Word: sharia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...west Baghdad between the nationalist Battalion of the 1920 Revolution and al-Qaeda-backed fighters. Last week, an influential nationalist group, the Islamic Army in Iraq, asked Osama bin Laden to rein in al-Qaeda in Iraq's more extreme tactics, such as targeting Iraqi civilians and brutally enforcing Sharia...
...Baptists in America. Then there is the fear that to befriend Evangelicals is to support their project of "Christianizing" the U.S. The idea that Evangelicals want to turn America into a Christian government is both alarmist and mistaken. For one thing, there is no Evangelical legal system like Islamic sharia. Evangelicals have an agenda, but it is largely the restoration of moral and ethical standards that have typified the U.S. since its inception but have been neglected in the last half century. You may disagree with this agenda, but it is not theocratic...
...heart. It pits the Transitional Federal Government, a product of years of painstaking horse-trading among rival clan warlords, against the Council of Islamic Courts, a loose Islamist alliance strongly nationalist in character - which has vowed to break the power of the warlords and unite all of Somalia under Sharia law (although it happens to be led by clan rivals of the dominant clan in the government camp...
...divorced but cannot obtain a divorce under Islamic law if the husband refuses to consent - he is allowed more than one wife, so is free to marry again, while she cannot. Far from the gruesome tales of women's rights abused that the British public might typically associate with Sharia law - Taliban-style sentences of death by stoning, for example - Khan says a Sharia council will always grant a woman a divorce whether her husband accepts it or not. He will comply, too, because to dispute or refuse to follow the decision of community elders is a shameful...
...value of Sharia courts, say advocates of the system, lie in the fact that their religious legitimacy gives them a degree of cultural authority in the community that British courts might not have. For civil matters, Sharia law supporters argue that what counts is a resolution that both parties adhere to - and one that eases pressure on Britain's notoriously overburdened legal system and avoids the grievances that occur if ethnic minorities feel they have been judged unfairly. In fact, very few people - and certainly not all those who sit on the Sharia councils - believe the courts should stray into...