-Caveat Lector-
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: April 10, 2007 11:37:11 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Gimme That Ole Time Religion
CLERICS: PAKISTAN OFFICIAL'S HUG A 'SIN'
USA Today, April 10, 2007
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-04-10-pakistan-hug_N.htm
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) — Islamic clerics at a radical mosque in
Pakistan's capital have demanded the tourism minister be fired for
hugging a foreign man, saying she committed a "great sin."
Minister of Tourism Nilofar Bakhtiar rejected the Taliban-style
edict Monday and said her family and friends were concerned for her
safety.
Two clerics at Islamabad's Red Mosque demanded her dismissal
Sunday, two days after setting up a court to deliver Islamic
justice in a bold challenge to President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a
U.S. ally who has promised to promote moderate Islam.
The mosque's chief cleric, Maulana Abdul Aziz, threatened last week
to stage suicide attacks if authorities tried to raid the mosque.
Photos in the Pakistani media have shown Bakhtiar being helped by a
male instructor during a charity parachute jump in France last
month to raise money for victims of the devastating October 2005
earthquake in Pakistan. Another picture shows a woman — apparently
Bakhtiar — hugging the instructor.
This was "an illegitimate and forbidden act," the clerics said in
their edict, or fatwa.
"Without any doubt, she has committed a great sin," the fatwa
said. It declared that Muslim women must stay at home and must not
venture out uncovered.
The fatwa demanded that Bakhtiar be fired, given another
unspecified punishment and that her family "force her to ask for
forgiveness so that she does not repeat this un-Islamic act."
Bakhtiar called the edict "baseless" and accused Pakistani
newspapers of publishing "distorted" captions with the pictures.
She said she had jumped without any previous training and her
French instructor had just given her a pat.
"It was just a pat because he felt so proud of me," Bakhtiar said.
"I felt very happy also because it was affectionate and very
encouraging."
The Red Mosque's hardline clerics — long alleged to have ties with
militants — have started a Taliban-style anti-vice campaign in
defiance of state authority in the relatively liberal Pakistani
capital.
They have warned nearby video and music shop owners to close their
businesses and abducted a woman and her relatives for allegedly
running a brothel, forcing her to make a public confession.
On Friday, the clerics announced the establishment of an Islamic
court and gave the government a one-month ultimatum to close
brothels and video shops.
Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz were briefed about the
Red Mosque on Monday, the state Associated Press of Pakistan news
agency said.
"The two leaders directed that strict measures be taken to enforce
the law," the agency reported, without elaborating.
The government has said it wants to resolve the situation through
negotiations, amid concerns that a confrontation at the mosque
could lead to bloodshed.
Seminaries associated with the mosque have thousands of students.
The chief of Pakistan's ruling party, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain,
held talks with the mosque's leaders over the weekend.
=============
"T" for thief was branded on the light-fingered criminal's hand. -
Photo by Dave Doody
http://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/spring03/branks.cfm
Colonial Crimes and Punishments
by James A. Cox
The English-American colonies were autocratic and theocratic, with
a patriarchal system of justice: magistrates and religious leaders,
sometimes one and the same, made the laws, and the burden of
obeying them fell on the less exalted — the tradesmen, soldiers,
farmers, servants, slaves, and the young. That burden could be
weighty.
In his History of American Law, Lawrence M. Friedman wrote, "The
earliest criminal codes mirrored the nasty, precarious life of
pioneer settlements."
A good example is the set of statutes imposed on Jamestown, the
"Articles, Lawes and Orders Diuine, Politique, and Martiall for the
Colony in Virginia," by the Virginia Company of London in 1611.
They were, with some justice, described by the colonists in a
letter to the crown in 1624 as "Tyrannycall Lawes written in
blood." They said:
The cause of the vniust and vndeserved death of sundry . . . by
starveinge, hangeinge, burneinhge, breakinge upon the wheele and
shootinge to deathe, some (more than halfe famished) runninge to
the Indians to gett reliefe beinge againe retorned were burnt to
deth. Some for stealinge to satisfie thir hunger were hanged, and
one chained to a tree till he starved to death; others attemptinge
to run awaye in a barge and a shallop (all the Boates that were
then in the Collonye) and therin to adventure their lives for their
native countrye, beinge discovered and prevented, were shott to
death, hanged and broken upon the wheele, besides continuall
whippings, extraordinary punishments, workinge as slaves in irons
for terme of yeares (and that for petty offenses) weare dayly
executed.
Alice Earle's 1896 Curious Punishments of Bygone Days showed
readers what bilboes did to the legs of lawbreakers.
Click to enlarge
A brank, the "gossip's bridle," effectively silenced an offender.
Every Virginia minister was required to read the "Articles, Lawes
and Orders" to his congregation every Sunday, and, among other
things, parishioners were reminded that failure to attend church
twice each day was punishable in the first instance by the loss of
a day's food. A second offense was punishable by a whipping and a
third by six months of rowing in the colony's galleys. Which
underlines the notion of the law as an arm of religious orthodoxy.
As Friedman says, an attempt to generalize about all the colonies
during the 169 years between the founding of Jamestown and the
Revolution—the number of years that passed between independence and
Hiroshima—would be bootless. But common threads can be traced, and
laws concerning religion, as well as the severity of punishments,
are as good a place to start as any.
In the Puritan north a religious message leaps out from almost
every page of the early criminal codes. Sin, of course, existed in
the eyes of the beholders, and the eyes were everywhere—as you
might expect in small, inbred communities. Consider the scrutiny
given to observance of the Sabbath. The law usually required
churchgoing, and someone was always checking attendance. In early
Virginia, every minister was entitled to appoint four men in his
fort or settlement to inform on religious scofflaws.
In the early seventeenth century, Boston's Roger Scott was picked
up for "repeated sleeping on the Lord's Day" and sentenced to be
severely whipped for "striking the person who waked him from his
godless slumber."
Virginia law in 1662 required everyone to resort "diligently to
their parish church" on Sundays "and there to abide orderly and
soberly," on pain of a fine of fifty pounds of tobacco, the
currency of the colony. Colonial strictures on deportment in the
pews long applied, even to children, such as in 1758 when young
Abiel Wood of Plymouth was hauled before the court for
"irreverently behaving himself by chalking the back of one Hezekiah
Purrington, Jr., with Chalk, playing and recreating himself in the
time of publick worship."
In l668 in Salem, Massachusetts, John Smith and the wife of John
Kitchin were fined "for frequent absenting themselves from the
public worship of God on the Lord's days." In l682 in Maine it cost
Andrew Searle five shillings merely for "wandering from place to
place" instead of "frequenting the publique worship of god."
And woe to the man who profaned the Sabbath "by lewd and unseemly
behavior," the crime of a Boston seafaring man, one Captain Kemble.
He made the mistake of publicly kissing his wife on returning home
on a Sunday after three years at sea, a transgression that earned
him several hours of public humiliation in the stocks.
But, of course, the codes concerned themselves as much with the
secular as the divine. The laws, especially in New England, made
crimes of lying and idleness, general lewdness and bad behavior.
Sex was of particular concern. Outlawed were masturbation,
fornication, adultery, sodomy, buggery, and every other sexual
practice that inched off the line of straight sex as approved by
the Bible. The term "sodomy" was applied to homosexual behavior;
"buggery" to bestiality.
Punishment for such serious sexual crimes could be severe. Thomas
Granger of Plymouth, a boy of seventeen or so, was indicted in 1642
for buggery "with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves
and a turkey." Granger was hanged; the animals, for their part in
the affair, were executed according to the law, Leviticus 20.15,
and "cast into a great and large pit that was digged for the
purpose for them, and no use was made of any part of them."
In 1642, Edward Preston was sentenced to be publicly whipped at
both Plymouth and Barnstable "for his lewd practices tending to
sodomy with Edward Mitchell, and pressing John Keene thereunto (if
he would have yielded)." Keene, who had reported the crime, was
required to watch the punishment because he was suspected of "not
being without fault himself." No death penalty here, since the
actions of Preston and Mitchell only "tended toward sodomy."
In Crime and Punishment in American History, Friedman writes:
In the eighteenth century, the death penalty was invoked less
frequently for these crimes. Even in the seventeenth century, most
sexual offences were petty, and the punishment less than severe.
Mild—but amazingly frequent.
The thousands of cases of fornication and other offenses against
morality . . . seem to give the lie to the conventional picture of
life in colonial times: sour, dour, obsessed with religion. . . . A
frank and robust sexuality leaps from the pages of the record
books. Still . . . most people probably did not transgress.
A seventeenth-century English ducking stool, in the Colonial
Williamsburg collections, would be swung out at the end of beams
over a river or pond. Some dunked died. - CWF Collection
Behind most of the systems of justice in early civilizations lay
the concept of vengeance, making the miscreant pay for his crime. A
side benefit to this idea was deterrence—giving other would-be
offenders a good reason to stay on the straight and narrow.
Colonial practice took the matter a step further, making use of
shame and shaming. Punishments were almost always public, for the
aim was to humiliate the wayward sheep and teach him a lesson so
that he would repent and be eager to find his way back to the
flock. Nothing made a colonial magistrate happier than public
confessions of guilt and open expressions of remorse.
The records tell of hundreds of colonial sinners forced to sit in
the stocks in public view. After warnings and fines, this was one
of the mildest punishments, although the scorn of bystanders, not
to mention the garbage and worse hurled at the miscreant by fellow
citizens, made for uncomfortable moments. At times, the punishment
was tailored to fit the crime, so that nobody missed the point.
Thus, when a servant named Samuel Powell stole a pair of breeches
in Accomack County, Virginia, in 1638, he was sentenced to "sitt in
the stocks on the next Sabboth day . . . from the beginninge of
morninge prayer until the end of the Sermon with a pair of breeches
about his necke."
Colonial villages were enjoined to have their own sturdy stocks,
and those that were lax ran the risk of a fine. The magistrates in
early Boston had imported from England bilboes, long heavy bars of
iron with sliding shackles and padlocks that held many a colonial
culprit by the heels. When replacements became needed, it dawned on
the local pence watchers that iron was expensive and in short
supply, though wood was plentiful. A set of wooden stocks was
ordered, and as soon as the job was done, the magistrates selected
as their first customer Edward Palmer, who was "fyned £5 & censured
to bee sett an houre in the stocks." Carpenter Palmer's crime? He
was accused of extortion for charging £1 13s. 7d. for the wood and
his labor in building the stocks.
Most self-respecting settlements also had a ducking stool, a seat
set at the end of two beams twelve or fifteen feet long that could
be swung out from the bank of a pond or river. This engine of
punishment was especially assigned to scolds—usually women but
sometimes men—and sometimes to quarrelsome married couples tied
back to back. Other candidates were slanderers, "makebayts,"
brawlers, "chyderers," railers, and "women of light carriage," as
well as brewers of bad beer, bakers of bad bread, and unruly
paupers. In the absence of a proper ducking stool, authorities in
some climes, as in Northampton County, Virginia, ordered the
offender "dragged at a boat's Starn in ye River from ye shoare and
thence unto the shoare again."
Perhaps the cruelest punishment for slanderers, nags, and gossips,
when simple gagging wasn't enough, was the brank, sometimes called
the "gossip's bridle" or "scold's helm." This was a sort of heavy
iron cage, that covered the head; a flat tongue of iron, sometimes
spiked, was thrust into the mouth over the criminal's tongue. Less
sophisticated areas made do with a "simpler machine—a cleft stick
pinched on the tongue." Either system pretty much insured silence.
Most village squares boasted, along with a church, a whipping post
as well as stocks and other engines of correction. Larger
municipalities often had whipping posts at convenient spots in the
city, and sometimes a cart substituted for the post so that the
evildoer could be dragged from location to location, tied to the
"cart's-arse," for the education and edification—and entertainment—
of the populace.
Fifteen feet high, this pillory and post—from seventeenth-century
England and in the Colonial Williamsburg collections—held the
offender by the neck and hands.
Whipping sentences usually stipulated that the stripes be "well
laid on," as the phrase went. In one case of a multiple whipping,
the beadle—a minor church official—was ordered to lay on, but was
so light-handed the sheriff seized the lash and scourged him, too,
before turning to the prisoners. Bystanders gave the sheriff three
cheers for his attention to duty.
The pillory, or "stretch-neck," called "the essence of punishment"
in England, stood in the main squares of towns up and down the
colonies. An upright board, hinged or divided in half with a hole
in which the head was set fast, it usually also had two openings
for the hands. Often the ears of the subject were nailed to the
wood on either side of the head hole. In 1648 in Maryland, John
Goneere, convicted of perjury, was "nayled by both eares to the
pillory 3 nailes in each eare and the nailes to be slitt out, and
whipped 20 good lashes."
The device was described by Nathaniel Hawthorne in his Scarlet
Letter as an "instrument of discipline so fashioned as to confine
the human head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to public
gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in
this contrivance of wood and iron. There can be no outrage,
methinks . . . more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his
face for shame."
The pillory was employed for treason, sedition, arson, blasphemy,
witchcraft, perjury, wife beating, cheating, forgery, coin
clipping, dice cogging, slandering, conjuring, fortune-telling, and
drunkenness, among other offenses. One man was set in the pillory
for delivering false dinner invitations; another for being the
author of a rough practical joke; another for selling a harmful
quack medicine. All sharpers, beggars, vagabonds, and shiftless
persons were in danger of being pilloried. On several occasions,
onlookers pelted the pilloried prisoner so enthusiastically with
heavy missiles that death resulted.
Often the pillory was just part of a package of punishments. On
April 23, 1771, the Essex Gazette of Newport, Rhode Island,
reported that "William Carlisle was convicted of passing
Counterfeit Dollars, and sentenced to stand One Hour in the Pillory
on Little-Rest Hill . . . to have both ears cropped, to be branded
on both cheeks with the Letter R (for Rogue), and to pay a fine of
One Hundred Dollars and Cost of Prosecution." It could have been
worse. Continental paper money usually carried this line: "To
counterfeit this bill is Death."
Branding and maiming may shock us, but, Friedman says, for our
colonist ancestors, "the sight of a man lopped of his ears, or slit
of his nostrils, or with a seared brand or great gash in his
forehead or cheek could not affect the stout stomachs that
cheerfully and eagerly gathered around the bloody whipping-post and
the gallows." In New England Jesuits and Quakers were particularly
feared as "blasphemous Hereticks" for their "devilish opinions" and
were banished, with orders never to return. The penalties for
coming back were ears cut off, tongues bored through with a hot
iron, and whipping until the blood ran.
Hogarth depicted a hanging at Tyburn's Tree in London. Such events
could bring as many as 50,000 spectators. - CWF Collection
Burglary was punished in all the colonies by branding with a
capital B in the right hand for the first offense, in the left hand
for the second, "and if either be committed on the Lord's Daye his
Brand shall bee sett on his Forehead as a mark of infamy." In
Maryland, every county was ordered to have branding irons, with the
lettering specifically prescribed: SL stood for seditious libel and
could be burned on either cheek. M stood for manslaughter, T for
thief, R for rogue or vagabond, F for forgery. In Maryland and
Virginia a hog stealer was pilloried and had his ears cropped. For
a second offense he paid treble damages and was burned with the
letter H on his forehead. Double punishment if the hog stealer was
a slave. The third offense brought death.
As vicious as colonial punishments were, there was a relatively
simple way to avoid the worst of them, the gallows, by pleading
"benefit of clergy." This escape hatch dated from the Middle Ages
and applied to anyone who could read a certain passage from the
Bible. It was always open to a particular page, the first lines of
Psalm 51: "Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving
kindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot
out my transgressions." The original tilt was in favor of priests
and monks, since most laymen could not read.
By colonial times everyone—male, female, even slaves—was using what
had come to be called the "neck verse" to get off. Not that they
had all learned how to read. But even the dullest magistrates
finally came to realize that with a little work almost any fool
could memorize the Good Book's magical formula.
And any man or woman unfortunate enough to stand in his dock could
understand that if there was in English America a severe side to
law and religion, there was as well a merciful.
Crowds loved a good ear nailing or whipping or, choicest of all, a
hanging. Interpreter Steve Holloway as the sheriff thwacks the ear
of a miscreant portrayed by Ralph Thurman. - Photo by Dave Doody
A hanging required a gallows, a rope, a hangman, and a guest of
honor. Richard Nicoll looks on as interpreter Darin Tschopp carries
off the recently deceased, portrayed by Willie Balderson. - Photo
by Dave Doody
View a slideshow of colonial punishments.
Pennsylvania writer Jim Cox contributed to the winter 2002-2003
journal a story on Patrick Henry's "Liberty or Death" speech.
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