If someone is raped, then they should not be punished.
No country is perfect, no judge is perfect. These issues are for
the Scholars of Islam to investigate and to sort out.
We have no details on the whole case or what happened in it.
However, in Islam, the victim of a crime such as rape, should be
treated in most respect and never hurt or punished in anyway. It is
not from Shari'ah to punish victims or humiliate them.
Obviously this has nothing to do with religion, this behavior
results from old alien bedouin cultural traditions that they have
mixed up with religion to make it legitimate.
Only those who commit the crimes should be punished
Yet they're not punishing her for being raped, they're punishing
her for being alone with a man she wasn't related to.
That itself falls under shariah (as shariah is a broad
spectrum).
The men were convicted of kidnapping but not rape, because the
judges seem to think that women who go out with men they're not
related to (no matter how innocent the outing is), should be
raped.
The "strange man" she was alone with (i.e. her ex-boyfriend) was
not the rapist... but both the guy and the girl were raped by
another gang.
That woman's ex-boyfriend was also raped by that gang and he is
also being punished with lashes, so I wouldn't really consider it a
feminist issue (since both the man and woman are facing similar
charges). Both of them are not being punished because they were
raped, but because of another silly reason about them being alone
together just before they were raped. Even most Saudi lawyers
consider the ruling to be outrageous.
The men were sentenced comparable to American standards, meaning
they were basically given a slap on the wrist.
Perhaps we should petition.
-----------------
King Abdullah and the Saudi regime are big friends of people in
power, they control the largest oil reserves in the world.
The vast majority of Muslims are Sunni, not Wahhabi. The Wahhabism
that Saudi Arabia adheres to was a reform movement that originated
in the 18th century.
Wahhabism was never "the strongest faction within Sunni Islam", and
most orthodox Sunnis do not even consider Wahhabism a branch of
Sunni Islam. Wahhabis make up only a small minority of the global
Muslim population, and they only rule a few Muslim countries in the
Arabian Peninsula (mainly Saudi Arabia) and have some limited power
in East Africa. Most other Muslim countries in the world follow the
school of Sunni, with the exception of Iran and a few other Shia
countries.
Anyway, Wahhabism should be eridicated. Muslims (Sufi, Shia) have
been victims of it, but that isn't so strange, since the founder of
it is EXTREMELY INTOLERANT of heretics (Shia's & Sufi's).
