A young British woman, raised in the North of England, escaped her abusive Muslim father and converted to Christianity, a fact that saw her father lead an axe wielding mob clamoring for her death.  She wrote a book about her experience.  When the Times interviewer asked why she didn’t seek help from the authorities, the woman explains how political correctness creates a straight jacket as tight as fundamentalist Islam itself:

When, at school, she had finally summoned the courage to tell a teacher that her father had been beating her (she couldn’t bring herself to reveal the sexual abuse), the social services sent out a social worker from her own community. He chose not to believe Hannah and, in effect, shopped her to her father, who gave her the most brutal beating of her life. When she later confronted the social worker, he said: “It’s not right to betray your community.”

Hannah blames what is sometimes called political correctness for this debacle: “My teachers had thought they were doing the right thing, they thought it showed ‘cultural sensitivity’ by bringing in someone from my own community to ‘help’, but it was the worst thing they could have done to me. This happens a lot.

“When I’ve been working with girls who were trying to get out of an arranged marriage, or want to convert to Christianity, and they have contacted social services as they need to get out of their homes, the reaction has been ‘we’ll send someone from your community to talk to your parents’. I know why they are doing this, they are trying to be understanding, but it’s the last thing that the authorities should do in such situations.”

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: “It says it talks to the Muslim community, but it’s not speaking to the women. I mean, you are always hearing Muslim men speaking out, the representatives of the big federations, but the government is not listening to Muslim women. With the sharia law situation and the Muslim arbitration tribunals, have they thought about what effect these tribunals have on Muslim women? I don’t think so.”

Hat tip: Hot Air

A year or two ago, the press reported on a rather charming religion called the Sky Kingdom cult that had popped up in Malaysia. The worshippers had built a Disney-esque little temple that centered on a giant teapot that symbolized the beneficence of love and the purity of water pouring from heaven. As is typical for a religion that always seems to operate from the paranoid viewpoint, the Malaysian government (which is Islamic), declared the little shrine heretical and leveled it. While regretting the destruction of this charming site, I thought that was the end of it. I was wrong. The Muslim government is also working hard on leveling the worshippers as well:

A sharia court in Malaysia jailed a woman for joining a “tea-pot worshipping” cult.

Kamariah Ali, a 57 year old former teacher, was arrested in 2005 when the government of the Muslim majority country demolished the two storey high sacred tea pot and other infrastructure of the “heretical” Sky Kingdom cult.

For the eccentric sect, which emphasised ecumenical dialogue between religions, the tea pot symbolized the purity of water and “love pouring from heaven”.

But in Malaysia, despite constitutional guarantees of freedom of worship, born Muslims such as Mrs Ali are forbidden from converting to other religions.  (Emphasis mine.)

Passing sentence, the Sharia judge Mohammed Abdullah said: “The court is not convinced that the accused has repented and is willing to abandon any teachings contrary to Islam. I pray God will open the doors of your heart, Kamariah.”

So, there it is in a nutshell:  freedom of worship in a sharia country means freedom to worship as you please so long as you don’t have the misfortune to be born Muslim. (For the significance of this “being born or raised a Muslim” issue vis a vis Obama, check this out.) More interestingly, the judge genuinely seems to believe that tossing a person in prison is the way to reach that person spiritually.  This is brute force conversion that doesn’t even pretend to enter the marketplace of ideas and explain why Islam is better than any alternatives.  It’s tempting to say that this is because Muslim enforcers suspect that they can’t win in the marketplace of ideas, but I believe it probably simply has more to do with the culture of coercion that Muhammad built right into the religion.

As it is, I don’t think that Kamariah Ali is going to bend very far, even if placed in prison as part of of her constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.  The same story reports that, back in 1992, she was already imprisoned for 20 months for the “sin” of rejecting Islam.  If 20 months in an Indonesian prison doesn’t make you recant the first time, does this judge really think it’s going to make her recant the second time?

As for me, I keep my eye open for creeping sharia.  For when it comes to a truly Muslim country, life is precisely the same as it is in a truly Communist country:  outside of a select cadre of true believers who are then, ironically, relieved from the harsher burdens of their belief system (collectivism, renunciation of alcohol, etc.), life for everyone else is an always scintillating blend of bad and worse.