As many women who marry Muslim men have discovered, divorce by the husband is ridiculously easy (even a text message saying 'I divorce thee' sent three times is acceptable)and any children that come from the marriage are considered the property of the father according to sharia with a divorced mother having no parental rights whatsoever.
Because of this, the kidnapping of young children by their fathers who take them to Muslim countries is quite common, and many mothers have experienced the horror losing all contact with their children when their husbands divorce them after taking the children on a trip to 'visit their family back home.'
Many times, the husbands don't even bother with a divorce, simply abandoning the wife and taking the children back to their home countries in the Muslim world.
One of these women was Alex Abou-El-Ella, a 29-year-old British woman who had her one-year-old daughter Mona kidnapped by her Egyptian father.
Mrs. Abou-El-Ella, who was born in Poland but came to Britain as a teenager married her husband Mustafa in England, where the met. One day her husband simply took the baby to the airport and flew to Egypt without telling his wife, and that was the last she saw of her daughter for two long years.
The British government has never been particularly helpful in cases like this, and this was no exception.
But Alex Abou-El-Ella decided she wasn't going to give up her child. With the help of British author Donya Al-Nahi, who is famous in Britain for her efforts in helping a string of women rescue children snatched by Arab fathers, she hatched a daring plot to get her child back.
First, the two women defied warnings from the British foreign office not to travel to Egypt. Once in the country, they were able to track down her daughter Mona's whereabouts, and Alex Abou-El-Ella disguised herself in full head-to-toe Islamic dress and hid her face behind a veil in order to get close to her.
They then hired a local driver and staked out the area until until Mona appeared with an aunt just before 9 AM...and the Daily Mail relates what happened next:
'I was walking behind them, faster and faster, and saw Mona's hand a few metres away from me,' she said. 'So I grabbed her, pulled her into my arms and the lady looked at my face - but all she could see were my eyes.'
Grabbing her daughter, she turned and fled to the waiting car and drove off with th echild and Al-Nahi. The confused toddler cried out for help from the woman she knew as mummy, to Abou-El-Ella's dismay.
"I felt shocked and upset to hear those words coming out of her mouth about another woman," she said. "But after half an hour she looked up at me and said, "Are you my mum?"'
The next step was getting Mona out of the country, so Alex resorted to that time tested Arab lubricant - baksheesh. She used the Polish passport belonging to her older daughter to hide Mona's Egyptian surname, bribed an Egyptian official to allow her to board a London-bound flight..and then used Mona's real British passport to get her into the UK legally when they landed at Heathrow.
Mother and daughter are now reunited and doing just fine.
Alex Abou-El-Ella says she has informed Mona's father that she has their child. She saved Mona from being deprived of her mother without any due process, from life under sharia and almost certainly from the forced clitorectomies that over 90% of Egyptian girls are forced to undergo as young, prepubescent children.
She is one courageous woman, but if I were her I'd definitely move and maintain a low profile to stop her daughter from being kidnapped again.
This sort of story - many times without the happy ending - has been repeated with increasing frequency since immigration from Muslim countries has increased in the West. Women whom marry these men need to consider carefully exactly what they might be getting into.
I describe myself as a survivor of a Muslim marriage, and this almost happened to me.
ReplyDeleteWhen I met Mahmoud, an engineer from Saudi Arabia,he was exotic, attentive and very masculine compared to a lot of American men I had met up to that time.
There were a lot of warning signs after we were married, but what really tipped me off was how his attitude towards me totally changed when we took a trip to the Kingdom with our 14-month-old son to visit his family. It was like being in jail, with him as the jailer.
When we came back to the US, his attitude towards me was just the same as it had been in Saudi Arabia. You see, I was a 'disobedient wife.'
One day, when I went to pick up our son at daycare, they told me that Mahmoud had already been there to get him, which was weird because he should have still been at work. When I called his cell there was no answer and his office told me he had quit three weeks ago. I knew nothing about it.
I put two and two together and called the police and told them I thought he might be trying to leave the country with our baby. They caught him at the Saudia terminal with our son. He had already bought tickets and was waiting to board.
We're divorced now, and I have custody of our son. Mahmoud went back to Saudi Arabia and I haven't heard from him since, let alone received a penny in child support. But I think of myself as very lucky, compared to some women I've read about. I'm free of a horrible mistake I made and I have my son.
Like the writer of this article, I urge any woman thinking about marrying a Muslim man to think again.
I urge any woman thinking about marrying a Muslim man to think again.
ReplyDeleteyou mean pass up on a he was exotic, attentive and very masculine compared to a lot of American men I had met up to that time. uh yeah, sure, that's gonna happen.
my mohammed/mustafa is different......
i'm looking forward to ff posting a follow-up on this topic.
if she thinks she's safe now, she has another think coming. the guy comes back to englandstan, gets a judgement in a sharia court, and the bobbies come in the middle of the night, ala elian gonzalez. either that or she leaves englandstan and goes,...... and she moves to, .......... uh, well, i'll have to get back to you on where she goes..........
i'm wondering when the female who lost mona is getting out of the hospital, considering the beating she surely got.
"any children that come from the marriage are considered the property of the father according to sharia with a divorced mother having no parental rights whatsoever."
ReplyDeleteThis is a completely false statement. I don't know what reference you used for that statement, but in real sharia, that i studied, a divorced mother has the right to keep her children with her until she remarries, and then they would go to their father. If the children are still being breastfed, they would still remain with her after she remarries, until they're weaned. If the children are older, they can choose which parent to live with, if the mother is unmarried.
Just wanted to clarify that.
Also, clitorectomies and FGM are dying out in Egypt and only practiced in backward, rural areas. That also is not from Islam or Sharia.
Firstly lets puts some facts to counter your taqiyya. 91% of Egyptian women between the age of 15-49 have been the victims of FMG.
DeleteSecond FMG is common in Muslim countries and while you say it is not from Islam, I have personally spoken to at least one imam who says it is.
Thirdly, it most Muslim countries a male child for sure, but probably all children over the age of 6 are given to the father. In most Muslim countries in the case of a foreign wife - she will not get the children.
As for non Moslems who marry Muslims - fools to a woman. Muslims want to marry non Muslims because doing so allows them entry to paradise as they are depriving the hated luff are acccess to a woman; a woman whose only use is to produce more Moslems. If this is not the case - why do Muslims always insist a woman converts?
@Safi, I wonder where you studied sharia.If you paid, you should ask for your money back. Your own comment reveals the truth, that children in Islam belong to the father. To wit:
ReplyDelete"a divorced mother has the right to keep her children with her until she remarries, and then they would go to their father."
" If the children are still being breastfed, they would still remain with her after she remarries, until they're weaned."
After which they become dad's property!
And you also seem to disregard the many instances of kids being simply kidnapped by their fathers from sharia run countries with these governments doing nothing to enforce a mother's parental rights.
As for FGM not being 'from Islam', Sheik Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood's spiritual leader says otherwise, doesn't he?
"...whoever finds it serving the interest of his daughters should do it, and I personally support this under the current circumstances in the modern world."
Yes, there has been some reaction by some Muslim clerics on FGM, but it's recent, dating from 2009.And the default position remains that cutting women is just fine if Muslims wish do it, although some clerics say leaving a small part of the clitoris is OK.
Also there's Reliance of the Traveler: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, a sharia manual endorsed by the President of the International Institute of Islamic Thought and the President of the Fiqh Council of North America, as well as Al Azhar Research Academy in Cairo, Egypt, the Sunni Islamic world’s foremost educational institution.It's one of the most widely read Shariah law texts in the world.
On page 59,it says: "e4.3 Circumcision is obligatory (O: for both men and women. For men it consists of removing the prepuce from the penis, and for women, removing the prepuce (Ar. Bazr) of the clitoris (n: not the clitoris itself, as some mistakenly assert). (A: Hanbalis hold that circumcision of women is not obligatory but sunna, while Hanafis consider it a mere courtesy to the husband.)"
FGM is part of Islam, just like wife beating, which is also sanctioned by the Qu'ran. It has been for centuries.