Comment on a recent incident of domestic abuse

Recently, a Muslim man committed a 'honor killing' in upstate New York. The method chosen to dispose of his victim, his wife, was death by beheading.
A prominent Muslim cleric Imam Shaykh Hamza Yusuf has spoken out against such killings (see video here) and is rightly shining a light on domestic abuse amongst minority groups across America. I am glad. However, it irks me that he nonchalantly refers and compares to incidents of domestic abuse in Jewish and Christians families in the following words while making the case that domestic abuse is prevalent across many religious denominations:

If a Christian beats his wife up, it's not Christian violence, if a Jew beats his wife up (from what the statistics show, it does not happen very often), but if they do then it is not Jewish violence - if a Muslim should do something to his wife, suddenly it has something to do with the religion of Islam.

Dear Mr. Hamza Yusuf, there definitely is a difference between beating and beheading. I really do not remember the last time we saw the words 'domestic abuse' and 'beheading' used in the same sentence and the latter being used as a vehicle to propagate the former. Yes, speaking out against domestic abuse is a good and a much needed thing, but comparing beating and beheading are poles apart...

Quotable

"Indian Muslims are proud of being both Indian and Muslim, and the Mumbai terrorism was a war against both India and Islam. Terrorism has no place in Islamic doctrine. The Koranic term for the killing of innocents is 'fasad.' Terrorists are fasadis, not jihadis. In a beautiful verse, the Koran says that the killing of an innocent is akin to slaying the whole community. Since the ... terrorists were neither Indian nor true Muslims, they had no right to an Islamic burial in an Indian Muslim cemetery."

- M.J. Akbar, the Indian-Muslim editor of Covert, an Indian investigative journal. From here.

Photographer Margaret Bourke-White captures a caravan of Muslim Indians fleeing from east to west Punjab escaping Sikh mobs, slowly streaming past the dead of a previous caravan & the whitened bones of their buffaloes & bullocks, India, April 20, 1945. From Life archives here.

On headscarves

Interview with two Swedish women Anne Sofie Roald and Pernilla Ouis who decided to convert to Islam in the 80's in an effort to step forward and explain the religion to the people. In the process they adopted the headscarf. A recent trend towards secularization of religious practices has led a lot of Muslim women to shed their headscarves. The interview chronicles life under the scarf, their reasons for remaining veiled and ultimately their reasons for giving up the practice thirty years later.

What made you initially decide to adopt the headscarf?

Anne Sofie Roald: I became a Muslim in 1982 and the pressure came not just from one man, but from a number of men around me. When I became a Muslim, I had no idea you were supposed to wear the headscarf. I've always been a seeker in life, and I'm a Muslim even without a headscarf. When I came into contact with Muslims, they said women had to wear the headscarf, but nobody did that in Norway then. Some Pakistani and Moroccan women went round with simple cotton scarves tossed casually over their hair. But the Muslim group had greater expectations of me as a convert, and I was one of the first in Norway to wear the headscarf.

The headscarf wasn't all that practical. The worst thing was that it made your head so hot, plus we used safety pins to keep it in place under our chins, because it was important to keep it in place. I lived in a detached house, and every time I wanted to go out into the garden I was supposed to wear it, but it was such a bother to put on and take off so in the end I didn't go out at all. In that way the headscarf became a barrier between inside and outside.

What made you decide to take off your headscarves?

Pernilla Ouis: What came first? My altered view of religion, or my divorce? One explanation is that the pressure from my husband had gone. Another interpretation is that I got divorced because I started thinking along different lines. And after the divorce I found myself in new social settings; people outside the Muslim community became important to me. I was "the one with the headscarf", but I felt it was a false description of who I was. My religiousness had changed, and the headscarf was a symbol of something I could no longer defend. I started wondering why I should have to pay such a high price. Everyone thought I was stupid, thought I had problems with the West. I became so one-dimensional; in every context I was just a Muslim. You could see it as a defeat and say we should have carried on fighting and insisting there was much more to us than that.

A painting I did a couple years back titled 'Veil - A Mea Culpa'... More on the painting here.