Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis
Only 14, Bangladeshi girl charged with adultery was lashed to death
Shariatpur, Bangladesh (CNN) -- Hena Akhter's last words to her mother proclaimed her innocence. But it was too late to save the 14-year-old girl.
Her fellow villagers in Bangladesh's Shariatpur district had already passed harsh judgment on her. Guilty, they said, of having an affair with a married man. The imam from the local mosque ordered the fatwa, or religious ruling, and the punishment: 101 lashes delivered swiftly, deliberately in public.
Hena dropped after 70.
Bloodied and bruised, she was taken to hospital, where she died a week later.
Amazingly, an initial autopsy report cited no injuries and deemed her death a suicide. Hena's family insisted her body be exhumed. They wanted the world to know what really happened to their daughter.
Islam is, of course, a hastily cobbled bit of manure stolen from Judaism, so it is no wonder that the misogyny came along with the compost. What’s even more inequitable, is this:
Hena's family hailed from rural Shariatpur, crisscrossed by murky rivers that lend waters to rice paddies and lush vegetable fields.
Hena was the youngest of five children born to Darbesh Khan, a day laborer, and his wife, Aklima Begum. They shared a hut made from corrugated tin and decaying wood and led a simple life that was suddenly marred a year ago with the return of Hena's cousin Mahbub Khan.
Pissing on the poor? Oh sure, Islam sure does inspire charity – but only if you’re wealthy.
Mahbub Khan came back to Shariatpur from a stint working in Malaysia. His son was Hena's age and the two were in seventh grade together.
Khan eyed Hena and began harassing her on her way to school and back, said Hena's father. He complained to the elders who run the village about his nephew, three times Hena's age.
Yes, this is way more than ‘boys-will-be-boys’ behavior. It’s a huge red flag, at least in civilized countries.
The elders admonished Mahbub Khan and ordered him to pay $1,000 in fines to Hena's family. But Mahbub was Darbesh's older brother's son and Darbesh was asked to let the matter fade.
Predictably, it went south very quickly.
Many months later on a winter night, as Hena's sister Alya told it, Hena was walking from her room to an outdoor toilet when Mahbub Khan gagged her with cloth, forced her behind nearby shrubbery and beat and raped her.
Mahbub is quite obviously a sexual predator.It gets worse, fast.
Hena struggled to escape, Alya told CNN. Mahbub Khan's wife heard Hena's muffled screams and when she found Hena with her husband, she dragged the teenage girl back to her hut, beat her and trampled her on the floor.
In a culture that sanctifies men and spits on women, this is all to common.
The next day, the village elders met to discuss the case at Mahbub Khan's house, Alya said. The imam pronounced his fatwa. Khan and Hena were found guilty of an illicit relationship. Her punishment under sharia or Islamic law was 101 lashes; his 201.
This imam should be shot.
Mahbub Khan managed to escape after the first few lashes.
And then he bolts? Charming. Wouldn’t mind spending a few hours in a room with ‘Bub Khan.
Darbesh Khan and Aklima Begum had no choice but to mind the imam's order. They watched as the whip broke the skin of their youngest child and she fell unconscious to the ground.
"What happened to Hena is unfortunate and we all have to be ashamed that we couldn't save her life," said Sultana Kamal, who heads the rights organization Ain o Shalish Kendro.
What most of these folks don’t realize, is that they’re simply enabling the crazies with their obnoxious superstition.
Bangladesh is considered a democratic and moderate Muslim country, and national law forbids the practice of sharia. But activist and journalist Shoaib Choudhury, who documents such cases, said sharia is still very much in use in villages and towns aided by the lack of education and strong judicial systems.
The Supreme Court also outlawed fatwas a decade ago, but human rights monitors have documented more than 500 cases of women in those 10 years who were punished through a religious ruling. And few who have issued such rulings have been charged.
They should probably get right on that shit, but accommodationists are everywhere, in every country it seems. The US alone teems with millions of them.
The government needs to enact a specific law to deal with such perpetrators responsible for extrajudicial penalty
in the name of Islam.
--Sultana Kamal, head of rights organization Ain o Shalish Kendro.
(Strikethrough mine)
Last month, the court asked the government to explain what it had done to stop extrajudicial penalty based on fatwa. It ordered the dissemination of information to all mosques and madrassas, or religious schools, that sharia is illegal in Bangladesh.
I’d be willing to bet this has been done before.
The United Nations estimates that almost half of Bangladeshi women suffer from domestic violence and many also commonly endure rape, beatings, acid attacks and even death because of the country's entrenched patriarchal system.
Oh yeah – the same assholes who tried to pass some ‘bill’ prohibiting attacks on religion, but when crazies hide under the religious umbrella, nobody sees them.
There was some action taken because of the media furor, though:
Monday, the doctors responsible for Hena's first autopsy faced prosecution for what a court called a "false post-mortem report to hide the real cause of Hena's death."
Public outrage sparked by that autopsy report prompted the high court to order the exhumation of Hena's body in February. A second autopsy performed at Dhaka Medical College Hospital revealed Hena had died of internal bleeding and her body bore the marks of severe injuries.
Police are now conducting an investigation and have arrested several people, including Mahbub Khan, in connection with Hena's death.
Normally I’m a pacifistic fellow, but I wouldn’t object to stringing these animals up. And there’s more reason in the following:
Police were guarding Hena's family earlier this month. Darbesh and Aklima feared reprisal for having spoken out against the imam and the village elders.
They had meted out the most severe punishment for their youngest daughter. They could put nothing past them.
Because religion is little more than a boot upon the neck of the poverty-stricken. It is nothing more than the excuse used by the savage to prey upon the weak and the weak-minded. Religion is not the root cause of problems in our world, but rather the flimsy centuries-old excuse used to inflict injury, both mental and physical, the psychotic’s alibi for brutality.
How I yearn for the day that there is no religion. No more excuses, no more free passes. But still that day is far away, and not likely in my lifetime.
Till the next post, then.
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