Meanwhile, in the U.S., Hamas-CAIR works energetically to block all measures outlawing sharia. If they continue, this will be America’s future. President Trump needs to revive the investigation and prosecution of Hamas-CAIR that Obama scuttled.
“A sinister British Sharia court and one girl’s tireless hunt for her father’s killer: How a brutal murder in Pakistan uncovered revenge killings in Lancashire,” by Martin Sixsmith, Daily Mail, January 10, 2017 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
The Muslim council of elders, or Sharia court, listened intently as the plaintiff outlined his case. He’d been disrespected by a neighbour, he told them, and in such a small Pakistani community, people talk.
As atonement for that disrespect, the neighbour had agreed to the plaintiff’s demand that their children would marry each other. But when the neighbour’s children objected to the idea, he reneged on that promise.
The plaintiff before the makeshift court was therefore demanding retribution.
The price for that broken promise was clear, he argued: his neighbour’s recalcitrant children had dishonoured him as well, and what’s more, they were consorting with white people.
This is not a question of race. It is a question of ideology and belief system.
As they were already promised to his own children, that constituted adultery: they should pay with their lives.
The council of elders deliberated, then issued their judgment.
He did, indeed, have the right to exact the death penalty on his neighbour’s children, the court ruled. It would be merciful if he would negotiate financial compensation in lieu of their death, but he was not obliged to do so.
If you think that sounds positively medieval, you’d be right. But this happened just a few years ago — not in Pakistan, but here in Britain, in a small town in Lancashire.
It was one of the most disturbing discoveries I made while researching my new book.
Over the years, I have probed the murky depths of Kremlin-commissioned assassinations, religious scandals and political cover-ups. But this latest project has been by far the most troubling. It has taken me into a world of murder, corruption and, as I’ve just described, violent summary justice sanctioned by appeals to the code of Sharia law. My book Ayesha’s Gift is the poignant story of a young woman’s quest to discover what has happened to her father, missing on a trip from Britain to his native village in Pakistan.
It is a real-life detective story, driven by Ayesha’s burning need to know why her father died, who might have killed him and who her father really was — the loving parent she had revered all her life or someone with a dangerous secret he had hidden from the world?
Her search for the truth about her father leads Ayesha to question the values on which she has built her life and identity.
It culminates in an encounter with a murderer on Death Row and his shocking claim that a council of religious elders in Britain were prepared to condone the revenge killing of two young people for the ‘crime’ of illicit sex.
It was a story that I felt drawn to on a deeply personal level, and it left me, a hardened journalist, moved and distressed.
My journey began in 2009. My book Philomena, about an Irish woman’s search for the son she was forced to give away for the ‘sin’ of giving birth out of wedlock (and which was turned into a film Philomena, starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, nominated for Oscars, Baftas and Golden Globes), had just been published and I found myself approached by a series of people with personal stories they wanted me to write.
Among them was a British Pakistani woman (not Ayesha), who told me her father had died in violent and mysterious circumstances in Pakistan. I took some time to investigate the case and uncovered a rather sordid tale.
The woman’s brother had been in an arranged marriage with a cousin from Pakistan; the family had brought his young bride to Britain, but the marriage fell apart.
So the groom’s father took the couple back to Pakistan on what he said was a holiday, but stole the young wife’s passport and flew back with his son to Britain — leaving the girl stranded and abandoned.
Her side of the family took this as an insult to their honour, so when her father-in-law visited Pakistan a year later, they murdered him.
I discovered the phenomenon of ‘disposable brides’, where British Asian men marry girls from the sub-continent, take their dowry and then cast them aside, is widespread in Pakistan and India.
But I concluded this story wouldn’t work as a book because no one emerged from it with any credit. However, I was hooked on the Pakistani setting and the notions of honour and justice that hold sway there.
It wasn’t until years later when I met Ayesha, through a mutual acquaintance, that I found the perfect story, the one I knew I had to write.
Ayesha Rahman was young, intelligent and attractive. She had a first-class degree from Cambridge and was running her own successful IT company in London, providing computer services to the NHS and government departments.
She had been born in Pakistan, but had come to Britain with her parents at the age of four. In most respects, she was British through and through.
I often said to her that people hearing her on the phone would take her for a product of Cheltenham Ladies’ College rather than a shanty town on the outskirts of Karachi.
The story that Ayesha told me stirred my imagination. She had grown up in a town in Lancashire with loving parents who had encouraged her to do well at school.
Her father, Ibrahim, cherished his young daughter, telling her tall tales of his childhood in rural Pakistan. When he described how, as a boy, he would spend his days fighting tigers and fleeing from wild elephants, she knew he was inventing adventures to impress her and she loved him for it.
The day she was offered a place at Cambridge, he was filled with pride at her success.
Unlike many Muslim men, Ibrahim believed that girls should be accorded the same advantages as boys. But this didn’t go down well with others in the local community; there were murmurings and petty jealousies.
Some, including Ibrahim’s brother, had suffered from racist abuse and they warned him against trying to integrate into what they called ‘white man’s society’.
Grudges and resentments began to form around Ibrahim that would grow over the years and eventually open the way for tragedy…..
