The prodigal daughter?

In early August, as the very successful Olympics Games were getting underway in London, another piece of news saddened and shocked many in the UK.

A Pakistani couple were convicted at Chester Crown Court of murdering their daughter, of whom they had come to feel ashamed because of her rejection of strict Islam and adoption of Western ambitions and attitudes. The man and wife were found guilty of the 2003 ‘honour’ killing of their daughter. They were told by the judge that they would serve at least 25 years in prison. It seems that they suffocated their 17-year-old by forcing a plastic bag down her throat in front of their four other children at their home in Warrington, after she rejected an arranged marriage in Pakistan.

For almost nine years the couple got away with the crime, accusing police officers of victimisation and racial and religious stereotyping for treating them as suspects after their daughter’s body was found months later in a river in Cumbria. The police were only able to bring charges when in 2010 one of the four children told them that she had witnessed the killing.

PC and shari’a courts?

The report in The Daily Telegraph said that there had been warning signs that the daughter was at risk since she was 13 years old. Staff at her school identified her troubled home life and one teacher had recommended that she call ChildLine for help. Her case was referred to Cheshire Social Services in the autumn of 2002 after another pupil told teachers that the girl was being kept off school by her family. However, although social workers noted that there were signs of physical abuse, after an examination of the case in November 2002, no further action was taken. One cannot help suspecting that the ‘politically correct’ nature of some of our social services let this girl down. Whatever you do you must not give even a hint of being ‘Islamophobic’.

In strict Islam, for a woman to even dress in a Western way is looked upon as tantamount to adultery, an offence punishable by stoning to death in some communities. Thus, the 16-year-old Saudi girl who took part in the Judo tournament at the London Olympics wearing a swimming cap received insults on Twitter from Muslims. One from an Islamic scholar in Mecca read: ‘You do not represent the chaste Muslim woman’.

An expert on shari’a law told EN: ‘Stoning does not occur in the present Qur’an, but it occurs in the reports of sunnah which is known as hadith. However, because Muhammad stoned two adulterers, (and so did the fourth calipha), some Muslim scholars approve of stoning’. One wonders what verdict would have been given on the honour killing case by some of the shari’a courts which the government is allowing to operate in the UK.

The prodigal son

This horrible ‘honour’ killing of a ‘prodigal’ child stands in stark contrast to Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son. In Jesus’s story, the young son’s asking for his inheritance, rejection of his father and leaving home would have brought great shame upon the family in the setting of a middle-Eastern village. It was equivalent to announcing to the world that he wished his father was dead. But the father does not react with violence. He does not force him into conformity. He gives his son what he wants. And, in broken-hearted love, he longs for the son to come back. Just so, Jesus is telling us, God loves the sinner and stands ready to receive all who repent and turn back to him. How very different.