We have made the case before on VTB that the issue is less one of polygamy, (and that is fortunate as the fight against that is lost in the western world anyway) and more of one of forced marriage. Pretty much every western nation has already caved in to Muslim multi-mate arrangements without so much as a debate in the legislatures. However this article, ‘Muslim bride tricked into marriage’ caught my eye today from The Religion Of Peace.
She thought she was signing paperwork in preparation for the ceremony but, because her culture does not allow her to talk to men other than her family, she couldn’t ask questions.
Her brother said he thought things were not right but the family’s strict Muslim culture meant their father and the imam could not be wrong.
He said he was asked to be a witness and told he was signing an engagement certificate – although the document was headed certificate of marriage.“We are a traditional patriarchal family and it would not be appropriate for me to question my father or the imam,” the brother told the court.
The names of the couple and the imam have been suppressed by the Family Court. It is not the first Muslim “marriage” ruled void by the court.
Justice Nahum Mushin said there had been previous similar cases, including one in which the couple became married when all they thought they were doing was becoming engaged.
In the present case, the 27-year-old “bride” is a public servant from a traditional Islamic family.
She told the court that in May 2007 her family and the family of a 39-year-old Muslim in Canada began discussing an arranged marriage.
She said arrangements were made between the man, a divorced financial planner, and her father “because in our culture it is not acceptable that women speak to men not in their family”.She first met the man at the airport and three days later the local imam attended the family’s home with a “bundle of papers”.
She was told by her father to dress “appropriately” and waited outside the room until called in, when she signed the documents where she was told.
The “husband” left Australia two weeks later and the couple only discovered they were married when, in January 2008, they agreed via text they wanted to call the engagement off.The woman told the court the marriage was never consummated.
As we have made the case before, how many wives is certainly a debatable issue. But we in the west need to make something perfectly clear to ourselves and that is how we view marriage at a level so fundamental that we probably do not even imagine that others may not see it as we do. To be clear, the notion that people who get married, consent to it.
The above case is relatively benign. Practically a clerical error. But one can see the potential in it. However hundreds of thousands of true forced marriages take place annually in the Muslim world. Marriages where the woman literally may be killed by her own family should she refuse to be sold like a goat to a man, often a stranger and often very much older.
The media is fond of referring to Muslim arranged marriages. It has a nice old world ring to it. Sort of charming. But many Islamic marriages are more accurately described as ‘forced’ marriages where the female has no actual choice in the matter whatsoever.
When we debate homosexual marriage in western nations it never occurs to anyone whether or not both people wish this arrangement. It is a given. The debate is whether or not a state stamp of approval on this sort of arrangement will have a deleterious effect on the rest of our culture and society. When we debate polygamy it usually has the exact same set of parameters. However anyone who has read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s most excellent book ‘Infidel’ or Bruce Bawer’s turpentine for the eye book, ‘While Europe Slept’ would know that in far too many cases, marriage is a property deal between men in one or more families to consign a woman to a man with absolutely no choice given to the woman and often without even her knowledge of the matter until she is delivered to the man’s address.
These must never be allowed to have state sanction at all. Preferably anywhere on earth but as the UN slides backwards away from any meaningful human rights towards protection of Islam we can forget that. But in western nations that still have a trace of true human rights, surely the most basic of which is the right to self determination in marriage. Even a whore gets to pick her tricks.
Eeyore for VTB
