Australia: Muslim mufti says women encourage rape

65-year old Sheikh Taj Din al-Hilaly, the Egyptian-born imam of the Lakemba Mosque in Sydney, is no stranger to controversy. In 1988 he notoriously addressed Muslim students in Sydney University with a speech about Jews in which he said, amongst other things: "The Jews try to control the world through sex, then sexual perversion, then the promotion of espionage, traitory, and economic hoarding."

As well as his anti-semitism, Hilaly has some strange views on terrorism. He is reputed to have been caught on camera, weeks prior to the 9/11 attacks, extolling Islamic suicide bombers in the Middle East, calling them "heroes', stated Australian Liberal Party MP, Christopher Pyne. The imam has, since 1989, been paid an annual salary of 40,000 Australian dollars ($29,668 US) from the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC) to be Australia's "mufti".

The latest scandal which the "Mufti" has created involves his suggestions that "immodestly dressed" women who who do not wear Islamic headdresses are to be blamed for being preyed upon by men. The Australian reports that the "Mufti" has compared such women to abandoned "meat" attracting voracious animals.

The Mufti made the comments at a Ramadan speech which has not pleased Muslim women leaders. The speech was made last month to 500 worshippers in Sydney as a sermon. Hilaly said: "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it...whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem."

"If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred," he said, following the statement with the observation that women were "weapons" used by Satan to control men.

"It is said in the state of zina (adultery), the responsibility falls 90 per cent of the time on the woman. Why? Because she possesses the weapon of enticement (igraa)," he claimed.

Hilaly made the statement after making an indirect allusion to the 2000 gang-rapes in Sydney, carried out by Muslim young men. The ringleaders, Bilal and Mohammed Skaf were handed down lengthy prison sentences on July 28. Bilal Skaf smiled as he was sentenced. The original sentencing report shows how the Muslim rapists had deliberately set out to commit rape. There was never any evidence that their victims, some as young as 16, had even thought of provoking their brutal degradation. Only the perverse mind of a "Mufti" or a Muslim rapist could construe that the girls were "abandoned meat" to be devoured.

The Australian describes the outraged responses of Muslim women to the Mufti's speech. Iktimal Hage-Ali said his comments made her "disgusted and offended." A former member of the Muslim Reference group, prime minister John Howard's advisory group, she said: "The onus should not be on the female to not attract attention, it should be on males to learn how to control themselves."

Hage-Ali said: "I find it very offensive that a man who considers himself as a mufti, a leader of Australia's Muslims, can give comment that lacks intelligence and common sense."

Aziza Abdel-Halim said that such remarks, made at Ramadan were "below and beyond any comment (and) do not deserve any consideration."

The lawyer Waleed Ali, spokesman for the Islamic Council of Victoria, also condemned the Mufti's comments, saying that the notion that a hijab (Muslim headscarf) being an antidote to rape was "ignorant and naive", and said