Just for the hell of it, let’s remember Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow who died in 2008 when she was thirteen years old.
Did I mention that she was stoned to death?
Well, she was.
The stoning occurred in southern Somalia:
A Toyota pickup with a loudspeaker began an early-morning tour of the ruined neighbourhoods of Kismayo, a port in southern Somalia, announcing that there would be a killing. By 4pm a crowd of 1,000 people had gathered at the football stadium. A hole had been dug in the ground, and half an hour later a truck loaded with rocks arrived.
Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow had been raped by three men. She also reported the rape.
That was the crime above all other crimes. Reporting the rape. Even being raped made a woman (or little girl) criminally liable for stoning, but reporting it? That calls for a stoning by fifty brave al-Shabab men.
Fifty men. One little girl.
Amnesty International said al-Shabab militia, which controls the southern city of Kismayo, arranged for 50 men to stone Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow in front of about 1,000 spectators. A lorry load of stones was brought to the stadium for the killing.
al-Shabab: a branch of Sunni Salafism:
Al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram, the Shabab and others are all violent Sunni Salafi groupings. For five decades, Saudi Arabia has been the official sponsor of Sunni Salafism across the globe.
Most Muslims are not Sunni Salafis. As a matter of fact, most Sunni Muslims are not Salafis.
Salafis, particularly Wahhabi Salafis out of Saudi Arabia, have a major problem with women (and little girls):
A common denominator among disparate Salafi groups is inspiration and support from Wahhabis, a puritanical strain of Sunni Islam from Saudi Arabia. Not all Saudis are Wahhabis. Not all Salafis are Wahhabis, either. But Wahhabis are basically all Salafis. And many Arabs, particularly outside the sparsely populated Gulf, suspect that Wahhabis are trying to seize the future by aiding and abetting the region’s newly politicized Salafis — as they did 30 years ago by funding the South Asian madrassas that produced Afghanistan’s Taliban.
Salafis go much further in restricting political and personal life than the larger and more modern Islamist parties that have won electoral pluralities in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco since October. For most Arabs, the rallying cry is justice, both economic and political. For Salafis, it is also about a virtue that is inflexible and enforceable.
“You have two choices: heaven or hellfire,” Sheikh Muhammad el-Kurdi instructed me after his election to Egypt’s parliament as a member of Al Nour, a Salafi party. It favors gender segregation in schools and offices, he told me, so that men can concentrate. “It’s O.K. for you to be in the room,” he explained. “You are our guest, and we know why you’re here. But you are one woman and we are three men — and we all want to marry you.” Marriage may have been a euphemism.
Marriage as what? As an euphemism for rape? Or for stoning?
Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow would certainly know about the problems that Sunni Salafi Wahhabis have with women. And little girls. If she were still around.