Maryam Namazie is a political activist, campaigner and blogger
Jahan News has gleefully reported that ‘Azerbaijan’s Salman Rushdie has been murdered’. The Islamic regime of Iran’s mouthpiece says writer Rafiq Tagi was despised by the people of Azerbaijan for his attack on Islam’s prophet Mohammad.
Actually, it is for that very reason that he was renowned and beloved…
it is very sad that whoever wants to practice his birth right of free speech and expression or criticizes Islamic mid-aged laws , is labeled as anti-people and some barbaric Mullas sentence him/her to death . The day of Rafiq Taqi’s death should be named a black day in modern days and hopefully Europeans and western powers notice the unreformability of Islamic regime and don’t waste precious time for speech and negotiation to them. once it becomes worse when you see some reformist like Kadivar and Ganji fleed to west even back his death sentence! Oh ,people notice Islam is like that , it kills and makes people not to breathe . BE AWARE
Evil. Evil never changes
(you have to imagine that read in a ron pearlman voice for full effect)
Horrible horrible news.
Mohammed is a product of people writing in around 500 AD, not a modern world view. His actions at the time were extremely normal.
Normal =/= good, mate.
Understandable… HOWEVER
I am pointing out the reason why child marriage is so entrenched in their culture. And don’t look so smug.
1. Ashkenazi Jews were quite known for Child marriages during the middle ages
2. Mormons marry VERY young. The only control on their age of marriage is the law, without which they would marry at Menses. Indeed the FLDS is still known to conduct them.
3. It’s widespread in Islam and Hinduism for a reason. Most of these nations were uneducated and poor until very recently and the culture of child marriage was common. Don’t look smug, it was only banned in many western countries in the 1920s and there was still a big backlash against it.
Child marriage is fought through the rights of women. The more a society treats women as equals the fewer women are married off as young as possible. It’s why child marriage in India is rare in the south than in the north and rarer amongst the rich and middle class. It actually has very little to do with religion
Want to know something cool? The age of marriage in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, UAE is 18…
The issue is child marriage is more common in places like Africa where life expectancy is low (if your average lifespan is 45 then 14 is nearly 25% of your life!) and India (45% of women in India are married under the age of 16).
Pakistan has a minimum age of 18… It’s mainly India and Bangladesh who let the side down.
As I said, Child Marriage is a cultural issue. Muslims in Turkey think it is a repressive system just as much as you do. Religion is just used to excuse the cultural practice. It’s like how child marriage proponents in the west (yes it was common once) used to defend their actions by the age of Mary when she was carrying Jesus.
I believe this is a more cultural issue than a religious one. Since it is an issue that is actually divisive amongst muslims with a fair number simply ignoring the Aisha event and marrying their daughters and sons when they are a lot older.
Here is an interview of Rafiq Tagi made by RFE/RL an hour or so before he died.
I thought I had posted this link earlier but I may have been mistaken.
Imagine a 50+ year old guy having sex with a 9 yr old. That’s the main guy in The Religion of Pis. Moo-hamhead also knew his medicine. He advised sick people to drink camel piss.
1. The standards of today’s morals cannot be applied to the past. Child marriage was common throughout the world just 200 years ago when the woman’s first menses was sufficient for her to be considered a woman (AKA 12 to 13)
2. Urine drinking was quite common in a lot of cultures. Including the west… It’s only recently gone out of practice on the basis of people going “WTF? Stop that!”
3. Juding the achievements of a 500 AD religious leader who may not even have done half the things he claims to have done (PFFT! By that logic Krishna cloned himself a 100 times over so that he could seduce a 100 women… To show people the true meaning of abuse of powers to get super laid)
4. These kinds of arguments actually give veracity to religion. See you are discussing actions of the characters rather than the veracity of the characters. If we didn’t explicitly state that Harry Potter is a fictitious character then to those who believe he is real, the discussion of the very events in the books and their similarities to real life locations is proof of the veracity. And again it just harms discourse.
Mohammed is a product of people writing in around 500 AD, not a modern world view. His actions at the time were extremely normal.
Consider that the FLDS still exists with it’s incest and child marriage and polygamy.
Sorry to break it to you but Mohammad was indeed a genocidal pedophile. To claim that “everyone did it back then” simply doesn’t excuse it. Not for a person who is held as the “moral paragon for all peoples of all times ” by his followers. As it turns out there is no shortage of dirty
older men in the islamic world “marrying” young girls to this day. The justification: the prophet did it so it makes it all right.
Sorry the truth hurts. Or, using your words, “harms the discourse”.
and what the heck does “veracity” even mean? Did anyone claim Mohammad didn’t exist? I am only saying he was a liar, pedophile and murderer.
There is no shortage of Hindus and Christians doing that in India. Remember culture changes slowly and the only reason christianity in the west has high marriage ages is due to the feminist movement. It’s the same in India where the first wave of indian feminists have a higher marriage age than the rural people who have not been exposed to it. This isn’t something that’s going to change right now. Think of it as how slavery was defended with the bible and condemned (yes there are muslims fighting against child marriage using the Koran too).
Often you are dealing with Millenia of culture that simply cannot be changed at the drop of a hat. It’s always been done this way… Why change?
It’s very hard to change people’s minds on this aspect. It requires a lot of work. And we simply aren’t doing any of it.
“Others are doing it too” is the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard. It is always brought up by people trying to escape responsibility for their own actions. As is the claim that there was nothing wrong with what Mohamad the pedophile did, because back then other people did that as well. Only those “other people” aren’t held up as moral symbols whose actions justify what happens today. WHEN A PERSON IS CLAIMED BY HIS FOLLWERS AS A MORAL VISIONARY HIS ACTIONS CANNOT BE EXCUSED ON THE GROUNDS THAT THEY WERE COMMON WHEN HE LIVED. That is just stupid. And any muslims trying to fight marrying off of young girls on the basis of islamic literature will be making laughingstocks of themselves. Mohammad not only married a 7 year old girl when he was in his 50s, he married off his own daughter too, when she eas nine. And he is not the only one. Imam Sadegh, the shiite saint known as one of the founders of shiite Islam, siad in a hadith: “one of the blessings of a man is for her daughter not to have menstruations while still living with him”.
Plenty of muslims do fight against child marriage. It’s just that it’s pervasive in the muslim cultures of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.
If one notices, a lot of muslim countries are trying to fight Child marriage. Yes there are some like Saudi who are basically encouraging you to marry 9 month old babies but there are some like Turkey (who are a secular nation) who are fighting a battle against a society that once considered this sort of thing very normal.
Bear in mind India is one such society where everyone married young be they hindu, christian or muslim. Christians use Mary as an excuse for child marriage. But it’s falling. My grandmother’s generation would have married at the age of 14. Now 45% of women are married by the age of 16 and this number falls every single year. It’s not a fight you win just by pointing fingers at religion. It’s a fight you win by raising the worth of women. It’s the same in Turkey. It’s the same across the gulf.
I say this is a cultural problem. Religion is being used to excuse the behaviour but this is something deep seated. That merely changing your faith won’t suddenly cause you to think women need to be given the choice of who to marry and not be treated as a commodity to be given away and incomplete without marriage.
you are extremely right and brave , keep it up , I’m with you , Bless you
The BBC web site still has nothing about this more recent than 2007.
Searching Al-Jazeera English for “Tagi” produces zero items.
Ditto for hunting “Rafiq Tagi” at Amazon.
😛
The stupid emoticon at the end of my previous comment was written as a colon-dash-P, and was intended to express disgust…
It’s extremely sad that one cannot even criticise honestly the nature of modern islam without creating a crazy response of fools who think that violence does anything but entrench the idea that Islam is nothing but the rantings of barbarians rather than a driving force of cultures that once rivalled Rome.
The ultimate irony is that I would wish to read this man’s writings. That in death the assassins have created a bigger market for this man’s work than in his life. I didn’t even know anything about him till I read this.
In much the same way, that my parents began to read Salman Rushdie after the Fatwah and I began to read his work after the 2006 redeclaration of the Fatwah.
They have done more damage to Islam than any silly book.
It is called “Streisand Effect”.
But it is not a bit surprising that some Muslims would carry out such heinous actions. Mohammad himself sent knife-wielding murders to get rid of Jewish poets whose work he didn’t like.
After all no one knows Islam (shiite Islam in this instance) better than those who have dedicated their whole lives to studying it: the ayatollahs. One of whom, Fazel Lankarani, was the one who issued the death fatwa against Rafiq Taqi (the person this article is about).
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