Whenever the West sees a shocking headline out of pakistan or iran — a teenage girl raped “on orders of a Sharia council” or a woman hanged for being a rape victim — the cry goes up: “This is Islam! This is Sharia!” But here’s the inconvenient fact: no Muslim, no Islamic law, and no Sharīʿah court has ever authorized such madness.
What you’re witnessing is not Islam. It’s village mobs, feudal councils, and tribal gangsters dressing up their cruelty in the language of religion. And then the Western press, hungry for clicks and outrage, slaps the word Sharia on it, as if the Qur’an itself ordered the rape of a girl in Multan.
Let’s be clear. In 2017, when a jirga in Multan ordered a “revenge rape,” Pakistani police stormed in, arrested the jirga members, and filed criminal charges. The Supreme court of pakistan has ruled — in black and white — that jirgas and panchayats are illegal, unconstitutional, and un-Islamic. No one with even a sliver of Islamic knowledge can defend collective punishment. The Qur’an states plainly:
“No bearer of burdens shall bear the burden of another” (6:164).
So when a rapist’s innocent sister is punished, that’s not Islam. That’s anti-Islam.
Yet, Western headlines roar: “Sharia council orders girl raped in Pakistan.” Why? Because it fits a lazy, Islamophobic script. Meanwhile, rape cases in Canada, grooming gangs in the UK, frat assaults in the US, and sex tourism in thailand are never called “Christian crimes,” “secular barbarism,” or “Western savagery.”
Here’s the bitter truth: no Muslim who understands islam could ever defend these jirga decisions. Not in Lahore, not in London, not in New York. Because the very religion that the West accuses of barbarism condemns exactly this barbarism.
But the controversy is sharper still: Why do Muslims themselves allow these mobs to hijack their faith? Why are so many silent when a village council spits in the face of islam and women bleed because of it? Why do Muslims tolerate the misuse of Sharīʿah’s name by illiterate tribal men?
Let’s provoke the real question: Is it islam that’s the problem, or is it the Muslim community’s failure to guard islam from being weaponized by the worst of us?
Until Muslims themselves rise and strip these jirgas of the stolen cloak of religion, the West will keep blaming “Sharia” for crimes that Sharia itself forbids. And that’s the most painful irony of all.
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