From the UK Timesonline, "Mother, 21, faces firing squad"
EUROPEAN leaders are making desperate pleas to spare the life of a 21-year-old mother who is expected to face a firing squad in Yemen on Monday. The lawyer for Amina Ali Abduladif will visit her in prison today to break the news that her execution is imminent.Mrs Abduladif was spared two years ago when she was facing her executioners and told them she was pregnant after being raped by a prison guard. But her lawyer, Shada Nasir, told The Times: “Now that her son has reached his second birthday the law here says the death sentence should be carried out.
“I don’t know how I am going to tell her.”
Mrs Nasir said the authorities had also told her to remove the boy from the Sanaa women’s prison as his mother was due to be taken back to her home village to face execution.
International pressure is mounting on Yemen to halt what Amnesty International has called “a barbaric sentence”. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said: “We are well aware of this case and the EU is urgently discussing the matter with a number of ministers in Yemen.”
Mrs Abduladif was convicted of murdering her husband when she was 16 and the mother of two daughters. There was no forensic science or other evidence and prosecutors in her home town, Mahaweet, relied on her confession which she says was tortured out of her.
Until now she has refused to identify the guard who raped her for fear of reprisals.
“She is in a terrible state after spending five years in prison with a death sentence hanging over her, and now I have to take her son away from her and cannot accompany her on her last journey which she will travel alone,” Mrs Nasir said.
Her parents will not be allowed to see her.
Witnesses say her husband was killed by his cousin in a land dispute in January 1998 but their evidence was not presented to the court during Mrs Abduladif’s trial in May 1999.
She gave birth to her son in jail but Amnesty and other human rights groups have complained that she has been allowed to see little of her other children. The youngest girl was killed recently in a car crash.
Her lawyers say none of her family are willing to look after her son because of the shame of her being raped...
The most Beautiful Names Of Allah
In the name of Allah, All-Merciful, the Mercy-Giving....The Acceptor of Repentance....
I heard a priest once say the some of the most beautiful names for God come from Islam, but that they lack the best of all His names, Father.
How can they call upon Him as the Merciful, yet fail to show mercy themselves, so often. Once again we find ourselves praying for such children, a girl facing death and her babies who will be motherless. One of whom has already died before she could really know a mother's love.
At least Amnesty International and EU leaders are already on the case. How can the feminist left continue to find so many positive things to admire in Islam?
Granny W.-
As a woman, how can you accept only "Father" as a beautiful name for 'God'. Should it not be 'Mother & Father', at least? Especially since a mother is about to be shot by a bunch of Patriarchally-poisoned nutjobs?
How any woman was ever convinced that the creator of the cosmos was a male alone I, as a male, have been never been able to fathom. (As a guy, I know I should be secretly thrilled that my gender got the theological upperhand, but, to tell you the truth, it is eschatologically embarassing to me that my sex hijacked half of the meaning of the universe for its own weasly ends of puerile power.)
(If I were a woman, I would laugh in any guy's face who tried to pull this 'sleight-of-God' on me.)
If there is a Creative Force, it would have to be be both male & female, since only splitting amoeba seem to do well without 'the other half of the world'. (Or is God a Grand Amoeba?)
I hope the Muslims keep giving the world such shining examples of their Compassionate Deity as this.
Ready, aim-... ALLAHU AKBAR!!!!
Big Sleep
First that was a direct quotation from someone else.
Second it was based on Christ's own words in the gospels when he speaks of his Father, and the opening line of the prayer he gave us, which begins
Our Father, which art in heaven etc (I still use the old version I learnt as a three year old)
Elsewhere in the New Testament we do see God as a parent of both sexes. Paul mentions this in some of the epistles, but I cannot find where to quote you chapter and verse at the moment. Later writers like Dame Julian of Norwich also refer to the motherly aspects of God. She said "as truely as God is our Father, so truley is God our Mother..."My copy of her book fell open at that page, as if to make up for my failure to find the verses of Paul I was looking for in the bible earlier.
This is a link to a sermon given recently at St Paul’s Cathedral in London by a woman priest who discusses the womanly aspect of God and Christ. http://www.stpauls.co.uk/page.aspx?theLang=001lngdef&pointerid=12464xOMkyL2uD9sWmRJU9BuWsKa0rCe&action=
But the point I was trying to make, which she makes better is that "We name God as father because Jesus called God Abba; a delightful intimate name for a close elder." That family relationship, involving love and forgiveness is lacking in Islam. The titles are indeed beautiful, but remote. To all Moslems the concept of the trinity is a blasphemy, to many even the concept of him (her) as family is blasphemous. Too familiar, not sufficiently distant and fearful.
I wonder too how any woman can support the crimes done to her by Death Cult of Islam?? Can see that such a 'religion' would appeal to baser instincts of males - who get away with pedophilia, rape and murder of girls and women WITH IMPUNITY AS MUHAMMED DID. There is no excuse however for any of the many Womens Rights Groups who remain silent
in the West. Read a statement from birdbrain [this is insulting birds] Islamic convert Yvonne Ridley who gushingly declared that "September 11 was the best and worst of things to happen in West. It made her [Ridley] & others 'want to know about Islam." Not a word was said about 3,000
innocent civilians being burned alive... Ms Ridley
REGARDS HERSELF AS A LIBERAL CARING WOMAN.
Good morning Morgane
I was just off to bed when your post popped up. We had that interesting discussion about Yvonne Ridley once before. She went into Afghanistan because she had run out of things to write about. Converting to Islam as a career move is not quite as drastic as dying (the old Jim Reeves joke) but, being deliberate, ultimately more stupid.
This is despicable. I'm surprised this is not on the front pages at the moment. Now, if I can find meself an petition or some venue to prevent the firing squad. If worst comes to worst (and Lord Forbid) she is killed...what will happen to the boy? Will some NON-Muslim family adopt him?
And how can her parents NOT say anything? Parental relationships truly are not strong in Yemen.
This of course is a terrible tragedy. I'm at a loss as to what to say or do to avert it. Justice in Islamic countries is considered a "decadent" Western import, hence Shariah law which mocks the idea of innocent before proven guilty. A woman accused of wrongdoing has no recourse, no advocate, and no hope where Shariah reigns supreme. BTW, calling God 'Father' is correct, Jesus commanded it. God stands above male or female of course, just as He stands outside space and time. Our puny minds cannot comprehend, His ways and thoughts are not our ways and thoughts. Let us remember that before we get into any amateurish theological discussion about Him.
RWB-
"Calling God 'Father' is 'correct' "?
And you're warning others about "amateurish theological discussion"?
"Correct"?
Is this Mao thought?
Or Mohammad thought?
Excuse one humbly for not being "correct". (I'll be off to the re-education camp in the morning.)
But, meanwhile, I choose to think from experience, evidence and intelligence.
I leave dogmatics to the Muslims and their co-"correct" absolutists.
(I'm sure I wouldn't have been "correct", had I had lived in ancient Central America, by violently disagreeing with the Aztec priest about throw a virgin sacrifice into a muddy well for the glory of the "Father" Quetzecoatl, also.)
As it is written somewhere: "There is neither male nor female in me."
And somewhere else: "Just say: 'I am that I am'."
Even these dyed-in-the-wool patriarchalists weren't so smug as to graft linguistic genitals onto the Ineffable, male or female.
Correct me if I'm wrong.