Month: October 2009

Oregonian: “Through a teen’s lens: the Taliban in Portland”
— The Oregonian reports on a teen amateur fictional video (“Sharia” by Cypress Chvatal-Jones) that portrays an extremist future America, where Taliban “religious police” amputate a child’s hand, a masked man in a kaffiyeh murders a man for his “travesty against Islamic rule and way of life,” and children go to an underground “dealer” to try to obtain music cassettes.  During the short film, it describes a realistic scenario supported by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan today that “All music-listening devices such as records, tapes, and CDs are highly illegal.  Violators may be punished by the amputation of a finger or hand.”  (Note the short fictional film has scenes of simulated violence, with one child choosing to pursue terrorist action. Responsible for Equality And Liberty condemns all terrorist activity.)

“Sharia,” by Cypress Chvatal-Jones

— Oregonian reports:
— “That summer, Chvatal-Jones shot a couple of funny movies about his family’s beach vacations. But he got the kernel of a much larger project as a freshman at Lincoln High, in Steve Lancaster’s global studies class.”
— “They discussed the churning complexities that are the Middle East, and Chvatal-Jones was perplexed by it. Through lunch periods and after school, he talked with Lancaster about the violence and the struggles, trying to understand.”
— “Then the class examined Afghanistan under the Taliban and sharia, the strict Islamic code that for 21st-century American teenagers can seem mind-boggling: Theft is punished by the amputation of a hand. Women cannot leave home without a male relative. Possession of Western music is forbidden. Boys and girls having a party together is a crime.”
— “On a test, Lancaster posed a hypothetical that struck Chvatal-Jones hard: Describe what would happen if the Taliban took over an American city. Long after he turned in his paper, Chvatal-Jones was galvanized by the what-ifs.”
— ” ‘And the more I thought about it,’ he said, ‘the more I wanted to try to make a movie about it.’ ”
— “As soon as the academy ended, Chvatal-Jones pounded out a screenplay called ‘Sharia,’ a story about a group of teenagers in an American city — nameless, but clearly Portland — that has been taken over by the Taliban.”
— “The plot centers on three boys trying to buy music cassettes from an underground dealer. They get caught and punished by the religious police. A young woman, also named Sharia, becomes so distraught at the consequences that she makes a desperate choice.”

Maldives: Parliament takes on revised penal code
— Minivan News: “Existing laws and regulations, principles of Islamic sharia and norms and values acceptable to Maldivians were taken as the basis for drafting the law, he said.”
— “Suood said difficulties arose when there were conflicts between the three. ‘Some Islamic sharia punishments are not enforced in the Maldives. For example, there is no amputation for thieves or death for apostates.'”
— “Another difficulty were disagreements among fiqh scholars in interpreting the Qur’an and the hadiths, he continued, and the traditional values and practices in the country were considered in such cases.”
— “Several MPs said Islamic sharia should take precedence in specifying offences and punishments and spoke in favour of introducing the death penalty.”

— Wikipedia notes that: “The Maldives have, in cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), undertaken to write the world’s first Muslim criminal code”

— Wikipedia notes that: “Meanwhile, Islam remains the only official religion of The Maldives with popular support of the people of the Republic. The open practice of all other religions is forbidden and such actions are liable to prosecution under the law of the country.”

— Wikipedia notes that: “adult literacy stands at 99%”