My Father Wanted to be My Axe Murderer

Your "religion of peace" update for the Ides of March.

My imam father came after me with an axe

This takes place in Great Britain, not the Middle East, and displays the probable result of political correctness run amok in government, social services and even in well-meaning but clueless religionists who seek first to be culturally sensitive rather than the true Kingdom of God.

The book is called The Imam’s Daughter because “Hannah Shah” is just that: the daughter of an imam in one of the tight-knit Deobandi Muslim Pakistani communities in the north of England. Her father emigrated to this country from rural Pakistan some time in the 1960s and is, apparently, a highly respected local figure.

He is also an incestuous child abuser, repeatedly raping his daughter from the age of five until she was 15, ostensibly as part of her punishment for being “disobedient”. At the age of 16 she fled her family to avoid the forced marriage they had planned for her in Pakistan. A much, much greater affront to “honour” in her family’s eyes, however, was the fact that she then became a Christian – an apostate. The Koran is explicit that apostasy is punishable by death; thus it was that her father the imam led a 40-strong gang – in the middle of a British city – to find and kill her. [SNIP]

This is the sort of cultural sensitivity displayed by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, last year when he suggested that problems within the British Muslim community such as financial or marital disputes could be dealt with under sharia, Islamic law, rather than British civil law. What did Hannah, now an Anglican, think on hearing these remarks?

“I was horrified.” If you could speak to him now, what would you say to the archbishop? “I would say: have you actually spoken to any ordinary Muslim women about the situation that they live in, in their communities? By putting in place these Muslim arbitration tribunals, where a woman’s witness is half that of a man, you are silencing women even more.”

She believes the British government is making exactly the same mistake as Rowan Williams ...

How can you maintain a civil society if you allow two different overlapping sets of justice, diametrically opposed one to the other, to operate? How can a justice system based on the rights of the individual - every individual - step aside to allow another operate which recognizes values that subjugate the freedom of some people to those who happen to be male and of one particular religion?

The belief that one culture is as good as another does not pass the sanity test. Toleration in this situation is madness.

And yet it is Great Britain, home of the Queen and the late Princess Diana; of fish and chips. The land of Winston Churchill, Shakespeare, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, William Wilberforce, the Beatles and the Moody Blues. That this once fearless nation that gave the world so much can be facing societal rot from within is nearly unthinkable, unspeakable. Yet it continues.

Don't say that it can't happen in America. It is already beginning in places like Detroit and Minneapolis, and in Buffalo. It will accelerate if we continue on a like path with our British friends.