A Malaysian model, who was set to become the first woman to be caned in the southeast Asian country for drinking beer in public, had her sentence postponed Monday until the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. An Islamic, or sharia, court in Pahang had fined Kartika — a Muslim — $1,400 (5,000 Malaysian ringgit) and sentenced her to six strokes with a rattan cane for drinking at a hotel bar two years ago.

The caning would have been carried out within seven days of that, making her the first woman to be caned in Malaysia under sharia law. The moderate Muslim country has a dual-track justice system, in which Islamic courts operate alongside civil courts. But the country’s civil system also cannot overrule a sharia court sentence.

Such a punishment, caning, for drinking alcohol, seems very harsh. Further, the fact that a country’s civil courts cannot over-rule a religious court seems even stranger.

Afghanistan has enacted a new legislation empowering men of Shia sect of Islam to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands’ sexual demands, a media report said on Saturday. The new final draft of the legislation also grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work, The Guardian reported.

According to the report, the new law has been backed by the hardline Shia cleric Ayatollah Mohseni, who is thought to have influence over the voting intentions of some Shias, who make up around 20 per cent of the population. Karzai has assiduously courted such minority leaders in the run up to next Thursday’s election, which is likely to be close, a poll indicated.

Given that the President is now contesting for re-election as the President of Afghanistan, and Shia votes will also be important, it is doubtful whether this legislation will be so easily reversed; would be so ironic that a state supported by the West enshrines a massive gender bias.

Recently, a law was passed in Afghanistan for the minority Shia population that legalized rape within the marriage, allowing the husband to force the demand for sexual relationship within the marriage. The passage of this law outraged people all over, with women’s rights groups in Afghanistan protesting the passage of the law; more significantly, western backers of the Karzai Government were outraged and gave public statements demanding withdrawal of the law. All this pressure has finally resulted in a statement by the Afghan President that the law will be revised and brought into conformance with the Afghan constitution and with the Sharia (link to article):

# Afghan law appears to let a man to have sex with his wife even when she says “no”
# Karzai tells CNN he, others unaware of the provision due to the amount of legislation
Karzai told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that he and others were unaware of the provision in the legislation, which he said “has so many articles.” Karzai signed the measure into law last month. “Now I have instructed, in consultation with clergy of the country, that the law be revised and any article that is not in keeping with the Afghan constitution and Islamic Sharia must be removed from this law,” Karzai said.
The bill languished in the country’s parliament for a year-and-a-half before it was recently pushed through in what one legislator called a “chaotic” vote. Women from various parts of Afghanistan marched in the capital Wednesday to protest the law, which has also been criticized by human-rights groups and Western leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama.

For now, the measure has been beaten back, but measures to lift women’s rights will take time, and many reverses before they can take root, especially in a backward society such as in Afghanistan.

Three teenage girls have been buried alive by their tribe in a remote part of Pakistan to punish them for attempting to choose their own husbands, in an “honour” killing case. After news of the deaths emerged, male politicians from their province, Baluchistan, defended the killings in parliament, claiming the practice was part of “our tribal custom”.
The girls, thought to have been aged between 16 and 18, were kidnapped by a group of men from their Umrani tribe. They were driven to a rural area and then injured by being shot. Then, while still alive, they were dragged bleeding to a pit, where they were covered with earth and stones, according to the findings of Human Rights Watch, the international campaigning group. Officials, speaking off the record, confirmed the killings. Some reports said that two older relatives of the girls had tried to intervene, but they too were shot and buried with the girls while still alive.

This is an absolutely despicable act, and the fact that the Government refuses to take any action on this even 6 weeks after this cold-blooded murder (in Baba Kot, a remote village in Jafferabad) makes it even more horrible. The Pakistani Government as well as the Government of Baluchistan are both run by the Pakistan People’s Party, the party that was run by Benazir Bhutto for the last 2 decades before her assassination, and the refusal to get the people involved arrested (for fear of antagonizing the tribes involved) is a political act. Even Musharraf was better than this, since in a major honor case (where a girl was raped as a means of punishment), he had got the people involved arrested and tried. In this case, what the girls wanted to do was to get married in a civil court, and this was enough to get them killed.
Unfortunately, this sort of custom (should one dignify this sort of act by calling it a custom?) happens in other countries in the region as well to varying degrees – the denial of many rights such as being able to select their own partners, being arrested for meeting people of the other sex, harassed and arrested for not wearing a full length gown, and in the more extreme cases, being ordered to be killed by tribal / caste gatherings that assume the power of life and death. These need to be combated through more education, bringing in more development; at the same time, they need to be accompanied by swift and merciless punishment for the people involved.