Friday, November 11, 2005

A Fatwa on you.....

While I respect the right of a community to have a law of their own, which they are more than welcome to practice in a country dominated by their community, I find some of the recent pronouncements of fatwa's by some illiterate and obnoxious celrics in India to be downright strange. My reaction on reading some of them vacillate between anger (Imrana) and laughter (Sania). Of course, I continue to believe that India should quickly adopt an Uniform Civil Code (a fact on which I will always support the BJP) but with Mrs G Redux in power and the crazy commies (Prakash Karat's latest is saying the Volker probe is a bunch of lies - inspired by what N.Ram wrote no doubt) this will never happen in the near future (Until in a highly optimistic scenario, Lalu loses in Bihar and this leads to a total breakdown at the Centre, snap polls are called and the NDA comes back to power, until then we'll have to wait till 2007). But, if you think some of the ones propounded in India are bad, I came across this article in The Guardian which reproduces a fatwa issued by some cleric in Saudi Arabia.
It is a fatwa on football/soccerr, and some of the suggestions made me go 'Whaddafaaak?'
Do not call "foul" and stop the game if someone falls and sprains a hand or foot or the ball touches his hand, and do not give a yellow or red card to whoever was responsible for the injury or tackle. Instead, it should be adjudicated according to Sharia rulings concerning broken bones and injuries.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Let me get a hold of my friend Em, and then we'll have all the crazy fatwa stories from Iran! Actually given the tightly structured Iranian clerical hierarchy, most clerics are fairly well-read at least in Islamic theology, and yet the kind of nonsense they come up with is unbelievable. The kookiest of them all of was of course Khomeini himself.

I'm all for the Uniform Civil Code, since we already have a Uniform Criminal Code. However, it should not be modelled on the existing Hindu Code, and also do away with sexist Hindu property laws and provisions like the Hindu Undivided Family.

Given the vehement protests of the Jan Sanghis and then BJP (Advani leading the charge)at every round of legislative reform in the Hindu Code (the first in 1956 and then divorce reform in 1976), it seems very unlikely.

K said...

T_M: HUF is a great tax-break for married people if you know how to use it well. And being the underpaid starving soul that I am who pays more than 15% of his gross every month to the government, I believe all tax breaks are good.
But then again, succession laws in India need drastic changes. My colleague had done a great piece explaining sucession laws during the Birla-Lodha spat.