Pakistan's Islam: The Flaying of a Muslim Wife.

Pakistan's Islam: The Flaying of a Muslim Wife. By Qanta Ahmed, MD - Author, 'In the Land of Invisible Women'.

Muslims complain the West portrays Islam as violent, misogynistic and unforgiving. As a Muslim woman myself, I confirm 'Muslim' brutality is best portrayed only by ourselves.

This week in Multan, Pakistan, 36-year-old Farzana Bibi was allegedly dismembered by her husband for refusing to wear a niqab. Waiting until their three children had gone to school, he allegedly took a knife used for slaughtering an animal in the halal fashion to dismember her into ten pieces.

Farzana's husband-turned-alleged-murderer was noted to have a short temper. Yet he was known as an upstanding man who led prayers at the local mosque and to whose home others came to study the Quran. In other words, he held religious authority because of his religious knowledge.

He left a note on the body before disappearing. The note allegedly confirmed the murder had been a rational and premeditated, one he based on his interpretation of Sharia. Claiming he had deliberated before the act, he finally determined to execute his wife since he didn't wish to bear responsibility for her sins against God. By extinguishing her, he believed he had absolved himself of any guilt for her intransigence on Judgment Day.

He reportedly wrote explicitly of wanting to "punish his wife for rebelling against Allah's orders" adding that he wished all women to learn from this act, and then complained of how his children had been enrolled in a secular English medium school rather than a religious madrasah.

Today, onlookers could be forgiven for assuming that brutal Quranic penalties are critical components to an observed Muslim life, a diabolical distortion of the pluralistic pacifist Islam I was raised in. However, even in a world rife with abominations afflicting the Muslim world, today's Pakistan, the world's first Muslim democracy, exemplifies some of the most egregious violations of Islam at the hands of Muslims, all too often befalling the heads of the most vulnerable.

It wasn't always like this. Sadakat Kadri detailed in his book on Sharia law "Heaven on Earth" how Quranic penalties were exceedingly rare throughout history. In the fifteen centuries since Islam's revelation, an array of violent recourse had been available to Islamic authorities, though generally not deployed. Restraint was the order of the times and documented in the very rare instances of capital punishment. Today, the resurrection of violent punishments defines much of Muslim culture in both Diaspora and Muslim majority communities. This revivalist extremism is a deliberate, modern product of 20th century Islamists. Read the full story here.