A look inside a Sharia Courtroom | Hacker News Reader

A look inside a Sharia Courtroom

newyorker.com

72 pointswouterjanl68 comments

I'm anyways skeptical of those who refer to "the media" or "the West" as a single entity.

"Much of the press saw U.S. troops as defending a pro-Western populace against a deeply unpopular Taliban insurgency. But Blue quickly realized that, in the insurgent heartlands, which lie in rural areas, the story was much more nuanced. To begin with, U.S.-occupied Afghanistan had been a divided realm; Afghans living in areas of relative calm tended to oppose the Taliban, but those living in war-racked regions often saw the Taliban as a better alternative to the corrupt U.S.-backed government. The Western media missed this story."

Is there an example of such a story (that describes near universal support for the US backed Afghan government and ignores the attitudes of rural areas) from any of the newspapers he mentions (WSJ, New York Times, Washington Post)?

I tried searching for "NYTimes rural Afghanistan 2019" and this is what I got:

"As American diplomats push for a peace deal with the Taliban to end the 17-year war, a strong voice of protest, largely coming from urban centers, has been cautioning against a rushed deal that could endanger some of the gains of past years. Those include women’s right to work and education, as well as an independent news media.

On the other hand, however, is the nearly half of the country that is caught between the two sides of the seesawing conflict. The constant fighting has deprived these rural Afghans of most of the improvements — schools and institutions — at the center of concerns over peace negotiations. And the voices of those Afghans are notably underrepresented in the debate."

>Yet nowhere in any standard interpretation of religious law does it state that women may not work or get an education.

Women are not allowed to work outside the home according to the Quran, there are exceptions but this is not generally allowed.[1]

Anand Gopal is very anti-US so he seems to be sugar coating things a bit.

[1]https://islamqa.info/en/answers/106815/guidelines-on-women-w...

The preceding lines in this surah explicitly mention this is addressed to wives of the Prophet who are unlike other women. The answer in your link even explicitly mentions this is their interpretation outside of what is explicitly written.

Islam is no different from the other Abrahamic religions. It is the culture of organized Islam that is uniquely violent, conservative, and extreme in its views today.

But please, DYOR.

Religion is always interpreted by people and how they interpret and act on the text becomes the religion itself. If you read the Bible, you'll find Christians don't follow most of the stuff written there and do follow a lot of stuff that is nowhere to be found in the bible (the Trinity, for example).

You can't really separate the religion from its culture is what I'm saying. If you go to into a cave and practice your own pure form of Islam, that is commendable, but has no impact on the rest of the world and thus isn't worthy of discussion.

>Islam is no different from the other Abrahamic religions.

But it is. For one, it claims its book, the Quran, is the literal word of god. This makes wiggling out of the (many) nasty bits much harder.

Additionally:

> Pashtun villages enforce a rigid gender segregation, confining women to the home in order to preserve the family’s honor.

Gender segregation is currently practiced in many Islamic countries (Saudi Arabia, Iraq to give some examples)..

It doesn't feel right to justify Sharia law by saying "oh, but under tribal law women are just property". Both are too old fashioned and should be discarded or amended.

> Both are too old fashioned and should be discarded or amended.

While I'm not supporting Sharia in any way, I support its amendment rather than complete abandonment, because a) it's easier and allows an iterative and a more acceptable way forward for its practitioners, b) It's supposed to evolve with times, anyway.

I remember talking with a religion teacher that one of the most prominent Sharia law books start with "These laws are made for this era. Modernize and change them when times change".

I think it's too inconvenient to preserve that page for some people.

Though surely this applies only to Ijma and suchlike. The rules which derive directly from the Quaran are the word of Allah and therefore immutable, and the Hadiths would be similarly difficult to question or reevaluate.

Yeah, but as far as I remember, some of the most criticized parts are open for interpretation. I may be wrong though.

FWIW, Saudi Arabia has almost entirely stopped legal enforcement of gender segregation during MBS's reign.

The text from your link is much better described that women are allowed to work outside the home, but only if a long list of conditions are met, most of which will not be true for workplaces in Western countries, e.g. that all coworkers must also be women.

This link is just a misinterpretation and misrepresentation of what is written in the book. Not different from what you see in the video in the newyorker article.

No, that the website's interpretation of that verse. An extermist one at that.

The more common interpretation of that verse and the ones sourouding it is about prefering to pray at home instead of going to the mosque. And when going to the mosque to not go in "revealing" clothes/fashion that would attract perverted men's attention.

Here's another website interpretation. https://recitequran.com/tafsir/en.ibn-kathir/33:33

The website IslamQA is run by the Islamic scholar Muhammad Al-Munajjid and adheres to the Sunni doctrine[1], the belief of 87-90% of Muslims[2].

If by extremist you mean unpopular that's not true.[3]

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Al-Munajjid

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_by_country#:~:text=Mos....

[3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_labor_force_in_the_Mu...

There is internal diversity between Sunni Muslims. The most common/accepted legal rulings are by the four legal schools: Maliki, Hanbali, Shafee and Hanafi. Some Sunnis broke away from those schools and are Salafi, which that particular website is. Salafi thought is promoted these days by the government of Saudi Arabia, but most Sunni Muslims today still adhere to the four legal schools I believe.

I'm not saying that the website itself is extremist (don't know never used it), I'm saying that the interpretation is so in this specific case. Also when talking about 'sharia law', sunni doesn't tell you much it's the jurisprudence part that's relevant and in the first link to the scholar you mentioned it say he follow the hanbali school of jurisprudence which is the least popular among sunni and the most extermist, for a long time it was not even deemed a legitimate one, the reason it still exist today is because of wahabism that sponsored by Saudi Arabia's money make it possible. To go from this to saying that 90% Muslims support this view is very dishonest.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanbali_school

I'm surprised this was absent from the article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacha_bazi

Bacha bazi is the systematic rape and abuse of young boys by Afghan men. The Taliban banned it and killed rapists when they found them. This was one source of the Taliban's initial popularity. The US hired child rapists to be Afghan army and police commanders. When they engaged in bacha bazi, US troops were told not to interferee. Numerous US soldiers were discharged or relieved for beating Afghan "allies" who kept little boys as sex slaves. Some boys were even raped on US military bases. This is all documented on the Wiki article and has been common knowledge among those who care to know for more than a decade.

In Afghanistan, it's not just a conflict between the West and the Taliban. It's also a tug-of-war between tribal traditions and religious rules. Surprisingly, the women, often seen as sidelined, might be the ones to watch as they navigate and challenge both systems.

> Surprisingly, the women, often seen as sidelined, might be the ones to watch as they navigate and challenge both systems.

As I posted in another reply, female suicide is spiking in Afghanistan.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/28/despair-is-set...

If women are Afghanistan's canary, the country seems to be spiraling down a shit sink.

> often seen as sidelined

They ARE sidelined. The few schools for them ARE closing. Their already limited means of feeding themselves ARE becoming more and more limited.

There are some protesters and advocates, mostly in urban centers. These woman do take a lot of risk, are cracked on, get tortured.

yes and if i'm reading it correctly, the article says banning women from schools is a remnant of tribal law, which is why they favour sharia law -- the lesser evil apparently given the circumstances -- as crazy as it may sound to out secular ears

What I am talking about is that there were schools in Afghanistan that were closed after Taliban came to power. Some teachers that continued to teach girls were tortured and imprisoned or executed by Taliban.

It was Sharia court that made them go to prison or get sentenced to violent punishment. That Sharia court was given power by Taliban. It was not tribal court that did that, it was Sharia court.

That's fascinating. It sounds like the system works as long as the judge really is an honest broker, and above corruption. And while it doesn't sound great, it sounds way better than the tribal customs they're used to.

Based on my limited experience with human people is that any position that relies on the individual acting in good faith and not being corrupt will immediately attract people who are unbelievably corruptable.

So that's probably not great long term.

Subsequently, I don't know if it's me being paranoid, a new spin being allowed, or just seeing behind the actual veil now, but I've been seeing more "maybe the taliban aren't so bad" stories lately. Interesting.

> It sounds like the system works as long as the judge really is an honest broker, and above corruption.

Well… a dictatorship works too if the leader is above corruption. The reality is that this is not usually the case.

As someone from Latin America, non-corrupt democracies are not the norm either. Very few democracies can be considered free of significant corruption.

Very true. Checks and balances do help, but the don't solve the issue of corrupt politicians.

Sure. I wasn’t really commenting on pros and cons of any particular system, just that the statement I quoted is true for any system but unrealistic.

> but I've been seeing more "maybe the taliban aren't so bad" stories lately. Interesting.

That's weird. The last newspiece I read about the Taliban is how female suicide is spiking.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/28/despair-is-set...

What weird kind of revisionist news feed are you following?

Yes the narrative I see is "The Taliban are awful as even the most pessimistic person said but we can't do anything about it"

This is of course a different spin from 20 years ago when it was "Lets deliver democracy and beer, America, Fuck Yeah!", but it's similar.

> This is of course a different spin from 20 years ago when it was "Lets deliver democracy and beer, America, Fuck Yeah!", but it's similar.

That's not correlated with reality at all.

From the start the spin was and always has been that Afghanistan was a safe haven for violent international terrorist organizations which were behind a string of terrorist attacks worldwide, and these organizations would be stopped by eliminating their safe havens and the regime that supported or enabled them to operate from their territory.

some slight hyperbole of course.

But the view that in the post cold war environment America should "spread democracy" was hardly a fringe

https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/why-united-states-s...

The 2002 National Security strategy was explicitly about spreading US style democracy and free trade to countries including Afghanistan.

"As we pursue the terrorists in Afghanistan, we will continue to work ... to rebuild Afghanistan so that it will never again abuse its people, threaten its neighbors, and provide a haven for terrorists. "

This view was certainly championed and repeated across opinion posts throughout the western press.

Now the view is "we failed in that, and it sucks, but we can't make it work". This of course was what many on the left were saying, but articles like

https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2006/12/21/de...

"So actually, as far as I can see, the way that America uses its military power will be quite central to any spreading of democracy in the Middle East. If you can be victorious, kind and smart, then people are going to want to find out how you did it. And I can't see why Fukuyama would want to argue to the contrary. "

There were always contrary views of course, many in academia were saying you can't force a cultural change. Those were reported a little, but in general it was very much pro-intervention.

>That's fascinating. It sounds like the system works as long as the judge really is an honest broker, and above corruption.

The issue is human rights and those who need it. People who do not believe in religion, women who want equal freedoms as men, lgbt people who don't want to be executed, etc.

Theocracies like any authoritarian dictatorship can "work" in providing the basic needs of it's devoted citizens.

More good reporting on Taliban Afghanistan: https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/02/23/the-west-lives-on-in...

Why are they whitewashing taliban's practices as a misunderstanding?

Tolerance of different cultures, or moral relativism.

Which makes i pretty clear how those things have quite hard limits to their applicability.

A Talib courtroom. This is not representative of sharia courtrooms generally. This akin to looking at a drumhead courts marshal and describing it as a "Christian" commonlaw court.

The common law could learn a lot from Sharia law, just not the punishments. (Although even those harsh punishments are rather similar to common law punishments of not long ago.) Want a trial in your own language? Want a codified standard of proof for specific crimes? You won't get those under the common law. You would in Sharia.

> Want a trial in your own language? Want a codified standard of proof for specific crimes? You won't get those under the common law. You would in Sharia.

Oh, so if I show up in a random Sharia court in Saudi Arabia they will switch the entire court proceeding to Swedish will they?

You could make that argument and many experts would say that you have a right to a translator. That isn't a thing under the common law. Many countries do provide translators, but that isn't a right across the board and for centuries people were executed in England without access to translators.

Your whataboutism skills are lacking.

>The common law could learn a lot from Sharia law

If you're curious to compare and live in the UK, just pop into your local Sharia court. Between 30-85 such courts are estimated to exist in Britain. They generally call themselves "councils" rather than courts but sometimes the mask slips:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/applying-sharia-l...

>Common misconceptions around sharia councils often perpetuate owing to the use of incorrect terms such as referring to them as ‘courts’ rather than councils or to their members as ‘judges’. These terms are used both in media articles but also on occasion by the sharia councils themselves.

Those aren't full courts. There are similar Jewish/rabbinical bodies in the US that also deal with family and religious issues. Sit in on a full sharia court and you will see procedures that techniques that answer questions that the common law has long struggled with. For example, not every witness in a sharia court must take an oath:

"Article 107: A person requesting the oath of his adversary must precisely specify the events concerning which he wishes said adversary take an oath. The court shall prepare the formula of the oath as prescribed by the Shari'ah."

https://www.saudiembassy.net/law-procedure-shariah-courts

This is highlighted by Rawls' "highly idealized" (according to him) concept of a wel-ordered society[0], which sounds (according to Professor Wael Hallaq of Columbia University) like a distinguished Muslim jurist describing the reality of his own legal culture".

[0]

"To say that a society is well-ordered conveys three things: first (and implied by the idea of publicly recognized conception of justice), it is a society in which everyone accepts, and knows that everyone else accepts, the very same principles of justice; and second (implied by the idea of the effective regulation of such conception), its basic structure— that is, its main political and social institutions and how they fit together as one system of cooperation—is publicly known, or with good reason believed, to satisfy these principles. And third, its citizens have a normally effective sense of justice and so they generally comply with society’s basic institutions, which they regard as just. In such a society the publicly recognized conception of justice establishes a shared point of view from which citizens’ claim on society can be adjudicated.

"This is a highly idealized concept. Yet any conception of justice that cannot well order a constitutional democracy is inadequate as a democratic conception."

I do agree with the fundamental assertion that American politicians and news organizations refused to accept the reality of religious fundamentalism in this part of the world. But it seems pretty ironic coming from The New Yorker who have been a big part of driving this confused worldview.

I didn't get a look inside a sharia court at all. I'm going to go ahead and call this a misleading title.

You should watch the documentary. The first minute of the documentary is literally footage of a hearing in a sharia court.

Yeah I'd do that, but I prefer to read than watch.

Afghanistan is very messed up: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacha_bazi

Pederasty was practiced in many cultures. It's indeed messed up but I wouldn't say it's peculiar to Afghanistan

OP stated that Afghanistan is messed up, and substantiated the claims by pointing a pervasive custom of sexual abuse of children.

Whataboutisms do not change the validity of such claim. I don't know what point you thought you were making.

And why? What would motivate someone to rebut the mild claim that its messed up?

> What would motivate someone to rebut

It was not a rebuttal. It was pure whataboutisms.

> the mild claim

Systematic sexual abuse is not mild, and it's way more than a mere claim: it's well and thoroughly documented.

I'm absolutely not trying to say say its not messed up. I was trying to say that these (horrible) practices do not characterize Afghan culture itself as they are pervasive in the world. I don't think this is whataboutism.

Honestly re-reading myself I now think of many cultures where it was never an occurrence, so I don't really agree with myself anymore. Thank you for making me rethink it.

It doesn’t have to be for Afghanistan to be messed up.

Taliban cleaned this practise up btw, their whole raison d'etre was fighting the Bacha Bazi practise by the warlords in 1990s. And the Republic's warlords between 2001-2021.

Seems to be missing something quite important:

    The Western media missed this story. Part of the reason was that the war-torn
    countryside had been difficult—though not impossible—for foreign reporters to
    access, so the scale of the crimes committed by U.S. forces and their allies
    went undocumented.

Sure, that's "part" of the story. The rest of the story is that if you make the crimes of the US forces public, then the US government will fuck you and your family over, and by extension the people around you.

Even if you're a non-US national living in a completely separate, supposedly "allied" country.

The most prominent example of course is Julian Assange.

It's mostly whataboutism though. Similar to how closet nazis attack Israel. There is an enormous moral difference between the US behaves and the Taliban behaves.

The US for example cares and are ashamed of the war crimes you speak of.

The Taliban CELEBRATE their war crimes, beheadings, lynchings of women.

That Frankie Boyle quote seems relevant here.

“Not only will America come to your country and kill all your people, but what's worse is that they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”

On the other hand, look at Korea. In hindsight it seems pretty clear that it was a huge loss to humanity that the US didn't push further north.

And of course, look at Afghanistan today.

Should the US have stayed involved or gotten involved with Afghanistan? Why? What good has come from it?

As a naive guess, if the US had somehow managed to avoid corruption at pretty much all levels in their Afganistan er... adventure, then either approach may have worked.

But the corruption just made a joke of everything, and of course it all ended badly. :(

In the cities millions of people had the best years of their lives due to US intervention. So in isolation that was a moral thing. But of course, they didn't manage to shift the balance away from islamism to secularism in the country. Probably because they didn't even try much. There was a cultural battle that the US largely tried to stay out of, even though that was the real battle all along.

Uh, we did push further north?

That's why China intervened?

I am not sure what exactly you are suggesting here, but its hard to believe that a nuclear war against china (and likely the USSR) in 1951 as MacArthur seemed to believe was necessary to recover North Korea would have been a net positive.

Sure. I'm not saying it was possible. Just that history has clearly shown it was just.

> The US for example cares and are ashamed of the war crimes you speak of.

Maybe in words, but not really in deeds/actions.

The US quite literally goes out of it's way to suppress any info about war misdeeds. Which of course directly enables those misdeeds and similar to continue.

Along those lines, the Guantanamo Bay facility is still operating to this day. All that seemed to do was enable torture and related activities (crimes?) in some weird finger pointing / blame shifting exercise.

> The US quite literally goes out of it's way to suppress any info about war misdeeds.

Again. The Taliban and similar islamists celebrate their crimes. They post them on youtube.

The US also actively prosecutes war crimes committed by it's own. See Abu Ghraib.

Do you think the Taliban comes close to anything like this?

It's not really relevant, as I was talking about why the US media misses specific types of stuff.

Abu Ghraib was covered extensively by the media.

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