Many in the West were shocked to learn that, in recently ruling that criticism of Muhammad is tantamount to incitement to hatred and thus not protected free speech, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) had effectively adopted Islamic Sharia’s ban on free speech. Freedom of speech is the fundamental Western right, formerly prized and zealously guarded.

The greater shock, however, is not that the ECHR ruled in compliance with Sharia, but that many Western nations intentionally uphold Sharia stipulations that contradict one-time Western values — even as most of their citizenry have no clue.

Take, for instance, a Canadian law which — in accordance with Sharia — essentially banned the adoption of children from Muslim nations.

As this week’s CBC report explained, back in 2013 “Canada banned adoptions from Pakistan without warning”:

Canada quietly extended the same restriction to virtually all Muslim countries. The reason: According to the federal government, adoptions aren’t permissible under Shariah law … Documents obtained through access to information legislation reveal the extent to which Canadian officials were delving into the particulars of Shariah law and in the process, bringing adoptions from Muslim countries to a near-halt.

Indeed, documents from 2013 indicate that Canadian federal officials had become preoccupied with the question of adoption in the context and according to the intricacies of Islamic law. “It is reasonable to assume,” reads one from June 2013, “that … a change in the child’s parentage is strictly prohibited under Shariah law.” “In the Islamic view,” it continues, “the child does not become a true child of the ‘adoptive’ parents.”

Accordingly, per the report:

Canadian officials have been restricting adoptions from various Muslim countries on an ad hoc basis for at least a decade — saying those countries don’t allow adoption and citing Shariah law.

The reason Sharia bans adoption revolves around Muhammad.

In the Koran, when the prophet once went to visit his adopted son Zayd bin al-Haritha in his tent, Muhammad’s eyes fell upon Zayd’s unveiled wife, Zaynab, whom Muhammad had earlier pressured into marrying his adopted son. (Koran 33:36 — which commands Muslims always to obey Allah/Muhammad without objection — was “revealed” in this context.)

Muhammad was instantly enamored by the sight of his scantily clad daughter-in-law. It was not long before Zayd realized that the prophet desired his wife. So he humbly offered to divorce her; but Muhammad, knowing how bad it would appear to his followers if he added his own son’s wife to his already burgeoning harem, refused.

But then Muhammad received another “revelation” (Koran 33:36-42): Allah ordered him to marry Zaynab. This was the Islamic deity’s will all along — to expose the problems with adoption.

Allah further chastised Muhammad; of all people surely a prophet should concern himself only with Allah’s will, not other people’s opinions. Finally, to guard Muhammad from the stigma of marrying and copulating with whom was considered his daughter, Allah abolished the traditional notion of adoption (see also Koran 33:4), thereby allowing men to have the ex-wives of their one-time but no longer adopted sons.

Needless to say, of all the impieties attributed to Muhammad in Islamic scriptures — and these are not a few — nothing so underscored his imposture among non-Muslims as much as this Zayd/Zaynab affair.

Virtually every Christian polemic against Islam from the Seventh Century on cites it, if not highlights it. For instance, in his exchange with Caliph Omar II in 718, Byzantine emperor Leo III cited it in the context of how Muhammad always imputed his carnal behavior to God:

Nor do I wish to pass over in silence the abominable authorization given you [Muslims] by your legislator [Muhammad] to have with your wives a commerce that he has compared, I am ashamed to say, to the tilling of fields [e.g., Koran 2:223]. As a consequence of this license, a goodly number of you have contracted the habit of multiplying their commerce [sex] with women, as if it were a question of tilling fields. Nor can I forget the chastity of your Prophet and the manner full of artifice whereby he succeeded in seducing the woman Zaynab. Of all these abominations the worst is that of accusing God of being the originator of all these filthy acts, which fact has doubtless been the cause of the introduction among your compatriots of this disgusting law [treating women as “tilling fields”]. Is there indeed a worse blasphemy than that of alleging that God is the cause of all this evil? (Sword and Scimitar, p.63.)

Here, then, is a reminder of just how far Western civilization has abandoned its rational and humanistic roots in order to appease irrational and inhuman practices. Thanks to entrenched relativism and “multiculturalism,” Western ethics are now deemed no better than — maybe not even as good as — Sharia.

Gone are men like British General Charles Napier (b. 1853): When Indian priests insisted on the custom of sati — burning the widows of deceased Hindu men with them — he responded by saying: “My nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them.”

Whereas once the Zaynab episode and its fruits — including an inhuman and irrational ban on adoption — epitomized all that was wrong with Islam in Western eyes, today it is on its way to epitomizing all that is wrong with the West itself.