Author: AP
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: January 22, 2009
URL:
http://www.dailypioneer.com/151685/Australian-PM-condemns-Muslim-clerics-view-on-domestic-violence-marital-rape.html
Australia's prime minister joined Muslim leaders
in condemning a cleric's comments that husbands are entitled to smack disobedient
wives and force them to have sex.Samir Abu Hamza made the contentious comments
in Sydney during a lecture in 2003, but they were first reported on Thursday
after they appeared in a video posted on the Internet.
During the lecture on marriage delivered to
a male audience, Hamza who has previously had no national profile _ ridiculed
Australian law that regards forced sex within marriage as rape. "Amazing,
how can a person rape his wife?" Hamza said, adding that wives must immediately
respond to their husbands' sexual demands.
He also said a man was entitled to use limited
force as a last resort to punish a disobedient wife."After you have advised
them for a long, long time, then you smack them, you beat them and please
brothers, calm down the beating that the Muhammad showed is like the toothbrush
that you use to brush your teeth."
"You are not allowed to bruise them;
you are not allowed to make them bleed," Hamza said. "You don't
go and grab a broomstick and say that is what Allah has said."
Hamza could not be contacted for comment Thursday
at the Islamic center he runs in the southern city of Melbourne. Thursday's
edition of the Herald Sun newspaper quoted Hamza as saying he stood by his
recorded comments.
While Australia is a relatively tolerant and
multicultural society, ethnic and religious rifts occasionally flare, with
the treatment of women under Islam a flashpoint in this majority-Christian
nation.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd condemned Hamza's
comments, saying violence toward women was permissible "under no circumstances."
"Australia will not tolerate these sort of remarks," Rudd told reporters.
"They don't belong in modern Australia, and he should stand up, repudiate
them, and apologize."
Joumanah El Matrah, the executive of the Islamic
Women's Welfare Council of Victoria state, said Hazma's comments were "a
grossly inappropriate representation of both the Quran and Muslim views on
violence, both in wife beating and rape."
"I don't like to use the word extremism,
but certainly his views are outdated and a minority view that is insistent
on seeing women as less human than men," she said.
Sherene Hassan, the vice president of the
Islamic Council of Victoria, said research has found that some imams in Australia
share Hamza's stance on domestic violence. She said the council will hold
a series of workshops aimed at changing those views. Conflicts between mainstream
Australia and its fast-growing Muslim minority, who number 400,000 in a population
of 21 million, have gained a higher profile in recent years.
Australia's former mufti, Sheik Taj Aldin
al-Hilali, created a furor in 2006 which split the Islamic community with
a lecture in Sydney in which he compared women who do not wear head scarves
to "uncovered meat" and said immodestly dressed women invite rape.
Tensions between Muslim and non-Muslim youths erupted into days of rioting
at Sydney's Cronulla beach in late 2005.
