North Texas Legislators Cry Wolf Again About Sharia Law
Fariha and Mohammad Ashfaq's marriage was brief. They wed in their native Pakistan in December 2007 but spent only a few months together before Mohammed returned to his home in Fort Worth. They lived together for a few additional months in Texas after Fariha acquired a visa in June 2009, but when they returned to Pakistan that November to attend a wedding, the couple separated and Fariha moved back in with her family. They never reconciled.
There's nothing particularly remarkable about the Ashfaqs' split. People get into bad marriages, or else good marriages turn sour. What makes the demise of their union unusual is that it has become entangled in the perennial push by conservative Texas lawmakers to keep foreign law (that means Muslim, not, say Belgian) out of the state's courts. Recently a trio of state representatives from North Texas — Matt Rinaldi, Rodney Anderson and Kenneth Sheets — cited the Ashfaqs in a guest column they penned for The Dallas Morning News. The column, a response to a July 31 editorial castigating firebrand Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne for "pandering to the right," didn't run in the paper, possibly because the DMN is a liberal rag but more likely because the editorial, which portrayed Van Duyne as a demagogue skyrocketing toward national prominence on a spaceship made of the Tea Party's xenophobic fever dreams, was on point. It did, however, find a friendlier forum in the arch-conservative Empower Texans, which published an excerpt of their piece which reads, in part:
This parallel Sharia court system puts women at risk of laws that treat them unequally or sanction violence. For example, despite Texas’ common law prohibition on application of laws that violate public policy, in Ashfaq v. Ashfaq, the Houston Court of Appeals upheld a discriminatory Islamic law allowing a husband to divorce his wife by saying “I divorce you” three times outside her presence.
To be sure, having a husband say "I divorce you" three times — known as a talaq divorce — is a manifestly terrible way to adjudicate anything. But nothing about the Ashfaq case is nearly as clear-cut as Rinaldi et al make it seem. For one, Pakistani law on talaq divorces requires the husband, after saying his divorce mantra, to also provide a copy of the divorce deed to his wife, then the chairman of a "Union Council" who, after a 90-day period of arbitration with an eye toward reconciliation, will finalize the divorce, which isn't categorically different from an American husband declaring that he wants a divorce and then walking into the courthouse to file a petition in district court. And the Texas courts that considered the Ashfaqs' case weren't "uph[olding] a discriminatory Islamic law." They were deciding whether there was still a marriage for the Texas court to still dissolve, which necessarily involved the consideration of Pakistani family law.
According to court testimony, Mohammed told Fariha that he wanted a divorce eight days after they had arrived back in Pakistan in November 2009. Fariha denied that Mohammed had gone through the procedural steps necessary to finalize the divorce, but she acknowledged that she did receive divorce papers by November 23. In any event, they went their separate ways. Mohammed was back home in Fort Worth by the end of the month. Fariha stayed with her family for a few months but came back to the U.S. in April 2010 and settled in Houston. Five months later, Mohammed remarried in Pakistan and brought his new wife to Texas to live with him. The couple had been apart for almost two years when, in October 2011, Fariha filed for divorce in Harris County.
Read more: http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/north-texas-legislators-cry-wolf-again-about-sharia-law-7545882