In what is likely to become a recurring news story over the next few years, an Afghan refugee known only as Tariq (many Afghans use only one name) was convicted on Monday of the sexual assault of a three-year-old girl at Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia, where he had been brought by Americans anxious to give him a new lease on life in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. For his part, Tariq explained that what he did was perfectly acceptable back in Afghanistan, a guileless and accurate statement that portends more trouble to come from the Afghan evacuees that Biden’s handlers are busy resettling now in American communities.
Associated Press reported that Tariq “was arrested in September at Camp Upshur in Quantico after Marines observed him fondling the girl, who was not related to him, above her clothes on her private parts.” Since there were witnesses, the conviction was not hard to obtain, but Tariq was surprised that anyone would object: “According to court papers, Tariq tried to explain through interpreters that his conduct was acceptable in his culture.” His defense team, apparently aware of the explosive implications of this claim, tried to have this telling detail thrown out of the record, but “efforts to have his statements suppressed were rejected by the judge.”
Tariq and many others like him didn’t leave Afghanistan very long ago, so it is understandable that some of the newly arrived Afghan evacuees would be acting as if they were still there. But this incident, and especially Tariq’s ingenuous admission, once again spotlight the fact that to bring in large numbers of people with a radically different culture and sharply divergent standards of behavior is unwise and is only going to mean strife in America’s future.
No one in the mainstream will dare discuss it, but Tariq may have gotten the idea that it was acceptable to be sexual with small children from the Islamic teachings that permeate every aspect of life in Afghanistan. And it’s not just Afghanistan: child marriage has abundant attestation in Islamic tradition and law. Turkey’s directorate of religious affairs (Diyanet) said in January 2018 that under Islamic law, girls as young as nine can marry. Ishaq Akintola, professor of Islamic Eschatology and Director of Muslim Rights Concern, Nigeria, said in 2016: “Islam has no age barrier in marriage and Muslims have no apology for those who refuse to accept this.” Dr. Abd Al-Hamid Al-‘Ubeidi, Iraqi expert on Islamic law, said in 2008: “There is no minimum marriage age for either men or women in Islamic law. The law in many countries permits girls to marry only from the age of 18. This is arbitrary legislation, not Islamic law.”
Dr. Salih bin Fawzan, prominent cleric and member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, declared in 2014 that there is no minimum age for marriage in Islamic law at all and that girls can be married “even if they are in the cradle.” Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology has ruled that “Islam does not forbid marriage of young children.”
Related: Disaster in the Making: 12,000 Afghans in U.S. Now with No ID Whatsoever
These authorities say these things because hadiths that Muslims consider authentic record that Muhammad’s favorite wife, Aisha, was six when Muhammad wedded her and nine when he consummated the marriage: “The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death)” (Bukhari 7.62.88).
Marrying young girls was not all that unusual for its time, but because in Islam Muhammad is the supreme example of conduct (cf. Qur’an 33:21), he is considered exemplary in this even today. The idea that Muhammad is exemplary even in his marriage to the child Aisha is taken for granted by nearly everyone in Afghanistan. When the Afghan evacuees were brought here, most of them were not vetted for criminal or terrorist activity or ties. And no effort whatsoever was made to alert them to the fact that American culture and Afghan culture are not the same and that it would not be wise for them to bring all their Afghan practices to their new home. To tell the evacuees that would have been “racist” and “Islamophobic.”
In light of that, no one should be surprised that at least some of these three evacuees, fresh from Afghanistan’s deeply Islamic culture, should be caught in America behaving like Afghans. The larger question is whether it is wise to endanger women and girls by bringing into the country large numbers of people among whom is an unknowable number who think the same way that Tariq does. But that question will, of course, not be asked. To ask it would also be “Islamophobic.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member