No Honor in Killing

The news from Pakistan just keeps depressing day by day. I was only still recovering from the news that a pregnant woman was stoned to death in broad day light in front of Lahore HIgh Court, by her own father when this shocker has arrived. Apparently the dead woman's husband had murdered his first wife because he loved the second woman so much. May Allah have mercy on the souls of both these women.

Don't know what's worse, a father stoning her pregnant daughter, or husband strangulating wife because he loves another woman. How far low we can fall from this? Istead of accepting his own weakness of faith and total absence of a moral conscious the husband person comes out and  indirectly blames his dead second wife for being the reason he killed his first wife. I don't even want to say anything about the father, except hat I hope he regrets and repents from his sin before Allah takes him to task. May Allah swt guide and forgive these men. But these and countless other horror stories of violence against women in the Muslim world are now becoming too frequent and too grotesque to ignore or dismiss as mere aberrations.

We can no longer turn a blind eye to the fact that violence against women is an epidemic of deadly proportions across the Muslim world, through no fault of Islam, which is why it is even more disgraceful and condemnable. We come from a faith where the Prophet never hit a woman in his life, denounced female infanticide and till his last days, kept advising the men, to take care of their woman and be kind and gentle to them. Yet today, men, and unfortunately even women, in many Muslims societies think it is man's right to sanction and discipline women.

This misplaced understanding of faith has created an attitude where men consider it their right to use force at any whim and created an adverse environment in which many women silently suffer abuse without having any means to protect themselves. Sometimes even silently suffering is portrayed as being rewarding in the eyes of Allah. This couldn't be further from the truth. Deliberately putting your self in harm's way, and not doing what you can do to fight for your rights is by no means Islamic and does not earn you any blessings.

Its not just with regards to violence against women, but even generally speaking, societal attitudes towards men who are benevolent towards women are highly negative. A man who consults with his wife before making decisions is a "joru ko ghulam". Increasingly, practices and behaviors which are actually closer to Sunnah are considered "unmanly" (such as helping out with domestic chores). What ought to be considered gentlemanly behavior, is rejected and instead unconditional servitude and abuse is accepted, promoted and even demanded as male privilege. None of this has any basis in Islam whose sets of rights and responsibilities for men and women are based on justice and each gender's unique characteristics.

No doubt women every where in the Ummah will be answerable to Allah for the sins they have done and many times we do slack of from some our responsibilities, but abuse and violence is not the answer. In fact, majority of the victims of abuse have done nothing to deserve such cruelty and in most cases they are meted out these punishments for asking for rights that Allah swt has rightly bestowed them with. Because of male abuse of their rights, the vast majority of women every where in the Muslim world are in seriously disadvantaged social position, denied even the most fundamental rights that Allah swt has bestowed them with, and men are the culprit. There is no running away from this fact. Men have forgotten that just because they may be physically stronger it does not give them the right to do whatever they want. If you can do nothing else, at least let us live with dignity and honor and stop putting us a bait to satisfy your ego. Fear Allah!

I don't know how or when men will stop using religion to justify their loss of self-control. Islam in no ways sanctions violence against women.There is no dignity or honor in disrespecting or abusing women and resort to such means is not a sign of male strength but weakness. If you are a real man, you will never hit a woman.

My heart aches every time I read or think about these two women. One was stoned to death by her own father in Lahore for the crime of choosing to marry out of her own will, a right that Islam grants her, and the other was murdered by the very man Allah swt entrusted with the responsibility to protect and guard her. They will stand before Allah on the Day of Judgement and seek justice from the men who have wronged them. May Allah swt elevate their ranks in Paradise.

In the meantime, each one of us has a responsibility to condemn this, and to try and do whatever we can do prevent these injustices from happening so repeatedly. The least we can do is play our part in changing societal attitudes toward violence against women by correcting the misunderstandings that even many seemingly educated people have about religion sanctioning violence against women.

Some thoughts on Bilawal and the Sindh Festival

It has been rather painful to see the sudden rise of  Bilawal Zardari (sorry I refuse to call him Bhutto) from relative political obscurity to the liberal press' poster child for the anti Taliban movement.

Whilst his anti-Taliban rhetoric is well grounded those who think this man or his family can bring change in Pakistan could do well to tell me what the Bhuttos have done for Pakistan in previous terms in office (including the most recent one where the Taliban menace was at its peak and the government powerless to control it) or why tax payers should trust a family with their votes on whom their are tons of corruption charges.

I hope too that others can see the great irony in this entire situation where a man who has barely spent a fraction of his total lifetime in Pakistan (let alone Sindh in particular) coming and proclaiming his attachments to its cultural values, or the fact that even the logo for this Sindh Festival event was copied (if he isn't even honest about something as small as this logo and doesn't even care about copyright, why would he care about putting the public money where it deserves to be put?).

There is also a legitimate question here about whether such an event was necessary at all at this point in time at tax payers expense (who ever believes Bilawal's claim that they will return the money they borrowed from Sindh government for this fanfare is obviously deluded) when so many in Sindhi in particular and Pakistan over all have far more serious things to worry about than projection of a better cultural image of Pakistan!

Bilawal boy has been rightly critical of the education system in his various recent speeches but I don't understand why he didn't consider it more pertinent to invest this money in education ...to build schools in Larkana, Badin, Thatta, Ghari Khuda Bukhs, to find teachers for all ghost schools, to carry out a full fledged province wise enrollment drive. I'm sure that if an education drive was carried out at the same scale as this pointless Sindh festival, Pakistan's image and indeed Bilawal's image and his reputation amongst non-Sindhis would have fared much better. But than again if the people of Sindh get education, would they still blindly vote for the Bhuttos? Perhaps not, that's why next year you will again have a grandiose good for nothing cultural festival but no additional spending on education. Because if the masses remain illiterate and deluded this is good for the Bhuttos.

He's also got to learn to get his history right. Sindh may have been the gateway for Islam in the sub-continent but the first translation of the Quran was not in Sindhi but in Persian in the 8th century. "Don’t teach us Islam, don’t teach us sharia, we are well aware of Islam” he is reported to have said in much publicized Sindh Festival closing ceremony. I do agree that we have no need to take our understanding of religion from the Taliban, but if we start taking our understanding of religion from the Bhuttos or the PPP, or indeed ANY of the political parties in Pakistan, than Allah save us in the hereafter truly!

Bilawal is hoping that through the Sindh Festival he is able to show Pakistan's real face to the world, but all I am hoping and praying for is that some day Sindhis, Pakistanis as a whole and indeed the world can see the real face of this Bhutto dynasty and their fractured legacy. May Allah save us from being put in charge of this man and if this is our fate, than may Allah give him right guidance before he is put in authority over us.

Female empowerment in Islam: A perspective on men being “quwamoon”

One of the most widely prevalent misconceptions about Islam that exists world over (including amongst many Muslims themselves) is that Islam as a religious code keeps women in either outright oppression or in at least a seriously disadvantaged social position. In sha Allah I have made the intention to do a series of posts, whenever I will have the opportunity, to dispel this myth. 

One of the most controversial ayahs of the Quran with respect to this debate about women’s rights in Islam is verse 34 of Surah Nisa where Allah describes men as women’s “quwamoon”, a word which has been translated as protectors, maintainers, managers, and by some as even controllers. Without wanting to dwell into the second half of the ayah at this point in time, I just want to share an example of how during the time of the Prophet, may Allah’s peace and blessing be upon him, the Prophet himself explained and showed us how to be “quwamoon” or rather how to deal with thos who are stingy "quwamoon":

Once, Hind, the wife of Abu Sufyan, came to Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi was sallam) and said, "O Messenger of Allah, Abu Sufyan is a stingy man and does not give me and my children enough provisions except when I take something from him without his knowledge. " Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi was sallam) said, "Take what is reasonably sufficient for you and your children.” (narrated in Bukhari and Muslim)

Subhanllah! This must seem unthinkable for the people who always out to prove that the Muslim women are the most subjugated creatures on planet earth. Here is the Prophet telling a woman that she can practically steal her husband’s wealth to provide for herself and her children if he is not fulfilling these responsibilities. Of course this is not a license for women to go and empty their husband’s pockets every time they feel like going on a shopping spree, but Muslim women should really feel tremendously empowered by this ayah and ahadith like this (and countless more which I haven’t quoted). Allah swt has freed us from the need to worry about our provision.

Whether we are married or unmarried, Allah swt has always placed the difficult responsibility of finding the financial means to fulfill our needs on someone else’s shoulders. We are entitled to be spent on, to be looked after and cared for. We have a right on other people’s hard earned money (and even more empowering is the fact that none of our “qawamoon” has a right over what we earn!). So in other words, as a good friend of mine puts it, whatever we earn in just our money, but whatever our husband’s earn is also our money!

We have a luxury that most women in the west do not have and probably secretly crave. We are not supposed to spend from what we earn or own on our husband, or our children, or even our parents. It’s good if we do or want to, but this is not our responsibility. But it is for men. They are suppose to pay the utility bills, buy the groceries, foot the bills for our clothes (hurray!), pay the rent, pay the school fees of the children and all we have to do is sit at home, and be available for them and may be if we want cook for them and clean the house (even this according to some scholars is strictly not a legal responsibility but a moral one –okay I better not open that hornet’s nest here- and we can even ask for domestic help if the husband can afford it!).

Subhannallah! So we get housing, clothing, food, even entertainment and domestic help if we want, all simply in return for being there for them! And there’s more, there’s reward and Allah’s blessings and His pleasure to be gained if we do this. So just by being at home and enjoy our privileges, we also get the bonus of doing something for our Hereafter.

I’m not saying that there is no provision in Islam for women working if they want to with their husband’s permission (that’s another debate), but trying to highlight just how much of a privilege this is (because most women do not realize). This realization has especially been profoundly dawned upon me recently because I just quit a job two months ago, and then declined another good offer shortly afterwards all because I could. Imagine men being jobless and the pressure they are under!

One of the reasons I wanted to go back to working after moving to Saudi Arabia two years ago was because I felt I was not really accomplishing something. But ever since I quit the job I was so eager to do because it wasn’t really satisfying me and came back to being at home with my daughter and being the ordinary house wife I thought I was, I finally realized that I was not ordinary at all.

I had the extraordinary privilege to have all my needs met because Allah swt had put someone in charge of them and I didn’t even need to worry about them. I could demand if they were not being met and they would have to be fulfilled. Also, unlike the job I was doing where I was quickly replaced after I quit, there is no replacement for my role at my home. I have a value here that I have nowhere and this finally fulfilled the sense of achievement I had been looking for. Sure I might still pursue a job if I get bored, but now I know that if I don’t and or can’t, there will not be any regrets.

What has been so negatively portrayed as women’s subjugation is arguably the greatest sign of female empowerment in Islam. Instead of viewing this as women being financially dependent on other men, we should view this as women having financial entitlement to the earning of their fathers and husbands. In the West, although the husband is expected to provide for his family, in a more casual relationship, such as cohabiting couples, there is often no explicit understanding that one person is financially responsible for the other.

The right of the women that their men fulfill their financial needs and the complete ownership of their own wealth, is one of the greatest rights Islam has given women. Unfortunately, many women in the sub-continent are not aware of these things.

It is disturbingly common to hear stories from female domestic help in major urban cities complaining about their husbands who refuse to work, and then on top of it snatch away most of the money they earn to make ends meet. Many a times, such men are also abusers and druggies. I could not understand why these women persisted in these relationships where the husbands were not fulfilling any of even their most fundamental rights simply on the absurd notion that “baap kaa saya bachon per rahey ga”. What kind of saya is this where the baap does not even provide for the children? Or those stories from interior Punjab and Sindh where the womenfolk work hard and long all day on the fields, come back home, do the cooking, cleaning and look after the kids, while the husband just sits on the choki all day long smoking away a huckah. Wallahi Allah swt is going to take to task such men who are negligent of fulfilling their responsibilities towards their wives.

This sort of culture even manifests its self in slightly more affluent middle class families where some husbands and in-laws positively expect a new bride to continue her job after her marriage, or find one if she didn’t have one, and even place most of her income in the family budget. The wife has no reason to obey her husband and go and do a job in the first place and she has the right to stay at home and be provided for. If she wants to work out of her own free will, then she needs the husband’s permission, but even then, whatever she earns is her own money and the husband is by no means entitled to it whatsoever.

Similarly, whatever the women receives as her dowry, i.e her mahar, from the husband, she has the right to spend from it as she wills and the husband should give the dowry as soon as  he is able to. Similarly, if there is any amount the wife has received as a gift from her parents or as a part of her inheritance, the husband has absolutely no right what so ever over it. Yet it is all too common to see women in the subcontinent being denied these rights (which is why perhaps so many people in the West have misconceptions about Islam).

The list of practices which are purely cultural in origin and are wrongly confused with Islam is quite a long one. But I’d like to end this post today with the point with which I started it, quwamon can be best understood as men being in a position where they are responsible for women. This is not at all subjugation or oppression, but rather a privilege and honor. Muslim women should feel gratitude to their guardians and foremost to Allah swt that He ordained a social order where we do not have to worry about our sustenance.

All praise belongs to Allah, and He is the only one worth of worship. May Allah swt make our spouses the light of our eyes and may He enable Muslim women to realize the tremendous honors she has been bestowed with.

Some thoughts on Iqbal and Jinnah's legacy

Over the course of the last several years, my news feed on the birth anniversary of Jinnah, has always been full of discussion on what the legacy of Quaid-e-Azam is. There are arguments from both the left and the right. For some Jinnah wanted a secular state and those behind the Objectives Resolution have hijacked his vision and the Pakistan state has only kept going in the wrong direction since, particularly during the Zia era. Others argue that the whole point of partition would be defeated if Pakistan was secular, and point to other sayings of Jinnah which could be interpreted to mean he didn't necessarily oppose an Islamic state either. Some in this side of the debate go to the extremes to suggest that the movement to paint Jinnah as a secularist is nothing short of a grand conspiracy to turn Pakistan into a secular state.

As such I am by default skeptical of any grand conspiracy theories especially as many in Pakistan associate everything with them, but my own take on the debate is that I don't really know what Jinnah wanted and may be, he didn't really know either because its not really clear. He said different things at different points in his life and you could sit down and interpret those things to mean a whole lot of different things. Some evidences from both sides of the debate are equally valid, so I really don't want to open up at that hornet's nest here. May be Jinnah did want a secular state, or may he didn't, may be at one point he thought a secular state would be best, but later he realized it would not work out and changed his mind. I don't think either side of the evidences are conclusive.

It would be really nice if there wasn't so much confusion. In fact its almost tragic that in 60 years since independence we haven't even been unable to form a unified national discourse on the kind of state the founder wanted us to become which is no surprise we aren't any kind of state to write home about. That's why I think we should move on. Jinnah played an important role in founding the state, but we shouldn't have to stick to his vision if that's not what we want to be today or if it isn't what is morally correct.

Although I understand and appreciate everything Jinnah did for Pakistan, there's one man from Pakistan's history that inspires me way more than Jinnah and that's Iqbal. This post is actually about him, not Jinnah. To be specific, its about how his legacy compares to that which the liberals claims to be Jinnah's legacy.

For starters, Iqbal's vision is much less ambiguous compared to Jinnah's; he wanted Muslims to peruse an Islamic revival of their community, wrote of the dangers of blind nationalism (noting where it led Europe to), and wrote volumes upon volumes in Urdu and Persian why westernization wasn't going to take Muslims back to their glory days. He spoke passionately of a Muslim identity and of the supremacy and timelessness of Islamic Laws. He was not apologetic but he acknowledged where Muslims had gone wrong, but he didn't spare the West from any blame where they deserved it. 

The most recurrent theme of his poetry is Islam and it is very difficult if not outright impossible to suggest that he was a secularist. Contrast this with the never ending debate about Jinnah which continues to polarize people in Pakistan today (Ansar Abbasi and co. on one hand and Nadeem Paracha and co. on the other hand). In this sense Iqbal's ideas are diametrically opposed to how the liberals of today in Pakistan interpret Jinnah's legacy to be.

Although Iqbal's poetry has been a integral part of Pakistani popular culture (inspiring everyone from the likes of classical singers in Tani Sani to sufi rock artists in Junoon) there are a fair share of Pakistani liberals for whom Iqbal isn't even a considered worthy of being a national hero. In February this year Pervez Hoodbhoy, for example, wrote in an opinion ed in the Tribune that Iqbal's "prescriptions for reconstructing society cannot help us in digging ourselves out of a hole", arguing that Pakistan was much better looking into the legacy of Sir Syed for its revival, who for him was "modernist".

I don't know to what extent Jinnah was influenced by Iqbal, but it was Iqbal who brought him back to India and it was Iqbal who first suggested that idea of Pakistan. I personally find it difficult that he would have been swayed into action  by someone who he would be ideologically in disagreement with. If we should bother finding out what Jinnah's legacy is, we should also bother with what Iqbal believed. Although Iqbal and his poetry are well known amongst the masses most people do not know that Iqbal was skeptical of (although not completely opposed to) democracy, laid emphasis on spirituality and was staunchly opposed to blind westernization; he said that we should search for our renaissance from within our own unique religious, spiritual and cultural traditions (that's why he's not liked by those who want to put forward the idea that Jinnah was secular).

Personally, I am big fan of Iqbal. I will forever be grateful to the people who made me realize the worth of Iqbal's poetry. His work isn't just a literary masterpiece, but a timeless and remarkably accurate critique of the state of Muslims in the world everywhere, not just in Pakistan. I was reading the translations of some of his Persian works today and I suddenly found my self wishing I knew farsi. My Urdu, to my shame, isn't much home to write about either, so I wish had I had a better grasp of the language so I'd be able to appreciate and understand his work more. I'd like to end with these brilliant verses Iqbal wrote on the state of those Muslims who are blinded by their love of the west. I don't know who Iqbal had in mind when he wrote this, but it seems so true to this day for people like Hoodbhoy and their ilk (many of whom seem to write for the Tribune):

Tera wajood sarapa tajal-e-farang
ke to wahan ke imarat garon ke hai tameer
magar ye paiker-e-khaki khudi se hai khali
Faqat nayam hai to zar nagaro be shamsheer

Immunity or Impunity?

Just how little importance America ascribes to International Law and how shallow her cries to other members of the international community are with to respect to obeying international law is often ignored by those who like to champion America as the leader of the free, just and developed world. Here are some related but not identical recent high profile events involving American claims and counter claims of how and where diplomatic immunity is or is not applied:

1. In 2012, An American Civil judge rejected former IMF-head Dominique Strauss-Kahn's s claim of diplomatic immunity in his effort to dismiss a civil suit filed by a hotel housekeeper who claimed that the French leader had sexually assaulted her. The charges against him were eventually dropped by the prosecution it self.

2. Summer of 2013, BBC quoted then British Foreign Secretary William Hague as saying that U.S. Embassy had yet to pay 63,000 congestion fines; American officials claimed diplomatic immunity shielded them from the charges.

2. Hillary Clinton her self received a parking ticket in London in the same year for $125 after her security detail parked her limo near an event but failed to pay the required fee for the spot.

3. This is the same Hillary Clinton who as as a junior senator from New York wrote of her outrage at $21.3 million in unpaid traffic (mostly parking) violations by diplomats who were stationed at the United Nations in New York. She argued that their diplomatic immunity should be revoked but later on as the Secretary of State, she insisted on invoking diplomatic immunity for Mr. Raymond Davis, who murderer two young innocent men in Lahore in broad daylight. Davis was at best a contract employe of American diplomatic staff in Pakistan and had a very weak if any legal basis for claim to diplomatic immunity.

4. After Davis incident, an American diplomatic vehicle which came to escort Davis from the scene of the crime killed another innocent person because of driving at high speed in the wrong direction.

5. Now the American administration is claiming that a much more senior diplomat, in Indian Deputy Counsel General Devyani Khobragade, who they recently arrested on charges of visa fraud (she was not paying her nanny the minimum wage as required by US Law) is not protected by diplomatic immunity, but simply by consular immunity which only gives her protection from crimes she may have committed in the course of her work as a diplomat, but not at any crimes she may have committed outside of her work. This time they may actually have a legal basis.

My point here is not just in highlighting the American double standards in invoking and revoking diplomatic privileges irrespective of the nature of the crimes involved, but I'll make that point first in any case. In more than one example from recent history American officials have insisted on revoking immunity or denying it where it applies for crimes committed on American soil by diplomatic staff of other countries, whether they are as minor as parking violations or more serious as rape or labor abuse . On the other they have insisted that their diplomatic staff and even those who aren't really staff members (but anyone who is involved with American diplomatic staff in anyway) should be protected and forgiven for even the worst kind of crimes such as manslaughter.

My second point here is to assess the whole point of immunity. As International Law students we were told that diplomatic immunity as originally conceived was meant to facilitate the work of a diplomat without undue interference from the host country, and especially to protect them from any kind of persecution if the relations between the states involved turns bitter. It was never meant as license to flagrantly violate universal principles of justice and morality (forget local and international law). But that's exactly how diplomats seemed to have behaved in these examples of abuse of these privileges.

And its not just the Americans really, the abuse of immunity privileges is so rampant every where in the world that you could rack up tons of examples (for a quick glimpse just wikipedia diplomatic immunity for a lengthy list of abuse cases). Although parking violations and car accidents are the most well documented form of immunity abuse, other diplomats have used immunity to get away without paying rents, for smoking in aircraft, domestic abuse against children, physical assault, rape and a host of other fairly serious crimes.

In theory such abuses are against both the letter and spirit of the Vienna Convention which quite explicitly states that "without prejudice to their privileges and immunities, it is the duty of all persons enjoying such privileges and immunities to respect the laws and regulations of the receiving State.". But in practicality it seems diplomat treat their immunity as more akin to impunity.

It is high time for some of these absurd and excessive privileges to be either be completely revoked or seriously re-assessed in the light of these abuses, especially as they seem to be applied only selectively by countries and nearly always result in situations where diplomatic back pressure is used to either completely bypass legal protocols and technicalities or overlook or even change the facts of any case. The victims of such crimes (where they exist) are left with very little hope.

No country, America or otherwise, should be in a position where it has to tolerate a criminal amongst its ranks and wait for the whim of the host country before it can persecute it (especially more so if it involved a crime they committed against a citizen of the host state). The idea in theory is that states do this on a reciprocity basis; i.e. you give diplomats of a country these privileges so that your diplomats can enjoy the same privileges in other countries (but the selective way countries, an in particular the Unites States, apply this law) is making a mockery of the whole notion of diplomatic immunity.

Is international law no longer relevant?

Have been trying to do some independent research over the past few months to make sure whatever I learned in four years of university isn't quickly forgotten and here's the one thing I realized, hardly anyone cares about international law.

One of the sources of international law is what is known as "customary practice". In non legal terms this mean that what states normally do can be considered a source of law even though its not written down anywhere. Increasingly, the customary practice of states has been to violate the very laws that have been so painstakingly agreed upon by the international community.

Whether it is the Geneva Protocols or the UN charter, it seems they're only there to be applied when its in favor of the powerful international law flouting countries. Otherwise these laws are just there as documents that international law students should study and memorize and quote in hypothetical examples.

The customary practice of states suggests that its no big deal to carry out extrajudicial killings during war, to subject of prisoners of war to inhumane treatment, or to wage illegal wars themselves, or to give repeated threats of use of force or to negate the doctrine of sovereign equality of all states. All of these things though illegal under international law, are rampant in the practice of states.

So it begs the questions, is international law no longer relevant? Has it been rendered obsolete by the utter disregard of it by most states of the international community? And by extension does the customary practice of states (that you can disregard international law whenever it is convenient) the new default?

Islam NOT banned in Angola

News has been around that Islam has supposedly been banned by Angolan government officials. However not only has the government denied this but now some of the leading Muslim figures from Angola community have come out and said that this news is not correct. The government has not closed or demolished all the mosques there and the religion is certainly not banned.

The government had simply started a crackdown on all religious buildings build without proper documentation and proceeded with the demolishing all of those that had not followed the due protocols. Amongst the buildings that were destroyed there were also a couple or so of mosques and even Muslims scholars in Angola admit and accept that these destroyed mosques were build on land not allotted for a mosque.

The way this news has spread like wildfire is a BIG reminder again to everyone out there that everything we read and see on the internet is not true and must be fact checked and verified before it is shared (especially when it has got anything to do with a sensitive topic that can lead people to react emotionally). This is not just moral obligation but a Quranic requirement, mentioned explicitly in Surah Hujrat.

It is equally sad that Muslims continue to abandon the great legacy our Prophet (saw) about due procedure being followed for constructing a mosque. When the Prophet came to Medina he bought the land on which Masjid Nabawi was built, although being the Prophet of Allah no one would have challenged him if he had build the mosque ANYWHERE, but he set the precedent so future generation of Muslims would do the same.

Yet through out the Muslim world, the trend of Muslims erecting mosques in non-designated areas and sometimes even illegally acquired land is rampant. And when these illegal mosques are later brought down a huge hue and cry is raised in the name of "disrespecting houses of worship". Surely building it illegally in the first place is much greater disrespect? When will Muslims learn?