Sharia alert from India, via AFP, with thanks to Scaramouche:
LUCKNOW, India (AFP) – A powerful Muslim body in India has ordered a woman allegedly raped by a relative to separate from her husband, but said she was free to remarry if she wished.
The victim, 28-year-old Imrana Ilahi, was allegedly raped by her father-in-law Ali Mohammed in Muzafarnagar district of northern Uttar Pradesh about two weeks ago.
The All India Muslim Personal Law Board, set up in 1972 to protect the rights of Muslim women in the country, said the marriage would have to come to an end.
“As per the Koran, Imrana’s conjugal relationship with her husband stood dissolved since she has been raped by the latter’s blood relative,” the board’s woman member Begum Naseem Iqtedar Ali told reporters here.
“Had she been raped by anyone other than a blood relation, she could have stayed with her husband … but here a sacred relationship had been violated, the consequences of which have to be borne by Imrana and her husband Noor Ilahi,” she said.
But Imrana could remarry if she wanted to, she added.
The Muslim body’s rulings are binding on all Muslims in the country.
But it was a ruling by a group of local Muslim clerics that the mother of five children marry her rapist and treat her husband as her son that caused an public outcry.
The Muslim clerics said the rape had annulled the woman’s marriage to her husband and had ordered that she marry her father-in-law.
Imrana’s father-in-law, who is presently in jail, has alleged his daughter-in-law had consented to having sex with him….
When asked whether the ruling was too harsh on Imrana, Begum Naseem Ali said as believers of Islam, they had to “follow what has been prescribed by the religion and even the victim and her husband have professed to abide by Shariat.”