- "If a man is caught in the act of raping a young woman who is not engaged, he must pay fifty pieces of silver to her father. Then he must marry the young woman because he violated her, and he will never be allowed to divorce her."
Deuteronomy 22:28-29
This passage from Torah should be followed by Christians, Jews and Muslims alike. It's accepted in Judaism as their central holy book, in Islam as a direct message from God and in Christianity as one of the five books of Moses that form the Old Testament. So by all accounts all three should accept these words as a literal will of god and should act accordingly.
Yet the only part of the world where this still happens is in places where sheria law is practised. In Bangalore a Muslim employee raped a 12-year-old daughter of his Muslim employer. He was arrested and sent to prison, but some influential elders of a local masjid committee have commanded the employer to marry his daughter to the rapists so that the rapist will be out of jail. In Morocco a 16 year old rape victim Amina Filali swallowed rat poison and died in protest after a judge ordered her to marry her rapist.
What's funny though, is that Moroccans actually protested over such harsh usage of their penal code and demanded change. It's quite common in the Middle East, even in deeply Islamic societies to see outrage, from a significant percentage of society, after sheria law has been executed word for word. Are these the first sun-rays of enlightenment over the bronze age mentality? Is the middle east now where the western society was after Salem Witch Trials? What is it exactly that makes jews and christians disregard the abhorrent teachings of their holy books and only cherry pick the universal good-samaritan verses? What is it that keeps Islam stuck in the same doldrums of bronze age mythology bringing misery to a few thousand infidels but most importantly countless of millions of believing Muslims?
I have no clear answers. But it's my personal opinion that Muslim faith in general, as broad and inter-cultural as it has become, needs it's own age of enlightenment. A movement as powerful and progressive as European humanism and as rational and determined as the French revolution. Without these, Europe as well as all the Jews and Christians living in it would be a much different place today. It's easy to forget that witchcraft was an offence punishable by death in Germany just two and half centuries ago.
I don't think steady evolution will bring rational thought to Islam. Christianity stagnated trapped in its fundamentalist ideas for hundreds and hundreds of years between the fall of the Roman Empire and Dark Ages, before Petrarch, inspired by wisemen of the Greko-Roman world lit a spark of knowledge and rationality that explosively propelled the western civilization towards the renaissance and beyond. I reckon Islam still awaits its Petrarch. It might not be a person at all. It might just be a set of ideas, that are so powerful and profound that they'll transcend the muslim world and break down bronze age beliefs into something as harmless as Christianity, Judaism or astrology is today. It will be something revolutionary and will sweep the entirety of the Islamic world. I predict the messiah of Islamic humanism has already been born. In fact I predict he was one of the people protesting during the Arab Spring uprisings. Even though this time his words were drowned out by religious and military opportunists, I believe it is just the beginning. His time will come.
