{"id":1652,"date":"2009-10-30T14:35:56","date_gmt":"2009-10-30T19:35:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/?p=1652"},"modified":"2009-10-30T14:35:56","modified_gmt":"2009-10-30T19:35:56","slug":"traditional-islamic-values","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/30\/traditional-islamic-values\/","title":{"rendered":"Traditional Islamic Values"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An Iraqi immigrant, 48-year-old Faleh Almaleki,\u00c2\u00a0 has been arrested for punishing his daughter for becoming &#8220;too Westernized&#8221; according to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.msn.com\/id\/33550176\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">this MSNBC article<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Okay, maybe &#8220;punishing&#8221; wasn&#8217;t the most accurate word for me to use. Here&#8217;s what the article says.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>An Iraqi immigrant has been arrested in Georgia for allegedly running down his daughter because she was becoming &#8220;too Westernized,&#8221; police in a Phoenix suburb say.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;Running down?&#8221; Like&#8230; with a <strong>car<\/strong>? Yep.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The father was upset that his daughter had become too &#8220;Westernized&#8221; and he aimed his car at her Oct. 20 in a Peoria parking lot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>His twenty year old daughter, Noor Faleh Almaleki, is hospitalized in serious condition. Her father had reportedly threatened her because of her lifestyle, saying she was not living up to &#8220;traditional Islamic values.&#8221; Another woman, purportedly her roommate, suffered &#8220;non life-threatening injuries.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I haven&#8217;t read the Qur&#8217;an yet, but I&#8217;m starting to wonder if &#8220;traditional Islamic values&#8221; include running down your daughter (and her roommate) in a automobile? This is barely a step away from &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Honor_killing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">honor killing<\/a>,&#8221; a horrid practice not uncommon in some Islamic societies and almost always perpetrated against women.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know what kind of punishment, if he&#8217;s convicted, would be appropriate for Mr. Almaleki. I suspect he feels that he was being true to Islamic teachings as he smashed his car into his increasingly &#8220;Westernized&#8221; daughter, and that alone should put him in the category of &#8220;dangerous psychopaths,&#8221; in my opinion, and he should be treated accordingly. Any parent, regardless of religious affiliation, should be considered despicable for brutally beating a child, regardless of the reason&#8230; including (perhaps especially?) in the name of their religious beliefs.<\/p>\n<p>Religiously-inspired violence is particularly heinous because it has all the indications of pre-meditation. It&#8217;s not violence in a blind fit of rage, but violence that has been considered, calculated, and deemed righteous in the eyes of the perpetrator&#8230; because of his interpretation of his chosen religious dogma.<\/p>\n<p>In Almaleki&#8217;s case, he seemed to have felt that his daughter&#8217;s acts were an insult to Allah or Muhammad (or whatever &#8220;traditional Islamic values&#8221; are) to such a degree that she should be intentionally struck by a speeding vehicle and hospitalized (or killed&#8230; don&#8217;t know what his intended conclusion was). If his parenting skills are based in &#8220;traditional Islamic values,&#8221; then I think we need far, far fewer of those kinds of values.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m guessing his daughter might feel the same way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An Iraqi immigrant, 48-year-old Faleh Almaleki,\u00c2\u00a0 has been arrested for punishing his daughter for becoming &#8220;too Westernized&#8221; according to this MSNBC article. Okay, maybe &#8220;punishing&#8221; wasn&#8217;t the most accurate word for me to use. Here&#8217;s what the article says. An Iraqi immigrant has been arrested in Georgia for allegedly running down his daughter because she &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/30\/traditional-islamic-values\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Traditional Islamic Values&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[54,76,323,448,475,540,577,618,654,820,833],"class_list":["post-1652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-islam","tag-allah","tag-arizona","tag-faleh-almaleki","tag-islam","tag-koran","tag-muhammad","tag-noor-faleh-almaleki","tag-peoria","tag-quran","tag-traditional-islamic-values","tag-values","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalitynow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}