KUWAIT CITY, May 26: The Court of Appeals upheld Wednesday the ruling of a lower court, which sentenced a Kuwaiti woman, identified as Nasra Al-Enezi, to death for setting fire to a wedding tent in the suburb of Oyoun, Jahra after discovering her husband’s plan to marry another woman, resulting in the death of 58 women and children and injuries to many others.
During interrogations at the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) and Public Prosecution, Nasra told the authorities she went mad after finding out her husband’s intention to marry another woman. She has threatened him, but he ignored her and pressed ahead with his wedding plans.
On the day of the wedding, Nasra took a taxi from her family’s house in Rabia, went to a petrol station where she bought some petrol, and headed to the tent. When she arrived at the location, she poured petrol on the edges of the tent, set fire to it, and hurried back to the taxi, which took her back to her family’s house. However, she denied the charges when she appeared in court.
The fire caused the death of 58 women and serious injuries to some.
On March 30, 2010, the Criminal Court sentenced Nasra to death.
The session was presided by Judge Faisal Khuraibet.

Agencies add:
“We still believe it’s a harsh sentence. We will challenge the verdict at the supreme court,” Zaid Al-Khabbaz told AFP by telephone after the ruling was announced.
The lower court sentenced Nasra Yussef Mohammed Al-Enezi, 23, in March after convicting her of “premeditated murder and starting a fire with the intent to kill.”
The Aug 15 inferno engulfed the women-and-children-only tent in minutes and triggered a stampede. The final death toll was 58, including Saudis and stateless Arabs as well as Kuwait’s.
Enezi was initially believed to be the groom’s ex-wife but defence lawyers said she was still married to him, as men are allowed to have more than one wife in the conservative Muslim emirate.
Enezi and her husband have two children together, both of them mentally handicapped.
If her death sentence is upheld by the supreme court, she would be the first Kuwaiti woman to be executed in the Gulf state’s history.
Women from other nationalities have been hanged in the past, however.
Kuwait has executed a total of 72 people, three of them women, since it introduced the death penalty some four decades ago. Most of the condemned have been convicted murderers or drug traffickers.

Credit for above info: arabtimesonline.com/ 12/19/2010

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Immigration Minister Eric Besson says France may consider revising current laws in order to strip an Algerian-born man accused of polygamy and defrauding France’s social services of his French nationality.

French law could potentially be revised to strip polygamists of their acquired citizenship, Immigration Minister Eric Besson told French radio on Monday amid an escalating controversy over Islam, immigration and women’s rights that has captured national headlines. 

The incident began on Thursday when a Muslim woman told the media that French police had given her a traffic fine for wearing a niqab, a Muslim face veil that leaves only the eyes exposed, while she was driving in the north-western city of Nantes in early April.

Police issued a €22 ($29) fine, saying her clothing impaired her vision and therefore posed a safety risk.

Lies Habbadj could lose his French citizenship.

The immigration minister’s comments on Monday followed a request by Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux to look into whether the woman’s husband, Lies Hebbadj, could be stripped of his French nationality.

Hortefeux said he had obtained information suggesting Hebbadj was a polygamist who lived with four women, all of whom received single-parent welfare benefits.

Those allegations are yet to be proven, but on Monday Hebbadj defended himself at a press conference in Nantes, saying, “As far I know, mistresses are not banned by France or Islam. Maybe by Christianity, but not in France.”

Hebbadj is said to have acquired French nationality through marriage in 1999.

The law and the veil

According to French civil law, neither polygamy nor welfare fraud can justify revoking a person’s nationality.

Howerver, according to Maitre Brah Rached, a lawyer and expert in rights of foreigners in France, “a person’s nationality may be revoked if it is proven that he or she lied about his or her marital status when granted citizenship.”

If Hebbadj was already married in Algeria before wedding a Frenchwoman, his citizenship may be considered void, the lawyer explains.

In an interview with RTL radio station, Besson admitted revoking a preson’s French nationality was a controversial legal matter.

Credit for the above info: France 24/7 – France 2/by Josh Vardey, 4/26/2010

Fatima is now married to a man in his early fifties, who is also divorced. The couple lives together in peace in a big house that they both bought. Fatima says she will retire by the end of this year and start living “the rest of the life” she has always dreamed of.

Fatima says she never felt rejected as much as she did when her husband married his second wife, an older divorcee with five children from two failed marriages. “I knew that he was not faithful to me, but somehow that didn’t bother me as much as the news of his marriage,” she said. “I always repeated what my mother told me over and over: ‘It is just a phase. He will come back to his senses. It is just a phase.’ But when I found out he was actually married to her, my whole world was shaken.

Fatima says that this was followed by a series of questions from her friends and relatives. “Did he complain about your weight? Do you satisfy him in bed? Do you cook for him? Do you keep the house clean? Do you spend a lot of his money?

I asked for a divorce, and he refused. He left the house for me and the kids and only visited occasionally. When he did, I slept in the living room or in the children’s room. One day he called me while I was at work and told me that he wanted to get a divorce. I felt completely worthless, as if I had no say at all in anything. He kept our marriage just to spite me, and when I was actually making the effort to get used to it, he decided that we needed to get a divorce.

Growing trend of multiple marriages

Fatima’s story illustrates many other similar narratives in society today. Whether in secret or publicly, a lot of men marry before they take a second or third and even fourth wife for no good reason.

Kuwait Times spoke to social counselor Khaled Al-Mohannadi, who shared his opinion based on his experiences with such cases. He said that a lot of men marry for selfish reasons and sacrifice the future of their family without even caring.

If you notice, the majority of second-marriages are not arranged marriages. The man who is already involved in a marriage meets a woman outside his marriage and they plan their commitment together,” he said. This does not mean that arranged marriages are completely wrong, argued Al-Mohannadi. It means that people should encourage themselves to speak openly about their feelings and not force themselves into doing anything at all that they aren’t convinced about.

After some time, there is a big chance that the couple will realize they don’t want to be together; they have nothing in common. This, ideally, results in a divorce. But because of the social stigma of divorce, and because in many cases the couple comes to this realization after having had a child or two, they remain married but become emotionally-separated, or as we refer to it, ‘emotionally divorced.’

Emotional divorce usually occurs when a couple fails to communicate. When both neglect their duties to each other and become less emotionally committed to each other, “they desert each other and become strangers who just happen to live with each other,” said Al-Mohannadi. This can lead to the dissatisfaction of the wife, whether emotionally or sexually, and that leads her to seek different ways to satisfy her needs. These solutions, says the counselor, are sometimes illegitimate and destroy the marriage.

Polygamy as a sign of weakness

Al-Mohannadi continued to say that from his observations, the problem with polygamy is that the husband is usually weak. “The husband, in many of instances that I dealt with, is very emotional. It is always apparent that he loves this wife more than the other, and this is not right. He either gives them equal love and attention or the wife has the complete right to get a divorce. She has better chances with someone else. Staying in the marriage will make her feel unwanted, and it can cause a lot of distress for the entire family,” he said. This usually reflects on the way the wife treats her children, and it can cause a lot of instability.

With regard to what would push the woman to be a second (or third or fourth) wife, Al-Mohannadi said that it is mostly the pressure of society. “Yes, in some cases it is love, which can blind the woman from seeing that she is destroying the stability of a whole family. But in many other cases, it is social pressure. In our society, we label an unmarried woman in her late twenties a “spinster.” We judge a woman by her looks, her academic qualifications, the history of her family. A lot of women in our society are taught that they cannot find true love.

The solution to all problems is conversation, says Al-Mohannadi. He advised, “Conversation is an essential part that all Kuwaiti families lack. We don’t talk. We don’t converse about our feelings and our needs. If the picture isn’t clear to us, how are we supposed to do anything right? Communicate, be honest and learn how to think as a ‘we’ rather than a ‘me’ when you are married.

Credit for above info: Kuwait Times – Published Date: June 18, 2009
By Hussain Al-Qatari, Staff writer

Information was brought to the atention of Polygamy 411  the courtesy of a very special reader, commentator and friend. Polygamy 411 thank you friend!

A Saudi court has sentenced an employee of the kingdom’s religious police to 120 lashes for marrying six women.

The man said he was not educated enough to know that Islam does not allow men to marry more than four women at any one time, said an official at Ahad al-Massarha court in the southern province of Jazan.

“The judge did not believe him. Nobody believed him. I honestly did not,” the official told Reuters.

The court banned the man from standing as a preacher and leading prayers, ordered him not to travel abroad for a five-year period and to memorise two chapters from the Koran.

The accused, in his fifties, is not a member of the Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice’s morals squad but holds an administrative position there, the official said.

Shaikh Abdul-Mohsen al-Qaffari, spokesman of the virtue and vice commission, said it was the commission that discovered the case. Judge Salman al-Waadani, who pronounced the sentence, could not be reached for comment.

The court official said, “Members of the commission were accompanied by police when they arrested the man with one of his wives but it was the governor of Jazan who ordered an investigation onto the case”.

The commission makes sure Saudi society abides by an austere interpretation of Islam in the kingdom, where clerics control the justice system.

With more than 5,000 members, its squads roam streets and shopping malls to make sure unrelated men and women are kept apart, that shops and restaurants are shut at prayer time, that women are covered from head to toe and to search for alcohol and drugs.

Islam allows polygamy for men on condition the wives are treated fairly. (Reuters)

Credit for the above info: Arabian Business.com by Souhail Karam on Wednesday, 18 February 2010

What is seen as a breach of family trust has raised questions about Zuma’s personal judgement and whether he has the mettle to lead South Africa.

It has reignited attention to an embarrassing rape trial a few years ago in which he was accused of having non-consensual and unprotected sex with an HIV-positive family friend.

Many read political motive in those charges and Zuma was eventually cleared. But the trial embarrassed the man who, as vice-president, led the country’s moral regeneration movement initiated by former president Thabo Mbeki.

Zuma’s capacity to walk the talk on moral and ethical issues came into question and the latest incident shows that these remain valid and disturbing questions.

It is unclear what impact this has on Zuma’s standing amongst his majority black supporters in South Africa. But, going by the massive support he maintained throughout his rape and earlier corruption trials, it seems the black majority, who form the bastion of his support, are least bothered about his personal indiscretions.

JZ is a popular and highly accomplished political mobiliser who weathered what was widely seen as a carefully choreographed scheme to block him from ascending to high office following the conviction of his private financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, for corruption which forced his resignation as vice- president.

Justice Hilary Squire who presided over Shaik’s trial found that Zuma had a “generally corrupt” relationship with a fraudster who had bankrolled him in return for political favours which translated into lucrative government contracts.

As expected, Justice Squire’s ruling generated a great deal of hair splitting but Mbeki would have none of it. In his words, “the judgment (contained) some categorical outcomes which raised questions of conduct that would be inconsistent with expectations that attend to those who hold public office”.

A leitmotif of those who rallied to Zuma’s defence was to cast him as a victim of political machinations aimed at frustrating his political career. An underlying but barely subliminal line was to hack to a conspiracy theory of the Xhosa (represented by Mbeki) fighting a potential Zulu presidency.

These issues obscured the serious questions on integrity by a man aspiring for high office.

Zuma was, of course, eventually cleared of the corruption charges paving way for nomination by the African National Congress (ANC) to vie for the presidency.

The acquittal is seen as an act of deft political strategy notwithstanding the fact that the National Prosecution Authority was unable to sustain a conviction which entitles Zuma to the presumption of innocence.

Going by the notoriety of the past, it is almost certain that we have not had the last from Zuma’s rich cocktail of controversy. It begs the question whether a man prone to personal indiscretions can diligently execute his mandate and command respect on the world stage.

South Africa is not a nondescript republic. It is a regional leader whose economy is bigger than the combined GDP of the 14-member grouping of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC).

It has pioneered key blueprints like the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) that was reconfigured at last week’s African Union heads of state summit in Addis Ababa. A key player in regional peace keeping initiatives in Burundi and DRC, it is among top contributors to the African Union budget.

The towering image of the iconic Nelson Mandela is a global signature for tolerance amongst different races and that one places special responsibility on the country’s leadership.

While it is difficult to fit Zuma within Madiba’s moral and ethical prism, he must safeguard his legacy and his country’s strategic importance in Africa and on the world stage.

It is within Zuma’s call to decide on personal matters like polygamy on which he has been candid and forthcoming. One cannot begrudge a man who opts to follow the dictates of his culture. However, personal indiscretions and a poor judgement should not be excused.

Simply put, Zuma’s conduct must befit the standing of his office and serve as a role model as the head of Africa’s signature republic. The choice is easy and obvious but one that calls for serious soul searching.

Credit for the above: Gichinga Ndirangu, 6 February 2010, opinion . Gichinga Ndirangu is a lawyer and policy analyst

Listen to Audio: Polygamy is Teamwork . See photo of Jacob Zuma (President of South Africa) and his wives.

Audio provided by ”Times Live Media”- 2/5/10

 Nadia Nasser told the press that the cash reward ” is to encourage the youths marry women who lost their husbands by the Israeli army fire.”

 ”The project aims at providing a stable life for the widows, especially the young who lost their husbands days or weeks after the marriage,” Nasser said, adding “this is the best way to protect the Muslim women.”

 In December and January, Israel conducted an unprecedented offensive in the Gaza Strip, killing more than 1,300 Palestinians. About 43 percent of victims were women and children and the rest were men, most of them youths.

 However, the Hamas project sparked criticism by pro-women groups. Samira Abdel Aleem, the Director of Women Committees said that it “degrades the dignity of the Palestinian woman who always sacrificed alongside the man.”

 ”The woman has the right to choose her husband,” Abdel Aleem said, demanding the authorities to amend the personal status law and outlawing the polygamy.

 Hamas said those who want to get advantage of the project should be fiscally capable of “providing for two wives or more and must be ready to look after the children of the new wife.”

They also must be committed to the moral and religious principles and provide “a private place for the new wife.”

 Credit for the above info: 2009-03-24 10:28:04 GMT2009-03-24 18:28:04 (Beijing Time)  Xinhua English