With apologies for the brevity of this post but…you know when you see an article which screams for blogging but you just can’t get your head around the pure wrongness running through the thing?

This is one of those moments. TheEye is going to pour a drink and return to reflect on this piece of BBC “journalism”.

Update: Okay, having poured a stiff scotch:

Quite why the BBC picked a couple of lesbians is unclear. Maybe they’d make the article more ‘approachable’…..TheEye initially typed ‘touchy feely’ there but it would been a double meaning too far…although it soon turns out that they are a couple of nutters.

“I wanted to wear leather, but Asra wouldn’t let me,” she sighs.

“We got rings from Camden market, and we drew up contracts – we got a blueprint off the internet of a heterosexual contract and we both looked at it separately, to see if there were things we wanted to change.”

“I remember I put about the dog – that if we broke up, Asra wouldn’t steal the dog.”

…and one of them is a convert, just to make things even odder.

Sarah and Asra know their marriage is unorthodox, and the idea of a gay nikah would be rejected by the majority of Muslim scholars, but Sarah says it is nobody’s business.

It’s a bit more than “majority” and “rejected“, sweetheart.

Same-sex intercourse carries the death penalty in five officially Muslim nations: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mauritania, Sudan, and Yemen. It formerly carried the death penalty in Afghanistan under the Taliban, and in Iraq under a 2001 decree by Saddam Hussein. In other Muslim nations, such as Bahrain, Qatar, Algeria or the Maldives, homosexuality is punished with jail time, fines or corporal punishment.

There’s no argument that these laws are ambiguous. In its 1991 Constitution, Iran specifically adopted execution as the punishment for sodomy. Articles 108-113 say:


Sodomy is a crime, for which both partners are punished. The punishment is death if the participants are adults, of sound mind and consenting; the method of execution is for the Shari’a judge to decide.

Sometimes, though, mercy is shown. In February 1998, the Taliban ordered this punishment for three men convicted of sodomy:

On Wednesday, the Taleban ordered the execution of three men for sodomy in the southern town of Kandahar, southern Afghanistan. They were ordered to be buried alive under a pile of stones and a wall was pushed on top of them by a tank. Their lives were to be spared if they survived for 30 minutes and were still alive when the stones were removed.

The ‘survival’ clause is hardly a bonus though.

So get it through your head, you daft bints. They aren’t secretly on your side or playing religiously hard-to-get. There’s a whole religious mob out there who would be quite happy to see you dead. You don’t get that down the Methodists.

Maybe you think that your family will throw soft fluffy stones at you instead, eh? After all, what are brothers for?

Much as it’ll be highly entertaining to see the look on their faces when the goon squad turn up to impose the will of Mohammed (the one with the 9 year old girlfriend, remember) on these two, you’ve got to ask yourself about where the public interest story is here.

The BBC have really picked a corker of an obscure hobbyhorse. Not sure what percentage of the UK population are ‘married’ lesbian Islamists but it’s a fair bet that it’s a minority sport. Perhaps the BBC are trying to highlight the hypocrisy and contradictions of the knuckle-dragging UAF? Actually, no, that’s not likely.

Still, it’s telly-tax money well spent, eh?