Gang raped by 7 men? That's 200 lashes

I'm not going to waste much energy on this thread of insults, so here's a short summary of my perspective:

Yes, the article was factually incomplete. But whether the wife was having an affair or not remains unclear. What we know is that she was with another man. This is illegal there (whether it should be or not), so we may assume that she knew she was committing an offence (although it is a ridiculous offence in my eyes).

What surprises me is the change of opinion this produced in some posters here. She met with a man who wasn't a husband, and possibly had an affair with him, so she deserves to be abducted, raped, and then lashed for it?! And people say Islam is backwards in its views...!

The fact that she was meeting with another man had nothing to do with the rape. If she had been alone, she would have been even easier to abduct. Does one offence justify the other, much more severe one? Or does the injustce rather lie in the act of victim-blaming for rape itself? Or in the fact that women are repressed?

I would say it's a combination of all of these, but that this is not necessarily a direct consequence of the Islamic religion as such. Islam in Germany is different from Islam in urban Turkey, which is different from Islam in rural Turkey, which is different from Islam in Saudi Arabia...Religions do not develop independently; they are a product of the social context. In this case, it is the product of a highly stratified society, where some are immensely rich due to oil, a wealth that was acquired over a relatively short period of time, and the rest very poor. This social stratification extends to every area, including the family, where it is produced according to gender and age.

Consider the industrialisation period in Western Europe (factory owners and the proletariat, etc.), which didn't lead to anything that extreme, but still included a similar hierarchy, with female workers getting hardly any pay in the factories, and raising children at the same time, children being exploited even more in the factories with even less protection from accidents and death, etc. Then look at the sexual moral of the middle class at that time, the strict Victorian rules of conduct for women.

Rather than bashing a whole religion, we should perhaps consider where these views originated, and look to change the social conditions which produced them, and question our own perceived moral superiority.

Jam it back in, in the dark.