The new law "no longer obliges wives to obey their husbands, angering Muslim groups." It is Qur'an 4:34 which insists on obedience so much as to endorse violence as a means of attempting to ensure it. To grant women more rights than that would be to imply that Muhammad as well as Allah himself were mistaken, or that their decrees are less relevant now than 1400 years ago.
As we have seen numerous times, that quickly gets dangerous. An update on this story. "Mali imam living in fear after backing women's rights," from BBC News, May 10 (thanks to Twostellas):
An imam in Mali is living in fear after backing a new family law which no longer obliges wives to obey their husbands, angering Muslim groups.
He has received threatening phone calls and local Muslim leaders have tried to dismiss him.
The new law is currently being given a second reading in parliament after Mali's president refused to sign it because of the Muslim protests.
More than 90% of Mali's population is Muslim.
In April, the imam of Kati, 15km (9 miles) north-west of the capital, Bamako, wrote a letter to Mali's High Islamic Council stating he saw nothing in the new family law which infringed the country's social values, much less Islam, the BBC's Martin Vogl in Mali says.
The High Islamic Council has said imams can only be dismissed by their congregation and it is unclear what weight the decision by local Muslim leaders to sack the imam will have, our reporter explains.
But the incident has highlighted the intense feelings among Muslims towards the new family law.
Its most contentious provisions give more rights to women.
For example, under the law husbands and wives owe each other loyalty and protection rather than obedience, women get greater inheritance rights and the minimum age for girls to marry in most circumstances is raised to 18.
All of those provisions run afoul of Sharia, hence the ferocity of the opposition.
When the law was introduced in August 2009, the parliament building was attacked and it was difficult to find anyone to defend the law in public, our reporter says.
Mali's President Amadou Toumani Toure said he was sending the law back to parliament for the sake of national unity.


























More evidence that the 'Moderate Muslim' mirage is just that, a mirage. At best, it confirms that nastier more violent demographic of Islam will always run the show. The issue that I always wonder about is whether so called moderate Muslims can even see the glaring hatred, hypocrisy, and fundamental flaws within their own religion. You'd think at one point these 'moderates' would figure out that at the end of the day they can't change Islam for the better, nor is Islam subject to a benign interpretation to fit in the modern world. You'd think they'd figure out it's a lost cause and move on from there.