What if you’re a Muslim and you want some nookie with someone other than your wife? You can’t go to a prostitute — Allah hates that.

India’s rent-a-wife industry to the rescue! Tourist-friendly! Allah-approved! Perfectly halal!

You see, in India’s Hyderabad and environs, it’s not hard to find marriageable girls who can be talked into one month of wedlock for a couple of thousand dollars.

According to the Telegraph,

[W]ealthy foreigners, local agents and ‘Qazis’ — government-appointed Muslim priests — are exploiting poverty among the city’s Muslim families.

We learn how the scheme works from one of the quasi-wives — an underage girl not keen on being bedded by a “husband” older than her father — who came forward to tell her story.

She told police she had been taken by her aunt to a hotel where she and three other teenager girls were introduced to a Sudanese oil company executive. The ‘groom’, Usama Ibrahim Mohammed, 44 and married with two children in Khartoum, later arrived at her home where a Qazi performed a wedding ceremony.

According to Inspector Vijay Kumar, he [Mohammed] had paid 100,000 Rupees (around £1,200) to the girl’s aunt Mumtaz Begum, who in turn paid 70,000 Rupees to her parents, 5,000 Rupees to the Qazi, 5,000 Rupees to an Urdu translator, and kept 20,000 Rupees herself. The wedding certificate came with a ‘Talaknama,’ which fixed the terms of the divorce at the end of the groom’s holiday.

For as long as women have mounted saddles, men have worried about the morality of it.

It started with horseback riding.

Riding astride anything had always been problematic — girls sitting astride while playing with toys such as a hobby horse was frowned upon, and it was partly because of sexual concerns that women rode side-saddle on horses.

Bicycles were no different. Victorian-era physicians warned that

the bicycle inevitably promoted immodesty in women, and could potentially harm their reproductive systems. Other critics argued that women bicyclists favored shorter skirts, thus “inviting” insults and advances. Moreover, by tilting the bicycle seat, they could “beget or foster the habit of masturbation.”

Ah, the good old pre-vibrator days.

You might think you’d have a hard time finding anyone today who still has such concerns, but that just means you’ve never heard of Suaidi Yahya, a Muslim in Aceh, Indonesia. Mr. Yahya was so bothered by the immoral spectacle of women sitting astride scooters and motorbikes, that, as the mayor of Lhokseumawe, he decreed this was against Islam.

In January, it became the law: no woman in Yahya’s city may ride a motorcycle, not even as a passenger, unless she rides side-saddle (both legs on one side) and wears something other than pants, and that garment doesn’t reveal the shape of her legs or buttocks.

No matter that riding side-saddle makes it more difficult to keep your balance; and no matter that loose, flowing clothes may get caught in whirring spokes. What’s a bunch of injured or dead females when you’ve got Allah to please?

Mr. Yahya, never one to let lawlessness fester, asked the Sharia police to enforce the ban (Aceh is currently the only Indonesian problem where Sharia is the law). And so, two days ago,

Thirty-five women in Lhokseumawe have been let off with a warning after the Sharia police caught them straddling a motorcycle and not wearing appropriate Islamic dress.

The Sharia police were conducting a raid on the main roads of Lhokseumawe on Friday, to monitor the administration’s bylaw that prohibits female passengers from straddling motorcycles. … While the women were not arrested, they were warned to not straddle a motorcycle again and to not wear tight outfits.

Lhokseumawe mayor Suaidi Yahya explained that the bylaw was expected to discourage women from wearing pants in public. He said that the bylaw was needed because he had seen people’s behavior and morals straying too far from Aceh’s Islamic cultural values. “We wish to honor women with this ban,” he said, “because they are delicate creatures.”

It could be worse, and in the Gaza Strip, it is. There, Hamas rulers decided in 2009 to ban women from scooters and motorbikes altogether. At the time,

Spokesman Ehab Al-Ghsain said [that] “men carrying women behind them on motorcycles caused accidents and did not match our social traditions. The image looked odd.”

[images via saltyscooterstories]

That’s one way to win an election: kill the opposition’s candidates, with Allah’s presumed blessing.

ISLAMABAD — Militants targeted candidates of two of Pakistan’s leading secular political parties, killing one, after the Pakistani Taliban warned that they would attack secular groups in the run-up to national elections on May 11. …

The Taliban claimed responsibility for Thursday’s killing of Fakhrul Islam, a candidate for the Sindh provincial parliament from the city of Hyderabad, representing the Muttahida Qaumi Movement. The MQM, the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Awami National Party have been identified by the Taliban in threats against secular groups. Also on Thursday, an ANP lawmaker running for re-election survived a bombing on the outskirts of the northwestern city of Peshawar.

Every Saturday morning, I take my youngest daughter to the Y for swim class. While she’s in the water, I sit on the bleachers and watch her, and chat with other parents.

Apparently, that makes me a perv in the eyes of a lot of Muslims. And if I lived in Canada, and we went to a municipal pool, I might be told to leave the pool area while averting my gaze — because I’m a guy.

TORONTO – When a single dad signed his nine-year-old daughter up for female-only swim lessons, he didn’t realize he — as a man — was going to be banned from watching her practice.

[The father] was shocked when he had the blinds to the viewing area of the Dennis R. Timbrell Recreation Centre pool in Flemingdon Park shut on him, and then was told by staffers it was for “religious reasons.”

Would it help if my daughter (below) wore a ‘modestkini’?

“I spoke to a staff member and she told me that it’s because of Muslim women, that we’re not allowed to look at them or whatever,” he told the Toronto Sun Friday. “I don’t think religion has a role to play in a public pool.”

The city aquatics department confirms the account. The public pool also has gender-segregated time slots for men-only and women-only swimming, with the opposite sex not allowed to watch. This is requested by followers of Allah, for the same “religious and cultural reasons” as the no-male-onlookers rule that’s in effect during girls’ swims. The newspaper discovered that the policy, and the accommodation of religious demands, is in effect all over Toronto:

There are currently nine pools across Toronto that run the female-only swim program. All pools follow the same policy of not allowing people of the other sex to watch practices,

said city aquatics manager Anne Jackson.

Though some Muslims may crow about these concessions from the kuffar, I doubt they’re doing themselves any favors. The mental image I’m stuck with is of men who are collectively so sexually repressed sensitive that they might feel or do something impure at the sight of females — even eight- and nine-year-olds! — in a swimming pool.

Is that how Muslims want other people to think of them?

[images from the catalog of modestkini.com]

Another atrocity by a no doubt highly religious Muslim:

A suicide bomber blew himself up Saturday at a lunch hosted by a Sunni candidate in Iraq’s upcoming regional elections, killing 20 people, officials said. The blast ripped through a hospitality tent pitched next to the house of Muthana al-Jourani, who is running for the provincial council and held the lunch rally for supporters, councilman Sadiq al-Huseini said.

Expect more of this in the next few weeks:

Violence is expected to surge in the run up to Iraq’s provincial elections on April 20.

Muslims believe that ascending to paradise requires the usual avoidance of temptations: no alcohol, no drugs, no sleeping around, etc. But why adhere to such sacrificial purity if you can simply become a martyr with almost no effort? Why not just kill a bunch of infidels and go straight to your heavenly reward?

There’s a perverse logic to that, especially if you’re young and aimless and you can’t hold down a job because the boss won’t repeatedly give you time to pray during work hours. You’d have to be a fool to take the 100-mile path if there’s a 100-yard shortcut at hand. Oh, and you can stick it to the establishment while you’re at it.

And so…

MONTREAL — Shocked to learn that two of their own attacked a desert gas plant in Algeria, Canadians are struggling to understand how young men from a quiet, middle-class neighborhood ended up as jihadists.

It was announced by Algerian officials almost immediately after the days-long siege of the In Amenas plant by the Algerian army in January that the pair were among the dead. One intelligence source said they were Arabs with dual citizenship and were among the 29 Islamists killed in the bloodbath, alongside 38 hostages. But it was only this week [that] Canadian media revealed that they were actually former schoolmates who grew up in sleepy London, Ontario.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation named the jihadis-next-door as

Xristos Katsiroubas, 22 from a Greek Orthodox family

(in Greek, Xristos mean Christ, no less!),

and Ali Medlej, 24. They died during the siege, possibly by blowing themselves up. Both apparently had become angry and alienated at home, and eventually ruptured ties with their families, reports said. After high school, they also reportedly struggled to keep menial jobs as employers refused to allow them time to pray.

A former friend told the CBC that Medlej had once told him he did not want to give up women and drinking. “There’re things that I just can’t give up in my lifestyle, and it’s hard for me to be a practicing Muslim, so why don’t I just be a shaheed (martyr) and go straight to heaven instead of all the effort that I can’t seem to do,” Medlej was quoted as saying by his former friend.