Iranian Woman Escapes Stoning
Eleven years ago, Mokarrameh Ebrahimi was sentenced to execution by stoning after being convicted of adultery in the Iranian province of Qazvin. Her partner Ja’far Kiani was tragically executed last year, despite the moratorium, in a case that sparked international outrage and raised concerns over Mokarrameh’s safety.
However, after months of campaigning by rights groups both within and outside Iran, Mokarrameh was released from prison, on the orders of the Iranian judiciary’s amnesty commission. She is said to have returned, along with the son she conceived with Kiani, to her family in Northern Iran.
While the reasons behind her pardon are unclear, her lawyer stated that “the role of public opinion and domestic and international pressures” cannot be denied.
According to Amnesty International, 11 people – 9 of them women – are facing that grotesque penalty in Iran. By speaking out and actively campaigning though, there is hope that stoning as a form of punishment would be abolished.
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I am happy for the woman, but angered and humiliated for the law being enforced in my country. Nothing can justify the methods adopted for punishment. While we argue that we shouldn’t handle animals savagely, we still have laws of such savage nature being practiced in the name of religion. I think this is the wrose way the authorities backstab religon and make the youth despise adopting anyt form of religious ideology.
My prayers in the begining of approaching spring is for the shift of power to the people of Wisdom. I don’t know who is wise, I just know wisdom is too different from what we see around us.
All religions contain scripture which is wise, and scripture which is off the wall. The mark of wisdom is the ability to separate what makes sense from what doesn’t. It is wrong to obey scripture, simply because it is scripture. Our allegiance to scripture must be rooted in what makes sense, taking modern sensibilities into account. If we can do that, we will find ourselves converging on some common truths which we can all agree to, and which can then confer legitimacy to religious belief. This “coming together” on common sense principles is the key to moving forward for the betterment of man. Without it we are doomed to remain mired in the quicksand of nonsense.
Nissim,
The problem as you mentioned, was not being able to adopt the method compatible with the modern age. Every now and then one might come up with an idea compatble with the modern life, but then it is too negligible compared to the number of law- alterations being made, so all in all the result remains the same…
Religion and State need their independence from one another!
Elinor, I agree that religion and the state need to be separated. The separation of church and state is in the U.S. constitution and has worked well in this country. The reason this separation is good is because in politics you often need the flexibility to decide what is right, and strong religious beliefs often don’t provide any measure of flexibility.
But if you think about it; religion can have its craziness, and politics can have its craziness as well, and craziness doesn’t work anywhere you put it. What is needed, with regard to all aspects of human existence, is the ability to make sense of things, and to subject all our thinking to the filter of Common Sense.
We can no longer afford to believe what we want to believe, whether in relgion, or in politics. We have brought ourselves to the point where we had better start believing in what makes sense. That is the standard in mathematics, or in business, or in medicine. Why should it be any different with regard to religious belief, or with regard to politics?