That’s the punishment you get in Saudi Arabia for being a woman and riding in a car with a man who is not in your family. Oh, after your gang rape. (Via Feministing.)
A court in the ultra-conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia is punishing a female victim of gang rape with 200 lashes and six months in jail, a newspaper reported on Thursday.
The 19-year-old woman — whose six armed attackers have been sentenced to jail terms — was initially ordered to undergo 90 lashes for “being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape,” the Arab News reported.
But in a new verdict issued after Saudi Arabia’s Higher Judicial Council ordered a retrial, the court in the eastern town of Al-Qatif more than doubled the number of lashes to 200.
A court source told the English-language Arab News that the judges had decided to punish the woman further for “her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.”
But, lest you jump to conclusions, understand that it’s not only women who have to feel the occasional lash to be kept in line. It’s gay men, too!
About 50 people picketed Saudi Arabia’s embassy in London on Oct. 19 in protest against the nation’s reported floggings and executions of gay men.
On Oct. 2, two Saudi men convicted of sodomy in the city of Al Bahah received the first of their 7,000 lashes in punishment, the Okaz daily newspaper reported. The whippings took place in public, the report said.
I presume that the strong connections between totalitarian impulses, religious fundamentalism, and sexual repression have already been the subject of dozens of Ph.D. theses. There is a truly ugly part of human nature that feels a need to control the lives of others, and theocracy serves as a mechanism for amplifying those impulses into public actions.
Muhammed,
Why should not we judge a culture? Any culture has its own set of taboo. Some of Islamic rules (against killing or stilling) has parallels here, some had parallels (taboo on homosexuality). But certain rules can not be justified by any means, those are the rules against which Western civilization fought centuries ago. For example we believe in freedom of consciousness, and Islamic rule that mandates killing of apostates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam can not be condoned. In fact we consider something like this as example of pure evil.
Inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims existing in many Islamic countries can not be justified. Here is what do I mean by inequality: For e.g. in Saudi Arabia, when a person has been killed or caused to die by another, the prescribed blood money rates are as follows:
100,000 riyals if the victim is a Muslim man
50,000 riyals if a Muslim woman
50,000 riyals if a Christian man
25,000 riyals if a Christian woman
6,666 riyals if a Hindu man
3,333 riyals if a Hindu woman.
Ref http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diyya
Another example: no other religion , but Islam can be practiced in Saudi Arabia.
So why should not we judge the entire culture if it is saturated by what we consider to be evil? Saudi Arabia has no constitution but Quran and Suna.
If those rules are based on Islamic law, (and they are) why should not we judge Islam as whole?