As a survivor of domestic abuse I don't even know what to say...

The judge was removed from the case but did someone sit him down and tell him that he was out of his farking mind?

My thoughts are with the woman who had to endure yet further humiliation and abuse.

If she's going to court for a divorce, obviously she's NOT 'accustomed' to it. (I can't even discuss the idea of his expectation.) And when did cultural interpretation triumph law?

It takes major courage for many women to leave abusive husbands; it's just too devestating that such courage is valued this way.

Xana...

What's even more fucked up is that the judge was female. "Christa" is not a male name in Germany... In fact, all of the legal representatives in this case were female--the judge and both lawyers were female.

I believe the judge was a woman, or at least was referred to as a woman in the article.

It's really a peculiar case. Is this simply a case of "multiculturalism gone wrong", as is suggested in the article? Or is there something deeper going on?

By the way, Jessica, I hope you'll find some of this interesting. I blogged about the issue here on Eteraz to bring up the idea of and formulate strategies for getting people to take action to make sure that Germans only let qualified judges judge Islamic law, but I also really like what mohammadfadel wrote:

While the condemnations of this decision have been swift, some of the criticism has been for the wrong reasons.
...
Not much has been made of the utter casualness with which this judge could make gross generalizations about Moroccans, the Quran and, implicitly, Islamic law. Apparently, she could make these factual conclusions without the assistance of any experts, whether anthropologists with some knowledge of Moroccan society or scholars of Islamic law, a large number of which reside in Germany. I had posted on this site an entry in defense of Edward Said’s Orientalism on December 6, defending his overall thesis – especially in light of the circumstances in which it was originally published – but decisions such as this in Germany confirm, sadly, the continuing relevance of Orientalism’s basic hypothesis: Power relations are constitutive of representation, and that Westerners – by virtue of their superior power – are able to “represent� the Other – in this case the Islamic/Arab other – and render it silent, unable to speak for itself.

The learned judge in this case – had she consulted any expert in Maliki law, the school of Islamic law that forms the basis of Moroccan family law – would have learned that according to Maliki doctrine going back to at least the 8th century of the common era, abuse constitutes grounds for a judicial divorce. Indeed, Maliki jurists went one step further and even recognized the right of the abused wife in this case to recover for her injuries from her abusive spouse. ... That orientalism should continue to flourish in the legal system, however, is profoundly disturbing to me, both on a personal level in terms of my commitments to contributing to the development of Islamic law so that it can play a positive role as constituent element within the global legal system, and on a professional level by evidencing the utter failure of the judge to take the legal principle of comity -- a doctrine that lay at the heart of this decision and remains an important and legitimate concept within private international law -- seriously when it comes to issues dealing with Islamic law.

...

...comity assumes that the law (especially transnational law) is cooperative project, and that it can be improved when jurisdictions cooperate in a spirit of mutual respect by applying each other’s laws in good faith in suitable circumstances. This was essentially the method used by the greatest Arab jurist of the 20th century – ‘Abdalrazzaq al-Sanhuri ... My colleague Mahmoud el-Gamal has an entry on his blog discussing Sanhuri’s method of law reform and the extent to which he deemed it a cooperative project.

I hope that courts in the future, when they are called on to apply Islamic law, to do so in the cooperative spirit urged by Sanhuri rather than in a spirit of condescension and stereotype. In this way, they will contribute to the revitalization of Islamic law and, at the same time, help reduce the tension that feeds into a "war of civilizations" paradigm.

Did you know that Islamic legal theorists had already developed some really cool ways to handle having two sets of laws?

I didn't!

Did you know that we ["Westerners"--Americans, Germans, etc.] can push reform to this flaw in our legal system by referring to a word they all know about--"comity?"

I didn't!

This makes me very hopeful. (TheLawFairy...you here? I'd love to hear what you've learned about comity from your professors & colleagues.)

Yes, it's very disturbing and screwed up...and part of me suspects the judge's decision was actually anti-Islamic scheming, intended to hang the poor woman out to dry as a public example - as in, "if you, a woman residing in Germany, choose to be a Muslim, don't expect us (the German courts) to come to your rescue when your husband merely does what your religion permits him to do."

That judge's decision is seriously wrong on many levels.

The most charitable interpretation I can put on this is that the judge had been receiving threats and was afraid to rule in favor of the woman. Other than that, I can't see any justification for making this kind of ruling.

Awww...sad me. I guess long posts go into the moderation queue even when I've been around here before. :-(

Also, I heard that if A keeps attacking B and B can't stop A without killing A then German law would consider B killing A self-defense...

...even if A is "attacking" B by dishonoring B, restricting B's property rights, or whatever instead of trying to kill or injure B.

Meanwhile, the article this post cites also says:

"...In a statement defending her ruling, Judge Datz-Winter noted that she had ordered the man to move out and had imposed a restraining order on him. But she also cited the verse in the Koran that speaks of a husband’s prerogatives in disciplining his wife. And she suggested that the wife’s Western lifestyle would give her husband grounds to claim that his honor had been compromised.

"The woman, her lawyer said, does not wear a headscarf. She has been a German citizen for eight years..."

It's worth noting that the judge has not tried to justify her own decision, and may be suffering from PTSD.

Whether they're judges or not, many people in Germany view muslims and people from the Middle East (especially Turkey, as there are so many of them) with a great deal of suspicion. There isn't much of an attempt to understand these newcomers or their culture, and I suspect that this case is an example of these prejudices coming to light.

See, this is what happens when you socialists bring in relativism to moral debate and undermine standards of justice. As if you could expect anything less from multiculturalism. Pretty soon, you'll all be whining when your rights are completely stripped away by a subjectivist judicial system.

This seems racist to me, rather than sexist. You wouldn't have to look hard to find that kind of justification in the bible.

Jeez, Ivy, can't you go troll at a site where inanity is appreciated? Like Althouse's? You're just wasting space here.

Ivy-
you should maybe read what you write before you post it, because you make no sense whatsoever. It's like you took a few different neo-con talking points, put them in a blender, and poured out the nonsensical result on this page.

Myself, I'm whining because all the rather un-multicultural rich white guys in charge are stripping away my rights one by one.

Ivy, go away and come back when you have something coherent to say.

So back to that judge... I do wonder about the PTSD theory. Maybe one extremely bad experience did have something to do with her screwed-up ruling. She should stay away from domestic violence cases, methinks.

"This seems racist to me, rather than sexist. You wouldn't have to look hard to find that kind of justification in the bible."

Yes. And? This is an issue pertinent to women, that's also horrendously xenophobic. Feminist sites are allowed to cover racism, aren't they?

Ivy, Germany is run by a conservative coalition of the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union. No matter how tenuous your grasp of political science, you cannot seriously be describing the German state or judiciary since 1990 as 'socialist'.

I don't think this ruling has anything to do with moral relativism. The most logical interpretation I can put on the judge's verdict is that she may deliberately have been trying to prove a point, highlighting her belief that Islam is incompatible with German law by a deliberately absurd and prejudicial decision.

If that's the case, she's not just an idiot - she's a racist idiot. Unfortunately she's not alone: Pickleberry, above, makes a good point about integration in Germany.

PTSD may well have played a role in the judge's decision:

"Judge Datz-Winter herself narrowly avoided injury 10 years ago in a case involving a man and woman whose relationship had come apart. When the man shot up her courtroom, the judge escaped by diving under her desk. German papers have suggested that that ordeal may have affected her judgment in this case, which the spokesman denied." (from the New York Times)

(On a side note: the German government coalition consists of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratcs... the Christian Social Union you mention is actually the CDU's Bavarian sister party. Either way, none of these parties are socialist).

Just a note, since I'm really pissed at "liberals" who ignore it.

This is not an example of multiculturalism gone bad. This is an example of a xenophobic judge failing to ask Islamic scholars about Islamic law. This “Judge� obviously has less knowledge of Sharia than I (a white college student who’s never left the US) do. Sharia is Islamic law. Nowhere in the Qu’ran does it say that Muslims living in a non-Muslim state should live by Sharia; that’s a ridiculous idea and contrary to many other concepts in Islam. As well, there are many, many different schools of Islamic jurisprudence. The Grand Mufti of Egypt and Ayatolla Khamenei, for example, don’t always agree.

As someone mentioned, in the Maliki school of jurisprudence (and several others, if I'm not mistaken), abuse is grounds for divorce. Moreover, many Muslims (Ali Eteraz, for one) dispute the translation of the Qu'ran that says that husbands can beat disobedient wives. The problem is that there has never been a single Arabic language, and so many passages in the Qu'ran have several wildly varying interpretations. For example, in the passage in question, what is translated as "beat" may more likely mean "leave." Likewise, the "70 virgins" we hear about are more likely "white grapes."

Finally, the Qu'ran, while authoritative, is not the only source for Islamic law (Sharia). Hadiths are used as well, and Muhammad is considered the living Qu'ran, so Muslims assume that what he did was the will of Allah. There is a Hadith that westerners tend to ignore when complaining about the way the little brown women are treated by Islam (not by Muslim men, but by Islam) that relates Muhammad as saying "How does anyone of you beat his wife as he beats the stallion camel and then he may embrace (sleep with) her?" As well, Muhammad is believed to have never hit a woman in his life, and said "do not beat the female servants of Allah."

Finally, jurists immediately following Muhammad (who generally are considered to have reached closest to the truth) qualified the only "beating" allowed as "dharban ghayra mubarrih" or a tap that does no harm. Anyone who says that Islam allows wife beating is talking out of their ass.

I think the judge did this to publicize her belief that Islam's treatment of women is backward. The public outcry over her ruling only brings focus to the way in which women are treated under Islamic rule.

I don't know that I would take such a chance and use the judicial system in a such a manner, but this is my belief that this is this judge's intent.

And for all the apologists who state that Muhammad only allowed a "beating" to be "a tap that does no harm," they are ignoring that such a "tap" has as it's inherent purpose, humiliation.

The public outcry over her ruling only brings focus to the way in which women are treated under Islamic rule.

Seriously, I can't believe you just got away with generalizing "Islamic Rule" like that.

*sigh* I don't even know where to start, but I guess one of the best places I can think of is in this book. It's a great book if you're a well-intentioned geek whose response to my comment will be, "Really? Wow...okay, where can I learn more about what most Islamic people actually mean when they say they wish there were Islamic Rule?"

(Hint--it's a little like the Christianity of Streetprophets.com types, but I'll let the book's author explain it even better)

The judge thought she was using Islamic law. I guess the Muslim women in Canada who opposed an effort by the Muslim men to have Muslim issues covered by Muslim law instead of Canadian law had a different view of Muslim law than people iike Eteraz and others who spend their time looking at texts instead of what really happens and is justified not by ancient texts but by the local imams.
If the Muslim women don't like Muslim law in this area, we ought to be paying attention to them, instead of to detached scholarship.