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Nazira Naz Tareen

Founder and past president, Ottawa Muslim Women’s Organization

While the Shafia family’s Muslim faith played a role in the criminal proceedings, note that Islam does not condone killings in order to preserve honour, says the India-born founder and past president of the Ottawa Muslim Women’s Organization. “The Quaran says if you kill one human being, it’s like you’ve killed all of humanity,” she says. “If you save one human being, it’s like you’ve saved all of humanity.” The Shafias committed murder and “it’s totally, totally cultural and it’s totally against the teachings of Islam.” Since many Muslims read the Quaran in Arabic, they may not glean that the Prophet Muhammad actually afforded women more rights than men and that children no longer answer to parents in their teen years —they answer to God, she says. Most countries are misinterpreting Sharia law to mean the Prophet’s urging to “protect” women really means to control them, she adds.

Raheel Raza

Activist and author of Their Jihad, Not My Jihad

Their communities so failed Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia, aged 19, 17 and 13 and Rona Amir Mohammad, 53, that Ms. Raza wonders if they would have received help had they been four white women instead of four Afghan-Canadians. “Was this political correctness to a painful degree?” asks the Toronto-based activist and author of Their Jihad, Not My Jihad. It’s time to stop being so sensitive in the name of preserving multiculturalism, she says.. “Immigrants bring this excess baggage with them and as a community, our biggest problem is that we remain in denial and we can’t address the issues,” says the Pakistan-born Ms. Raza. “What this verdict has done is open the door to a great deal of debate and discussion. I think we have a long, long way to go.” While Canada wants its immigrants to integrate, when there are problems, they tend to be “ghettoized,” she says, and, with a mind for sensitivity, it’s “their culture, their problem…But what is sensitivity in comparison to four lives?”