An article I noted over the weekend in the Toronto Star peaked my interest a bit;
There were no pleasantries, there was no small talk. Safa Rigby had expected to hear her husband’s voice when the phone rang one morning. Instead, the caller didn’t even bother to say hello.
“You think you know your husband. You don’t know him at all,” said the man, a friend of her husband’s. “His car is parked outside my house right now. He is with my ex-wife. They just got married last week,” the man said.
It took a minute for the news to sink in. Then she called her husband of 14 years, demanding to know if what she had just been told was true – that while she spent a year in Egypt raising their four children in a more Islamic environment, he had used it as an opportunity to marry not just one, but two other women in Toronto.
“Yes, I’m married,” he said, quashing all her dreams of their future together.
He told her he was married in a small ceremony 20 days earlier, officiated by Aly Hindy, a well-known Toronto imam, at his Scarborough mosque.
“I cried for six days straight. Lost my appetite, ignored the kids, even had to start taking antidepressants,” said Rigby, 35. “What I couldn’t understand was how such a thing could happen in Toronto, my hometown, where polygamy is supposed to be illegal.”
It was easy. He simply found an imam willing to break a Canadian law, in exchange for upholding an Islamic one.
Scoot backwards just a few days, and reconsider the goings on down in Texas, where Child Protective Services has broken up a cult of FLDS members. Clearly, there is much in the way of comparison, here, that needs some serious examination. In pinning victimhood on the FLDS members… (Even while leaving claims of sexual abuse of children by the side of the road)… are we as a society encouraging the behavior we see in this report in Toronto?
Addendum: (David L)
I do not defend the FLDS, but I note a legal disinction. There is a major difference between FLDS case in Texas, and similar ones, and the case in Toronto. The FLDS were not and are not legally polygamous marriages. No FLDS male was legally married to more than one women. One wife was legal. The rest were only spiritual marriages, in the eyes of God, not the state of Texas. The FLDS did not purport to either the state or the girls involved to legally married to more than one wife. So while you are free to disapprove of the FLDS lifestyle, aside from the issue of statutory rape, the lifestyle was, and is, legal. Not so in Toronto. The FLDS made an effort to have their choose lifestyle conform to state law. Not the case in Toronto.
Tags: aly hindy, child protective services, FLDS, imam, islamic environment, mosque, muslim, polygamy, Scarborough, Texas, Toronto, toronto star, victimhood
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May 27th, 2008 at 15:27
I more than grant your legal distinction, David.
However, the thrust of the comment was toward the behavior involved, which seems to me strikingly similar. One makes an accomidation for the letter of the alw, but not the spirit of it. The result is the tagled web of parentage that we see in Texas just now. And just as certainly, that will happen in the case of the Toronto sitution, should children ever occur. The behavior is the larger issue for society, and it seems to me that we set a double-standard in motion when we in the west set up the situation in Toronto as OK, and the FLDS as not OK. The difference between these is we’ve been bending over forward for some years now trying to accomidate Muslims and their culture… and clearly, we’re not ready to do that in the case of the FLDS. What I’m suggesting is that we as a society should be asking the questions as to why we treat them differently.
As I’ve said previously, the urpose of government is to nurture and support the culture that gave it life and if possible, to extend the influence of that culture. In Texas, they’ve followed that lead, albeit hamhandedly…(What can one expect from government, after all) and the Canadians ahve been trying to accomidate Muslims and their culture for so long they’ve forgotten their own culture and it’s values.
That said, alas!, you’re correct in that it will come down to legal distinctions if these matters ever get to a court. Law always ends up with primacy… which to my thinking, misses the whole point, anyway.The law is supposed to be the servant of the culture, not the reverse.