Islam in all its pristine purity. How are we to explain this peculiar fact?
I had been perplexed about their inability to distinguish between rape and adultery until I saw a few days ago a DVD of Bertolucci’s interview with Pasolini, one of the few truly great film-makers of the last century. The interview focused on just one of his films, the notorious and horrifying Salo. It is a transposition of Marquis de Sade’s eighteenth century fiction into the twentieth century, set in the Salo Republic which the Nazis established on Italian territory during the last War. The Nazis exercised absolute power there. Pasolini said that he wanted to bring out the Sado-masochistic element in all power and what happens when there is absolute power. His crucial point is this: power wants to make the body of the subjugated into a thing. I will apply that point to the Islamic extremists’ inability to distinguish between rape and adultery. The crucial argument is this: in rape a female body, which is only a thing, experiences sex outside marriage, which is adultery, and whether the female wanted it or not is entirely beside the point, because there is no getting over the fact that her body, which is only a thing, experienced sex outside marriage. I hold that that is the only possible rational explanation for the inability to distinguish between rape and adultery.
I will now cite the latest horror coming out of Saudi Arabia. According to a MNA report of February 3, a father raped – raped her “everywhere” – and tortured to death his five-year old daughter. Her back was broken, her skull was broken, her ribs were broken, and she had extensive bruises and burns. Her rectum had been torn apart and the father had attempted “to burn it closed”. The girl died on October 22, and the father was imprisoned, but he was released on payment of “blood money” to the next of kin, who was her mother and presumably his own wife. The judge had ruled that the prosecution could only seek “blood money” for the next of kin because under Wahabist law a father cannot be executed for murdering his daughter, nor can husbands for murdering their wives. The judge thought that the time spent in prison since the girl’s death – less than four months - sufficed as punishment. Activists of the Women to Drive group have appealed against the judgment. Who was the father? He was Fayhan al-Ghamdi, a Wahabi preacher and regular guest on Muslim TV networks.I will conclude this part of my article by mentioning a few details of Saudi practices that horrify the rest of the world. Beheadings are carried out in public on Friday afternoons with a crowd watching, some of whom doubtless experience sadistic glee. A Muslim friend of mine has seen several videos showing the heads rolling on the ground after decapitation. That was not shown in a video in which the beheading of an Indonesian female was shown – which was mistakenly shown on a local TV channel as Rizana’s beheading. According to the commentary, the Indonesian female’s body was wrapped up and suspended from a helicopter which flew round and round the town. Such is the Saudi understanding of Islam’s Divine Law, the Sharia.
I turn now to the point that the Rizana case is of importance to the Sri Lankan nation as a whole. I have shown above that Saudi practices amount to a horrible caricature of the Sharia. Do we want that kind of Islam in Sri Lanka? My answer is that it is already here and is spreading, and my expectation is that it will continue to spread unless it is countered in a sensible way. The fact that it is already here is established by just one fact: Chairman Senalankadhikara’s statement that all the people in Muttur believed that it was correct to behead Rizana in terms of the Sharia. That belief would not have held sway – to the extent of commanding unanimity – among SL Muslims who traditionally practiced orthodox Sunni Islam, such as myself. Another force has come into operation, whatever it might be called: fundamentalist Islam, Salafi Islam, Wahabi Islam, political Islam, or whatever. In Sri Lanka many of its adherents reject all such appellations, claiming that all they are doing is to practice Islam in its pristine purity.
Orthodox mainstream Muslims are most certainly not lacking in compassion. It is significant that every chapter of the Koran begins with the words, “In the name of Allah, Most gracious, Most Merciful”. SL Muslims have traditionally spoken Tamil with an admixture of Arabic words, two of which occur frequently in quotidian usage. One is “insan” literally meaning human being but carrying with it a load of significance that is peculiarly Islamic. It signifies that every human being is entitled to his dignity and to equal treatment, and above all a suffering being like the rest of us. When a child speaks with gratuitous rudeness to a servant the mother says “You must remember that he too is an ‘insan’.” There the dominant shade of meaning is that the servant too is a suffering human being who is entitled to our compassion. The other word I have in mind is “miskin”, literally meaning a poor person but carrying the significance that he is an unfortunate victim of a divine economy that totally transcends human comprehension. That word is always uttered with a strong note of compassion.
I expected much confusion among Muslims about how to react to the Rizana murder because of the misconception that it was strictly in accordance with the Sharia, but I had not expected the unanimity in Muttur. I had not expected that because as I was brought up in a strict orthodox tradition I was aware of the strong value placed on compassion in Islam. I made enquiries, and found that according to a well-informed Muslim friend that that unanimity was a fact but it was a specious unanimity because it was dictated by Saudi-influenced “priests”. They had instructed Muslims in Muttur and elsewhere that that they should on no account challenge the Rizana beheading because in doing so they would be challenging the Divine Law of Islam, the Sharia. That shows the strength of what I call “petro-Islam” in Sri Lanka.
There is much to be said about the spread of Islamic fundamentalism through the use of Saudi petro-dollars. As that will take too much space I will conclude this already lengthy article by making a few observations on why Saudi inspired – and funded – Islamic fundamentalism is antipathetic to Sri Lanka’s nationalism. What is being taught in the madrasas seem to many Muslims pure Taliban doctrine: a rigorous dress code for females, showing only the eyes; no education for females; confinement of females as much as possible to their homes; no Western dress for males or females ; no music; no photographs, films, or TV, and so on. All that may make the Muslims retrogress and keep them backward in comparison to Sri Lanka’s other ethnic groups. What specifically militate against our nationalism are two features of madrasa education, one of which is the dress code. If it is put into practice beyond a certain point, it will become powerfully symbolic of a Muslim sense of apartness and a refusal to integrate with the rest of the nation. The other feature is that madrasa students are encouraged to be contemptuous of and intolerant towards other religions. Alas, Buddhism falls into the category of idol-worship. The Bamian statues were treasured as part of their national heritage by the fiercely orthodox Muslims of Afghanistan, but the iconoclastic fervor of the Taliban destroyed them.
What should be done? Above all coercive action should be shunned, because one of the most quoted of the hadiths of the Prophet is this: There is no compulsion in religion. The counter-thrust to fundamentalism has to be found within Islam, and that can be done without the slightest difficulty. One of the best texts on the dress code is the one put out recently by Queen Rania of Jordan, which is currently gaining wide currency among Muslims. Likewise there is plenty of persuasive material to show that the fundamentalists’ contempt for and intolerance towards other religions is utterly unIslamic. Apart from texts by Ostrorog, Weeramantry and other scholars, there are in the Koran itself more than one statement to the effect that those who believe in the one true God and live a morally good life, such as the Christians, Jews, and the Sabataeans, will all go to heaven. Those texts have been interpreted as applying to Hinduism in its higher aspects, and it can certainly apply to Buddhism.
( The writer can be reached at izethhussain@gmail.com )
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