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Friday, February 4, 2011

Re: [ALOCHONA] Sexual Prey in the Saudi jungle



This is a serious issue for us Bangladeshis as well. Many of our women goes to gulf countries and facing this sort of savage behavior in the name of Islam. Our oversees employment ministry should ensure our women can work in a safe environment.

At one point of the article a verse from the Qur'an was quoted to "Justify" rape!!


The Islamic 'Holy' book Quran teaches the permissibility of Muslim men having sex with their 'right hand possessions' which is maids or slaves:

Quran 004.024  Also (prohibited are) women already married, except those whom your right hands possess

This problem of maid rape is an ongoing problem in Arabia due to this pernicious teaching of Islam.


Let me be very clear about it. There is NOTHING in Islam that promote raping slaves ( Male or female). Specially in 21st century people should NOT be allowed to force women into sexual relationship by abusing teaching of Islam. Let us look into the quoted verse.

Also (prohibited are) women already married, except those whom your right hands possess: Thus hath Allah ordained (Prohibitions) against you: Except for these, all others are lawful, provided ye seek (them in marriage) with gifts from your property,- desiring chastity, not lust, seeing that ye derive benefit from them, give them their dowers (at least) as prescribed; but if, after a dower is prescribed, agree Mutually (to vary it), there is no blame on you, and Allah is All-knowing, All-wise.
[ Source: Al Qur'an 4:24]

Here we see the verse "Right hand possess" has been "translated" as slaves or captives. Some people may disagree with the "Translation" about slaves or captives or taking this as permission to rape.  Gulf's horny men are abusing this verse by ignoring clear instruction of Allah in the Qur'an. The main problem is obviously men from gulf region. Then a minor problem is our lack of knowledge of the noble Qur'an and authentic teaching of Islam. The article also mentioned that,

Slavery was abolished by royal decree in 1962,

Since slavery was abolished in KSA, there is NO reason to treat anyone as "Salves". I would argue one can bring molestation and rape charges against those corrupt people who abused the name of God to justify their EVIL intention. Qur'an is also clear about such people.

Know they not that Allah knoweth what they conceal and what they reveal? And there are among them illiterates, who know not the Book, but (see therein their own) desires, and they do nothing but conjecture. Then woe to those who write the Book with their own hands, and then say:"This is from Allah," to traffic with it for miserable price!- Woe to them for what their hands do write, and for the gain they make thereby. And they say: "The Fire shall not touch us but for a few numbered days:" Say: "Have ye taken a promise from Allah, for He never breaks His promise? or is it that ye say of Allah what ye do not know?"Nay, those who seek gain in evil, and are girt round by their sins,- they are companions of the Fire: Therein shall they abide (For ever).


[Source: Al Qur'an 2:77-81]


Because the Qur'an also said in clear terms...

And let those who find not the financial means for marriage keep themselves chaste, until Allâh enriches them of His Bounty. And such of your slaves as seek a writing (of emancipation), give them such writing, if you know that they are good and trustworthy. And give them something yourselves out of the wealth of Allâh which He has bestowed upon you. And force not your maids to prostitution, if they desire chastity, in order that you may make a gain in the (perishable) goods of this worldly life. But if anyone compels them (to prostitution), then after such compulsion, Allâh is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful (to those women, i.e. He will forgive them because they have been forced to do this evil action unwillingly).

[ Source: Al Qur'an 24:33]



If anyone studies the noble Qur'an carefully, he/she will discover that, Islam actually encouraged Muslims not to support slavery system. It is some of us who abuse the noble teaching for our own evil gain. Surely Allah will judge them in due time. One cannot claim nobility based on their geographical location, race or culture either. The noble Qur'an says....

It is not Al-Birr (piety, righteousness, and each and every act of obedience to Allâh, etc.) that you turn your faces towards east and (or) west (in prayers); but Al-Birr is (the quality of) the one who believes in Allâh, the Last Day, the Angels, the Book, the Prophets and gives his wealth, in spite of love for it, to the kinsfolk, to the orphans, and to Al-Masâkin (the poor), and to the wayfarer, and to those who ask, and to set slaves free, performs As-Salât (Iqâmat-as-Salât), and gives the Zakât, and who fulfill their covenant when they make it, and who are As-Sâbirin (the patient ones, etc.) in extreme poverty and ailment (disease) and at the time of fighting (during the battles). Such are the people of the truth and they are Al­Muttaqûn (pious).



 Allah will not call you to account for what is futile in your oaths, but He will call you to account for your deliberate oaths: for expiation, feed ten indigent persons, on a scale of the average for the food of your families; or clothe them; or give a slave his freedom. If that is beyond your means, fast for three days. That is the expiation for the oaths ye have sworn. But keep to your oaths. Thus doth Allah make clear to you His signs, that ye may be grateful.





I have to thank the member for bringing up this important and relevant issues in front of us. At the same time I would remind all of us [ Including myself] to spend some time to learn what Islam teaches us. If we end up learning Islam from those who abhors everything Islamic, we are going to end up with wrong understanding of Islam. According to my understanding we should protest such UN-Islamic behavior from Saudi Abaria. Allah commanded us to stand up for fairness and justice [ Source: Al Qur'an 5:8] and it is duty of all of us to speak the truth and protect these helpless sisters of ours [ Regardless of their faith background!].

May peace be unto all of you.





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Sent: Fri, Feb 4, 2011 11:38 am
Subject: [ALOCHONA] Sexual Prey in the Saudi jungle

 


http://www.asianewsnet.net/home/news.php?id=17008

Sexual Prey in the Saudi jungle

Walden Bello
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Publication Date : 25-01-2011

He was an officer in the Saudi Royal Navy assigned to the strategic Saudi base of Jubail in the Persian Gulf. She was a single mom from Mindanao (in southern Philippines) who saw, like so many others, employment in Saudi Arabia as a route out of poverty. When he picked her up at the Dammam International Airport in June, little did she know she was entering, not a brighter chapter of her life but a chamber of horrors from which she would be liberated only after six long months.
The tale of woe recounted by Lorena (not her real name) was one of several stories of rape and sexual abuse that were shared by domestic workers with members of a fact-finding team of the Committee on Overseas Workers' Affairs (COWA) of the Philippine House of Representatives. The high incidence of rape and sexual abuse visited on the women we met in Philippine government-run shelters for runaway or rescued domestic workers in Jeddah, Riyadh, and Al Khobar most likely reflects a broader trend among Filipina domestics. "Rape is common," said Fatimah (also an alias) who had been gang-raped in April 2009 by six Saudi teenagers. "The only difference is we escaped to tell our story while they're still imprisoned in their households."
Rape: the ever-present spectre
The working conditions of many domestics, which include 18- to 22-hour days and violent beatings, cannot be described except as virtual slavery. Slavery was abolished by royal decree in 1962, but customs are hard to overcome. Domestic workers continue to be treated as slaves in royal and aristocratic households, and this behaviour is reproduced by those lower in the social hierarchy. Apparently among the items of the "job description" of a domestic slave in Saudi is being forced to minister to the sexual needs of the master of the household. This is the relationship that so many other women unwittingly step into when they are placed in Saudi homes by their recruitment agencies.
Rape does not, however, take place only in the household. With strict segregation of young Saudi men from young Saudi women, Filipino domestic workers, who usually go about with their face and head uncovered, stand a good chance of becoming sexual prey if they make the mistake of being seen in public alone - though the company of a friend did not prevent Fatimah from being snatched by her teenage captors. And the threat comes not only from marauding Saudi youth but also from foreign migrant workers, single and married, who are deprived by the rigid sexual segregation imposed by the ever-present Religious Police from normal social intercourse with women during their time in Saudi.
Lorena's tale
Lorena is in her mid-twenties, lithe, and pretty - qualities that marked her as prime sexual prey in the Saudi jungle. And indeed, her ordeal began when they arrived at her employer's residence from the airport. "He forced a kiss on me," she recalled. Fear seized her and she pushed him away.
He was not deterred. "One week after I arrived," she recounted, "he raped me for the first time. He did it while his wife was away. He did it after he commanded me to massage him and I refused, saying that was not what I was hired for. Then in July he raped me two more times. I just had to bear it ("Tiniis ko na lang") because I was so scared to run away. I didn't know anyone."
While waiting for her employer and his wife in a shopping mall one day, Lorena came across some Filipino nurses, whom she begged for help. Upon hearing her story, they gave her a SIM card and pitched in to buy her a load.
But the domestic torture continued. She would be slapped for speaking Arabic since her employer's wife said she was hired to speak English. She was given just one piece of bread to eat at mealtime and she had to supplement this with scraps from the family's plates. She was loaned to the wife's mother's household to clean the place, and her reward for this was her being raped by the wife's brother; kinship apparently confers the right to rape the servants of relatives. Also during that month, October, she was raped—for the fourth time—by her employer.
She not only had to contend with sexual aggression but with sheer cruelty. Once, while cleaning, she fell and cut herself. With blood gushing from the wound, she pleaded with the employer's wife to bring her to the hospital. She refused, and when Lorena asked her to allow her to call her mother in the Philippines, she again said no, telling her this was too expensive. The employer arrived at that point, but instead of bringing her to the hospital, he said, "You might as well die." Lorena had to stanch the wound with her own clothes and treat herself with pills she had brought with her from the Philippines.
Rape amidst rescue
Wildly desperate by now, Lorena finally managed to get in touch with personnel of the Philippine Overseas Labour Office (POLO) in Al Khobar. Arrangements were made to rescue her on December 30. That morning, the rescue team from POLO and the local police arrived at the residence. Lorena flagged them frantically from a second story window and told them she wanted to jump, but the team advised her not to because she could break her leg. That was a costly decision, since the employer raped her again - for the fifth time - even with the police right outside the residence. When she dragged herself to her employer's wife and begged her to keep her husband away from her, she beat her instead, calling her a liar. "I was screaming and screaming, and the police could hear me, but they did not do anything."
When the employer realised that he was about to be arrested, he begged Lorena not to tell the police anything because he would lose his job and offered to pay for her ticket home. "I said I would not tell on him and say that he was a good man, just so that he would just let me go ('para lang makatakas ako')," Lorena said. When she was finally rescued moments later, Lorena recounted her ordeal to the POLO team and police, and the employer was arrested.
Released from captivity, Lorena was determined to obtain justice. However, arduous bureaucratic procedures delayed a medical examination to obtain traces of semen right after her rescue. When it was finally conducted, she was given an emergency contraceptive pill - an indication, said the POLO officer who led the rescue, that seminal traces had been found in and on her. Also, the examination revealed contusions all over her body and bite marks on her lips.
The criminal investigation is still ongoing and the employer, who has been identified as Lt. Commander Majid Al-Juma-in, is still in jail at the Dammam Police Station. Lorena is worried that the evidence might be tampered with. "These people are influential," she said. "They have a lot of money. I am only a maid. They said they could put me in prison." Her fear is palpable. Her greatest wish is to be repatriated but she knows she must stay till he is convicted and sentenced to death.
Saudi society: a sexual pressure cooker
Lorena's story shows, according to one embassy official, that rape and cruelty is not confined to the lower class Saudi households. "This is an officer in the Saudi Navy, somebody that comes from the educated class."
The reasons why rape and sexual abuse are endemic provoked an animated discussion among those who heard her. The strict sexual segregation, one member of the House team speculated, must create tremendous pent-up sexual pressure, so when the opportunity for sexual satisfaction appears, it explodes. Another said that the sexual abuse of domestics was an extension of the strict subordination to males and institutionalised repression of Saudi women. Whatever the causes, Saudi society is suffused with latent sexual violence, much more so than most other societies.
Decision point for Aquino admin
Other societies have begun to take drastic steps to protect their citizens in Saudi Arabia. After a much-publicised case in which an Indonesia domestic worker suffered internal bleeding and broken bones from a ferocious beating by her employer, who pressed a hot iron on her head and slashed her with scissors, two labour-exporting Indonesian states, West Nusa Tenggara and West Java, banned the recruitment of domestics for employment in Saudi Arabia last December. Earlier, in October, the Sri Lankan ministry of labour backtracked from an agreement arrived at between the Saudi National Recruitment Agency and the Sri Lankan labour federation, asserting that the terms of the agreement was unfavourable to the Sri Lankan domestics and the Sri Lankan economy. This led the Saudis to indefinitely freeze recruitment from Sri Lanka.
These moves by other governments have led to greater demand for Filipino domestic workers. While the informal policy of the Philippine government has been to slow down the recruitment of domestics to Saudi, legal and illegal recruiters, many of them tied to Saudi interests, have been trying to step it up. The Aquino administration may soon reach a critical decision point on the issue of Saudi recruitment since the amended Act on Overseas Workers (Republic Act 10022) requires the department of foreign affairs to certify that a country is taking steps to protect labor rights if workers are to be deployed there. With its hideous record and its resistance to expanding coverage of its labour code to domestic workers, there is no way Saudi Arabia can be certified.
Tattered lives
For members of the recent House mission to Saudi, who were shocked to speechlessness, by the torrent of tales of cruelty, domestic repression, and rape, there is a consensus that every effort must be made to prevent Filipinas from going to Saudi to prevent recurrence of tragedies such as those visited on Lorena and Fatimah. For the many who have already been raped and degraded sexually, however, a move to prevent the deployment of more women to Saudi Arabia comes too late. Lorena may well secure the conviction of Lt. Commander Majid, but that will not restore her to her former self. As Fatimah put it in a handwritten note she passed on to the team, although her tormentors had been sentenced to seven years imprisonment and 2,500 lashes each, "there's no equivalent amount for what they've done. They destroyed my life, my future."
(Walden Bello of Akbayan Partylist is chairman of the Committee on Overseas Workers' Affairs (COWA) of the Philippine House of Representatives. He recently led a fact-finding mission to Saudi Arabia accompanied by Reps. Carmen Zamora-Apsay, Emmeline Aglipay, and Crescente Paez.)
 
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The Islamic 'Holy' book Quran teaches the permissibility of Muslim men having sex with their 'right hand possessions' which is maids or slaves:

Quran 004.024  Also (prohibited are) women already married, except those whom your right hands possess

This problem of maid rape is an ongoing problem in Arabia due to this pernicious teaching of Islam.

Indonesias previous president Wahid had this to say on the topic:

Indonesian Observer
March 2, 2000

Wahid urges talks on Indonesian women working in Saudi Arabia

JAKARTA (IO) — President Abdurrahman Wahid says Indonesia must hold talks
with Saudi Arabia on the treatment of Indonesian women employed as maids in
the oil-rich country.

"We must hold a discussion so that we can resolve the existing problems and
both sides can understand each other. Indonesia no longer believes in
slavery," he told members of the Mobile Brigade Police in Depok, West Java,
yesterday.

He expressed concern that many Saudis may treat their Indonesian servants as
slaves and sexually harass them.

Many Indonesian women who have worked abroad come home with horror stories of
being raped and badly treated by their foreign bosses.

But according to Wahid, the Indonesian media often makes inaccurate reports
on what goes on in Saudi Arabia.

"The media's descriptions created a public perception that our women workers
were raped. The situation is not like that. The Saudi people still believe in
the old Islamic teaching, which is belief in slavery. So a woman who works
for them is considered a slave," he said.

For some men in Saudi Arabia, sexual relations with a housemaid are not
considered as rape, because they believe that such a practice is permitted by
their beliefs, he added.

------------

We can see that it Islam itself that encourages this evil behavior due to its inhumane  teachings and legacy.
 
Kisan.




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