This is a story about right and wrong. It is not an anti-Islam story, or a pro-West story. It is a story about one powerless individual amongst many. It is about a life under oppression and true fascism. It is a story about the universal innate sense of human justice that should and must unite us all.

Malak Ghorbany is the 34-year-old mother of two, from the town of Urmia in the northwest of Iran, where she was living in the summer of 2005. She had a son, 10, and a daughter, 9. Malak was frequently home alone with her daughter - who as a girl could not attend school - as her husband worked at his farm about an hour's distance away, and came home only every two days. But they were by all accounts happily married and content.

Sometime in the summer of 2005, Malak began to receive phone calls from a man she did not know, whose name was Morad.

“For a while, I was receiving harassing phone calls from a man I did not know. He claimed that his name was Morad, and that he was infatuated with me. I have no idea how he had obtained my phone number or address.

One day, I was at home when this man called me again from his cell phone. As I was talking to him on the phone, the door bell rang. Still on the phone, I opened the door, and there he was! I tried to close the door, but he placed his leg inside and pushed his way in, despite my desperate struggle to keep him out. He turned off the lights and raped me.

Malak's brother and husband, however, walked into the house and found Morad still there. . . they then chased him down and stabbed him approximately 25 times, killing him. Then they returned to Malak, and using the same knife, stabbed her and beat her severely.

She had some time to think about what she would do next, from where she lay in the Intensive Care Unit in a local hospital, after several days in a coma. Now Malak had a real dilemma: where she comes from, a rape is only prosecuted if there are four male witnesses to the assault; even if the rapist is convicted, the woman is forever tainted - a liability to her family. But murder is punishable by death . . and a woman with no husband or brother to care for her welfare is worth little and faces poverty. Her children, with no father, would have no future. Malak decided that she would hide the horror of the rape to herself, and confess to adultery. This way, at least, her husband and brother would be spared the death penalty. Malak explained her thinking in a later letter to the court:

“I am a woman from a small village; I have had little formal education and I have no understanding of the law or the legal system. I thought that by saying that the murder was a response to some wrong-doing on my part and in an attempt to restore the family’s honor, I would be able to save my husband and my brother from execution. So I said things that were not true. I had no idea that those statements could be used to incriminate me for a crime that I did not commit.”

The two men were indeed spared death, and were convicted of murder (there were no charges for beating and stabbing a woman), and each sentenced to six years in prison. Malak, however,
as an adultress, was sentenced on June 29, 2006 to death - in the usual fashion for an adultress, stoning.

In Iran, under Sharia (Islamic) Law, adultery is a capital offense for which women face stoning. They can also be stoned for "acts incompatible with chastity"; Under Iran's Penal Code, the term "adultery" is used to describe any intimate or sexual act between a man and a girl or a woman outside of marriage. Since a woman's testimony under Sharia Law is worth half that of a man, their trials are generally short - and legal representation is the exception, not the rule - and Malak had no representation during two of the four trials held in her case... she was not informed of any rights she may have had. Sharia Law requires that female adulterers be put to death and Islamic holy scriptures recommend it repeatedly; stoning has been practiced regardless of gender. However, in modern-day practice, only women are executed by stoning for adultery, since they bear the burden in the practical sense - having no real rights equal to those of men - of legal sexual responsibility.

Western minds only imagine such a thing, but usually have no concrete accurate image of what stoning involves. First, the victim's hands are tied and she is wrapped in a sort of sack. She is buried in dirt or sand, in a standing position, up to mid-chest or to her neck, depending upon local custom. Her "peers" from her village or town, await with stones at the ready - the size of which have been dictated by the court with her sentence, according to the individual situation and crime. (Smaller stones are a slower death; under law they must be big enough to cause pain and injury.) A circle is drawn on the ground behind which the stoners must stand. After she is buried, she is pelted with stones by those present, until she is dead.

But in Malak's case, a miracle came. Someone in the West found out about her case - one in many such cases in which women are stoned for adultery. A lawyer - who was contacted by those Iranians outside Iran who worked with human rights organizations - found her and came to help. He and other lawyers - working with no pay - studied her case. They repeatedly requested transcripts and records from her trial, but received none. But they did learn enough to request a stay of execution.

Specifically, not only did Malak not receive consistent legal counsel or representation at the time of her trial and conviction, but she did not confess to the crime enough to have been convicted. As required by Iranian Islamic Law, Malak confessed four times to adultery in the presence of a judge, but her lawyers charged that her brother had coerced her to do so. (This was never disputed.) Additionally, there was no evidence of any physical relationship between Malak and Morad (although she claimed to have been raped, there was no physical examination, as doing so in the case of a woman is unusual; women do not often receive adequate medical care because being examined and remaining "modest" and "chaste" are mutually exclusive). Under Article 64 of the Penal Code, such evidence is required to convict the woman of adultery and subject her to stoning.

Because of these elements of the case, and because there were some other extenuating circumstances in the story of Malak's assault - her lawyers applied for a stay in execution and a retrial. They were ignored, and appealed to the international community for help.

Once Malak's story was out, the response was swift. It came from human rights organizations, from legal organizations, and from Western legislators, Iranian ex-patriot activists... Her name spurred letter-writing campaigns from government officials to Iran, decrying the practice of stoning, the lack of legal rights for women and the sloppy application of those few that existed. Legal organizations appealed to the U.N., reminding them that Iran was a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) - and that aside from the travesty of her "trial", stoning was universally unacceptable. Through the summer, the activity increased, and the name of Malak became synonymous with stopping the practice of stoning. But how?

By late July, an international petition had collected over 14,000 signatures, and that with a campaign led by Iranian-American lawyers with the Legal Rights Institute to save her life led Iran’s head of judiciary, Ayatollah Shahroudi, to issue a stay of execution and to order a new trial. But the battle to save her had only just begun. She remained in prison - as she does today, awaiting her fate - as Iran's increasingly fundamentalist regime dug in its heels.

A new trial began for Malak on December 24, 2006. The petition is still available for signatures. Whether or not she is convicted of "adultery" for being raped, every free-thinking and compassionate human being must understand the need for the end to barbaric laws under radical Islam which leave women no real access to justice, and little real human rights. Many women await death by stoning. Although international pressure is active and great, the practice continues unabated. Malak's is only one story - others are out there, other petitions exist, other fights are underway. Cases commonly exist in Iran, and most recently the practice continued under the Taliban oppression of Afghanistan. It is also known to occur in the modern day in Saudi Arabia, as attested to by eye-witness accounts.

Death penalty for "lack of chastity" in any sense is abhorrent. Until Malak is free, the effort to educate all who will listen about her case and to pressure the Iranian government to deal fairly with her, cannot be neglected. Foremost, the practice of death by stoning must end.



Petition: http://petitiononline.com/Malak/
Updates and history of the case: http://www.herearth.com/index_files/Page368.htm
Video of stoning: http://www.apostatesofislam.com/media/stoning.htm
Good general info: http://www.iran-e-azad.org/stoning/women.html
The U.N. position: http://www.iran-e-azad.org/stoning/un.html
(NOTE: A simple Google search for "Malak Ghorbany" leads to hundreds of resources.)

Food for Thought: The following comes from a Hadith of Islam - hadiths are collections of writings from Mohammad's followers which reportedly record his actions and words. . . much like the Gospels.

]Bukhari, Volume 5, Book 58, Number 188:
Narrated by 'Amr bin Maimun'
, and recording the actions and words of Mohammad:
"During the pre-Islamic period of ignorance I saw a she-monkey surrounded by a group of monkeys. They were all stoning it, because it had committed illegal sexual intercourse. I too, stoned it along with them."

( In fairness to Mohammed - Note that Islamic holy books and tradition refer to Christians and Jews as "pigs and monkeys" - something often quoted in the modern Islamic world as evidenced by several existing videos (and even taught actively to children), and used to justify hatred toward "infidels". So the above could well-be metaphorical, and in fact be referring to human beings.)

 

More on stoning in Islam can be found in this essay: Which Religion Should I Choose? - by Alamgir Hussain [Editor's note]