The Daily Mail (U.K.) reports:
Syed Zaidi faces up to ten years in prison for forcing [two] teenagers to whip themselves using a bundle of chains with sharp curved blades attached.
The device, called a zanjeer [for a photo, click on the link -EV], has been used for centuries by Shia Muslim men and boys to mourn the death of the Prophet Mohammed's grandson.
Zaidi lashed himself "until his bare back was covered in blood," then told a 15-year-old boy to do the same, and then "grabbed a 13-year-old boy by the arm, pulled off his T-shirt and made him flog himself as well. Both boys later needed hospital treatment for deep cuts to their backs."
It's apparently illegal in England for minors under the age of 16 to take part in such activities, even voluntarily (though of course it's often hard to tell with minors when such a decision is voluntary).
My sense is that the result is quite right on these facts, because this sort of behavior may well cause serious injuries. See also this post of mine about potentially, though rarely, life-threatening infant circumcision practices.
At the same time, the broader question of when it's improper to pressure children to engage in religious acts that are potentially physically painful or uncomfortable is a harder one. Fasting, for instance, is quite uncomfortable, which is one reason that people engage in it for religious reasons.
I'm inclined to say that it shouldn't be a crime to pressure your teenage children to fast, and that it certainly shouldn't be a crime simply to let them fast voluntarily -- again, noting the difficulty in determining voluntariness in many such situations -- despite the discomfort this might cause (unless the teenager has a medical condition that makes such fasting particularly dangerous). So my tentative sense is that the main distinction ought to be between (a) action that causes considerable physical pain or a significant risk of serious injury and (b) action that causes a modest amount of physical discomfort. At the same time, this strikes me as a pretty complicated question, even if the answer in some situations (e.g., whipping with blades until blood runs down your back) is pretty clear.
An extra twist: The law generally lets parents expose their minor children to considerable risk of pain and injury in typical kinds of sports (such as football), and even lets parents pressure their children to participate in such events. Should this be a benchmark for the kinds of risks that would be allowed for religious practices, so that the law would permit religious rituals that involve the same or lesser risk of pain and injury as playing football (or whatever is the riskiest sport that is generally allowed for minors)?
Sports carry an inherent risk of injury but their primary purpose is not injury.
Encouraging your kid to play football doesn't equal encouraging him to cut himself with razor blades
Suppose it is true. If we were to discuss LEGAL merits of forcing religious fanatics to whip themselves, then I see trouble for certain Hitler Jugend activist residing in city state in center of Rome. His Opus Dei (sic!) fanatic in SCOTUS is forced to self whip by threats of being send to hell in due time.
The described ritual instead seems to promote the injury itself as the end instead of just a potential risk.
A better example would perhaps be fire walking where measures are taken to mitigate the risk, yet substantial harm can result.
I'm not certain how to handle the risk thing, while flagellation (even without razors) is risky I'm not certain how to quantify it relative to a sport. While one is more like to sustain some type injury from this type of flagellation, the probability of major injury (severed spine, broken limb etc) is much lower than for many sports. It seems to me that it would be impossible to accurately compare the risks of the two.
From the article:Wow, discarding your trump card there, aren't you, Andy?
If coercing a child to mutilate himself is morally wrong, malum in se, why would it be OK to force the victim to visit Pakistan and mutilate himself there? Conversely, if it is merely custom, convention, why not let the family decided its own customs?
Is this really any different?
btw I, personally, am definitely opposed to either situation, but I’m not the family, and I don’t hold these religious convictions. The question is when does free expression of religion cross the line and who gets to draw the line?
This worked pretty well (with exceptions) when everyone was within a limited degree of separation on religiou sissues (all christian, but differing denopminations). Now the ideas we have are being stretched by a wider degree of separation, this case in point, out policy tolerance to be applied equally to all including the customs of Pakistani Islam.
I think the practice is brutal and has no positive effect, but believers in the magic of religion (At least that one) I am sure know that they will go to heaven for their suffering. Good for them.
Give us a break. The Daily Mail isn't WorldNutDaily or the National Enquirer. Do you really think it just makes up stories about Muslims? Here's the Times report on Zaidi's conviction. More detailed and better written, yes, but the content is substantially the same.
(Note that most BDSM practitioners would never consider it ethically acceptable to pressure an underage person into participating. That's another difference with religion.)
In general, all human activity has inherent risk to it. There is a risk whenever I get in my car that I will die. There is a risk whenever I climb a set of stairs that I will slip and hurt myself.
To a certain extent, the law allows parents to make reasonable distinctions based on the amount of risk that we, as parents, are willing to accept. youth sports, travel, life in general. At some point the risk of injury becomes so high that as a society, we tell parents that there are some risks that are too much. We make parents put baby's in car seats now for example.
If a group of parents tried to make their children participate in a no-pads full contact football league, I think society would step in and so no too much risk.
In the case of this ritual, it isn't a risk of injury, it is guaranteed that the child will be injured. It should not be outrageous for society to say that a child can't participate in such a ritual. The risk of permanent injury is just too high.
A crisper example would be a parent's encouraging children to deliberately hurt themselves to, for instance, better empathize with the suffering of other people or of animals or what have you, or to build up a tolerance for pain, or to otherwise improve their character. My sense is that this sort of infliction of pain or injury for character-building reasons would raise some of the same questions as similar infliction of pain or injury for religious reasons would.
The Muslims and Jews have killed more boys, rendered them invalids, given them lifelong genital herpes and turned them into girls than all the flagellation ever done in the history of the world!
Get real! Rabbis' sticking tiny peckers in their mouths is disgusting! It is high time that genital mutilation be criminalized!
The discussion of harm from sports raises a very interesting line of reasoning that could be applied to anything from pee-wee football to training Olympic gymnasts from infancy. There are certainly cultural difference that influence where that line is drawn.
As to Shia bloodletting rituals - not my cup of tea, and especially barbaric to force minors into it. Good that it was held to be illegal.
of course. a key distinction in law is between criminalizing ACTS and criminalizing FAILURE TO ACT.
in the cases of witholding medical treatment, it's NOT an act. it's a failure to act. flagellation is an act.
generally speaking, criminal law references ACTIONS not lack of actions.
england sets the age at 16, which is not adulthood (in america). however, it's the same age that many states set as age of consent, as well as the age at which many people think it's perfectly reasonable for a girl to get an abortion without parental notification/permission .
so, I think 16 is an interesting #
Parents have been criminally prosecuted for failure to obtain medical treatment for their children in the case of serious illness. Moreover, courts with some frequency issue orders permitting medical treatment at the request of doctors. The cases in which the courts have allowed the refusal of medical treatment for serious illness are, I believe, all cases in which the treatment was refused not only by the parents but by the child itself, where the child was old enough that the court determined that the child was capable of making an informed decision.
so i explained a DIFFERENCE. an act vs. a decision not to act.
that is a significant distinction.
That wasn't me. That was tommears.
Snake handling is harmless when properly done. For example, I handle rattlesnakes with a 12 gauge shotgun, or by running them over in a car.
to mourn the death of the Prophet Mohammed's grandson
</blockquote>
I get a little emotional every year around this time myself.
< /sarc >
key words: medieval, brutal, asinine
Dilan Esper, is there any reason why you ignored the potential benefits of circumcision?
http://tinyurl.com/62my8n
http://tinyurl.com/5becb9
As for the risk presented, I just don't know.
The rituals developed in the 20th century. The faithful handle venomous snakes, and often quite vigorously, to demonstrate their faith in certain Bible verses. They apparently believe:
1. If they are sufficiently faithful, the snakes won't bite them; but
2. If they are bitten, then if they are sufficiently faithful they will not die; but
3. If they die, then they have been called home by God as a good and faithful servant.
The purpose of the ritual is not to promote injury on oneself, but no particular measures to mitigate or prevent injury are taken either. That's why I wondered how they fit into the scale or continuum of purposes you described.
The whole continuum of intent (purposes) puzzles me, perhaps because of confusion over what is intended. Muslims such as M. Zaidi do not as a religious matter flagellate themselves with the intent of causing any injuries, just incidental cuts in the infliction of pain. As a practical matter there is a social component of being more pious by having more scars from it (although if you go too far people begin to think, as a bear might put it, that "you didn't really come here for the hunting"), but this isn't really part of the religious ceremony, just a social dynamic among a religious community. This causes problems if you're trying to decide on intent, do we just consider the religous intent or do we have to consider 'peer pressure' effects too?
I doubt anyone can create a valid calculus of acceptable risk by which we can calculate if a given practice like pee-wee football or dodge ball or self flagellation is acceptable or unacceptable. I know darn well that I cannot. I strongly suspect it must remain a 'I know it when I see it" sort of thing.
Also, fasting is uncomfortable, but unlikely to cause actual injury or harm unless taken to extremes, while flagellating with this sort of device is guaranteed to cause harm, and is intended to do so.
This may have an incidental practical effect of prohibiting certain religious rituals, however at no point should the ritual itself or it's intents be the subject of scrutiny. To pick on Catholics, if transubstantiation required instead of a cracker the flesh of a live person, and the Eucharist continued to said person being slaughtered and fed to the congregation, it would be acceptable to ban the killing of the person. It would not be acceptable to ban attendance at a mass, not acceptable to ban the act of transubstantiation, questionably acceptable to ban the act of accepting communion (no eating human flesh even if it is part of your religion, not certain how you can really justify this as a legitimate exercise of police power), and unacceptable to ban the slaughtering of the transubstantiated person per se, only the act of killing as a means of effecting this slaughter which would effectively prevent the slaughter. (Of course this would open the whole right to commit suicide thing which is a major mess, so it's a good thing Catholics have learned how to transubstantiate bread into flesh.)
We can apply a similar line of reasoning to non-religious activities. Without infringing the right to play football, we can determine that a particular technique like knifing or spearing is to be banned, even though it's intent is not to cause injury (in theory...).
This is where we have to reintroduce intent, performing a completely legitimate in football tackle on a sidewalk to a random passerby should be banned while it allowed on a football fieldNevermind, we don't have to, in football a legitimate tackle can only involve the players and performing an otherwise legitimate tackle upon a coach, referee or other person is illegitimate.It makes them "reticent" (i.e., closed-mouthed)? Or maybe you meant something like "cautious" or "restrained"?
How about boxing?