http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/06/21/ask-a-harvard-genius-does-sharia-law-mandate-child-rape/
Ask a Harvard Genius: Does Sharia Law Mandate Child Rape? 2010 June 21 [image: Jeanette Pryor] by Jeanette Pryor <http://www.newsrealblog.com/author/jeanettepryor/> Did God tell Mohammad, at the age of 50, to marry Aisha, who was only nine? More importantly, does Sharia Law, based in part on the conduct of Mohammad, still permit the imposing of marriage upon Muslim girls at the age of nine? In February, the Harvard Islamic Society hosted a teleconference featuring some of the world’s leading Islamic scholars and cultural leaders as part of its Islam Awareness Week. Among those showcased was Hamza Yusuf, a California convert to Islam. Yusuf is the founder of the Zayatuna Institute and is engaged, like the 9-11 Memorial Mosque Imam, in presenting Islam to the Western world as a religion that can peacefully co-exist with others<http://www.jihadwatch.org/islam-101.html> . Among Islam’s public relations nightmares Yusuf has to contend with, is the question of women in the Islamic religious system. Those pesky little issues of burqas<http://frontpagemag.com/2010/02/09/buried-alive-in-turkey%e2%80%94and-under-the-burqa/>, honor killings, and Quranic tutorials on the proper way to beat one’s wife, genital mutilation<http://frontpagemag.com/2009/10/02/female-genital-mutilation-islam-and-leftist-silence-by-jamie-glazov/>, and the discouragement of women from seeking higher education and careers, all make educated, independent women slightly skeptical about buying the Islamic brand. A good example of such a deal-breaker is precisely the marriage of Mohammad to Aisha. Hamza Yusuf attempted <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM4IuDVFL3s>to render this event comprehensible to Western students: “Mohammad had the same dream three times. Somebody was carrying something wrapped in a piece of silk and said, ‘This is your wife.’ So Mohammad uncovered her, and it was Aisha. It’s important to understand that this was not uncommon. In most modern anthropological methodologies, one of the things they teach people in anthropology is to…remove ones social frames of reference when one is examining another culture because it’s unfair to impose one’s own prejudices upon another culture. Each culture has its own traditions and its own way of doing things.” “If you try to force upon them your own ideals, your own principles, and your own acceptabilities, then what you end up doing is being unjust towards another tradition. For the Muslim, obviously, it’s going to be, ‘What does the Sharia say?’ But it’s important to realize that this was a normal thing within their society…there’s some discussion as to whether she was nine or twelve, but he did not take her into his household until she gave up playing with her dolls. That was the sign that she was no longer a child. So she was an adult when the Prophet brought her into his household. And that’s something that Sharia permits.” “Childhood was an invention of renaissance Europe. Prior to the Renaissance, children became adults at the age of 7 or 8. If a girl has her period at nine, she is considered an adult. If she had a period before nine, she is still not eligible for marriage, but nine and above, it’s ok. Nine year old to us is still a child, but a lot of that has to do with our own socialization.” The historical context of Mohammad’s marriage to a child is not the key issue here. What matters is that Sharia Law, the code of life promoted by Yusuf and the other Harvard guests, declares that now, in 2010, nine year olds are ready for marriage, or would be, were they raised in Islam with a proper, non- Western artificial socialization. MEMRI TV, a watchdog organization that monitors media in Islamic countries, offers a plethora of video recordings from mainstream Islamic scholars reinforcing the Sharia-based Islamic conviction that physical ability to bear children marks the legal passage to adulthood for women. It is the life of their Prophet, their desire to emulate him that condones and dictates this attitude towards the use of women by men in Islam. In the West, marriage is considered a contract between two consenting adults, a definition that precludes one of the partners lacking the maturity to comprehend the nature of the relationship to which she is consenting. The woman, in Western Civilization, is recognized as a person with the independent right to self determination, not a breeding machine or amusement park. There was no organized protest of Hamza Yusuf at Harvard’s Islamic Awareness Week. For some reason, groups that advocate women’s rights were not interested in protesting religiously mandated child rape. PETA was there to stop the experimentation by medical students on primates. Scores of anti-Israelis gathered to decry Israeli defense of a life-preserving blockade. Ubiquitous anti-war demonstrators relived the glory of their flower power days. Not a single roaring feminist could be heard protesting the misogynist patriarchy that benefits from our pluralism to accustom us, in the name of anthropological enlightenment, to religiously prescribed child molestation. In spite of Yusuf’s attempts to situate Mohammad’s behavior in a historical sense, most of the Sharia scholars, such as the following, hold the prophet’s conduct to be the rule of life. Is it really too soon to be concerned? -- Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. 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