Everything is bigger in Texas, including the egregious miscarriages of justice. The Blaze reported Wednesday that Collin County, Texas, District Judge Andrea Thompson “effectively denied a U.S. citizen,” a Muslim woman named Mariam Ayad, “her constitutionally protected due process rights, choosing instead to order her to appear before an Islamic tribunal where her testimony is considered inferior. And when her lawyers sounded the alarm — the judge doubled down.” Islamic law, Sharia, taking precedence over U.S. law — in Texas? Celebrate diversity!
Ayad was trying to get a divorce from her husband, Ayad Hashim Latif. Sharia stipulates that while a man can divorce his wife simply by telling her three times that he is divorcing her, a woman has to seek the permission of Muslim clerics and make her case for a divorce before them. There is, of course, no such provision in U.S. law, but when Ayad told Latif that she was going to seek a divorce, he told her that she had signed an Islamic prenuptial agreement that stated the marriage, and any possible divorce, would proceed according to Sharia provisions.
Mariam Ayad contends now that she was tricked into signing this agreement, and thought that what she was signing was something else altogether. Her lawyers state that American law should supersede it in any case. Thompson, however, ruled that the prenuptial agreement was binding, and thus Ayad will have to go through the Islamic Association of North Texas to get permission to divorce. According to The Blaze, this decision was in “complete disregard of both federal and state law.”
This case isn’t over: Ayad is appealing at the Fifth Court of Appeals in Dallas. Every American can hope that court will rule in her favor and overturn this dangerous precedent. If Mariam Ayad has to submit to Sharia as a U.S. citizen in Texas, she will be submitting to a legal system that contradicts American laws in numerous particulars. Hitting home for Mariam Ayad’s divorce case is the fact that the Qur’an declares that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man: “Get two witnesses, out of your own men, and if there are not two men, then a man and two women, such as you choose, for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her.” (2:282)
That’s not all. The Qur’an teaches that men are superior to women and should beat those from whom they “fear disobedience”: “Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.” (4:34)
Muhammad’s child bride, Aisha, says in a hadith that Muhammad “struck me on the chest which caused me pain, and then said: ‘Did you think that Allah and His Apostle would deal unjustly with you?’” (Sahih Muslim 2127)
The Qur’an also allows men to marry up to four wives, and have sex with slave girls also: “If you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four; but if you fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly, then only one, or one that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice.” (4:3)
It rules that a son’s inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter: “Allah directs you as regards your children’s inheritance: to the male, a portion equal to that of two females.” (4:11)
It allows for marriage to pre-pubescent girls, stipulating that Islamic divorce procedures “shall apply to those who have not yet menstruated.” (65:4)
Another statement attributed to Muhammad: “If a husband calls his wife to his bed [i.e. to have sexual relations] and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning.” (Sahih Bukhari 4.54.460)
Non-Muslims in several states a few years ago tried to outlaw the elements of Sharia that interfere with Constitutionally protected freedoms, not Islam as an individual religious practice. These anti-Sharia measures were aimed at political Islam, an authoritarian ideology at variance with the Constitution in numerous particulars: Sharia denies the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of all people before the law. That is what people wanted to restrict, and the elements of Sharia that contradict Constitutional freedoms were all they want to restrict. But of course these efforts met furious opposition and were denounced as “Islamophobic.”
Meanwhile, Sharia really does deny equality of rights to women. But to oppose that is “racist.” So Mariam Ayad just has to suffer, you see, for diversity.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member