On March 12, 2009, Mohammad Momin Khawaja was convicted of terrorist activity, almost five years after his arrest by Canadian authorities for plotting, with British Islamic extremists, to plant explosives in London nightclubs to shred her Majesty’s unwary subjects by the score for having too much fun (Operation Crevice).

In June 2011, the Supreme Court of Canada agreed to hear an appeal of his terrorism conviction. The appeal is expected to be heard in the fall. His lawyers will likely argue that he was not a terrorist but a legitimate enemy combatant, and that his ultimate goal was not to kill British citizens, but NATO forces operating in Afghanistan, which at the time included Canadian troops.

Khawaja's failing defence was that he was set on joining insurgents fighting NATO troops in Afghanistan to quench his rage for what he perceived to be a new Crusade against the Muslim world. Ottawa Citizen, June 30, 2011

If the Court decides that he was not a terrorist but an enemy combatant, his sentence of life in prison, which in Canada is ten years before you can apply for a get-out-of-jail card i.e. parole, can be expected to be reduced, even if he was planning to kill, not only foreigners, but Canadians serving abroad.

That the first appeal to be heard by the Supreme Court of Canada where Islam is front and center is about showing leniency for a Canadian-born would-be enemy combatant comes as a bit of a surprise.

If you have read The Fractured Nation Interviews you know that I expected that Islam’s first appearance before the Supreme Court of Canada would be to argue that the freedom of religion clause in Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedom protects a husband from criminal prosecution for exercising his God-given right to discipline his wife, or wives, as he sees fit, including beating them, because God has put him in charge.

4:34 Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made some of them excel the others, and because they spend some of their wealth. Hence righteous women are obedient, guarding the unseen which Allah has guarded. And those of them that you fear might rebel, admonish them and abandon them in their beds and beat them. Should they obey you, do not seek a way of harming them; for Allah is Sublime and Great!

The Supreme Court of Canada, in the speculative fiction that is Canada - The Fractured Nation Interviews, to everyone’s surprise, dismissed the appeal. The Supreme Court, until that time, it was said, had not met a religious right that it did not like.

It’s not that the Court was not sympathetic to the arguments made by the appellants, and was not moved by their willingness to still make the husband who beats his wife to death liable for prosecution for involuntary manslaughter, but there was the pesky overriding equality clause which specified that what was good for the goose was good for the gander.

28. Notwithstanding anything in this Charter, the rights and freedoms referred to in it are guaranteed equally to male and female persons.

If the equality clause was to be respected, the Court could not rule that a husband had a right to beat his wife (or wives) without granting his wives the right to beat him up, thereby bringing a whole new meaning to the expression “the battle of the sexes.”

The next appeal to get an exception from secular law on religious grounds, in my work of speculative fiction about the future of Canada, was based on what I call a straitjacket-clause.

A straitjacket-clause is an overriding legal principle or precedent that, like the equality clause, offers little wiggle room. Clause 27 of the Charter is such a clause. It not only instructs governments, but the courts to protect Canada’s multicultural character and to promote it at every opportunity, in effect, to be biased where it comes in conflict with other rights.

27. This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.

The appeal in The Fractured Nation Interviews was against a lower court ruling which refused to lower the age of consent for a Muslim man who wished to marry a nine year old girl.

The lower court would not make an exception to the age of consent for girls because it felt it would have to do the same for boys under the equality provision of the Charter thereby exposing both sexes to the same type of predatory pedophiles. The danger for young boys was very real with gay marriages having been recognized in law and with gay couples having the same rights as heterosexual pairings.

A core concept of Islamic law, or the Sharia, is that the Prophet Muhammad is the embodiment of the perfect human being who’s every word is wisdom incarnate, and whose example is an example for the believers. He is everyman's role model.

If the perfect human being did it, then every believer can do the same, and the perfect human being married nine-year-old Aisha, the daughter of his closest friend and successor Abu Bakr.

Aisha’s own recollection of her wedding day and her age at the time:

"My mother came to me while I was being swung on a swing between two branches and got me down. My nurse took over and wiped my face with some water and started leading me. When I was at the door she stopped so I could catch my breath. I was brought in while Muhammad was sitting on a bed in our house. My mother made me sit on his lap. The other men and women got up and left. The Prophet consummated his marriage with me in my house when I was nine years old. Neither a camel nor a sheep was slaughtered on behalf of me*.” Tabari IX:131

The Supreme Court granted the appeal and sanctioned marriage and sex between tweens (preteen girls usually) and adult males if your religion allowed it. It had no choice having accepted the appellant’s argument that religion under Canada’s multicultural doctrine was an integral part of a people’s culture which the Charter demanded be protected and promoted.

The argument made by those who opposed lowering the age of consent because children could not make an informed decision about being sexually violated by an adult, as required under existing legislation, was dismissed by the Court.

They accepted the counter-argument made by those wishing to lower the age of females with whom men could legally have sex that, in Islam, marriage is a contract which requires parental consent, therefore this parental consent to marriage should be considered “informed consent” on behalf of the child.

The equality provision of the Charter should have, under normal circumstances, trumped the protection and promotion of often primitive traditions clause, but it didn’t.

Equality it would seem is a relative thing, or so the Court said in its ruling, writing that equality means different things to different cultures, each of which were equally valid.

As the Ayatollah explained to Johnny MacDonald in The Interviews, Islam considers women equal to men, but it is an equality that recognizes the superior moral character and intellectual capabilities of males.

The future Canada would see girls as young as nine married to men who often could be their grandfathers.

What has all this to do with the appeal of Mohammad Momin Khawaja's sentence?

Everything and nothing, if only to suggest a strategy to Mr. Khawaja’s legal team if, as is the intent of the following, their objective is to have the Supreme Court declare him an enemy combatant and not a terrorist.

Mr. Khawaja can only be declared an enemy combatant if a state of war exists between Islam and Islam’s enemies which are, for all intents and purposes, anyone who refuses to submit to the Will of Allah i.e. become Muslims.

This should be relatively easy to do, starting with the more than thousand-year-old letter addressed to the governor of Egypt carefully preserved behind glass in the Holy Treasury within the third courtyard of the old Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. In this letter, which God's Messenger sent to all kingdoms i.e. countries bordering the Arab Peninsula after having eliminated all opposition to Allah's rule there, he demands that the recipient and his subject surrender to the Will of Allah or it's war.

Of course, the Prophet’s ultimatum to the leaders of his known world would not be valid if he did not have Allah's approval, end he did (read The War Surah).

The Prophet's declaration of war and the Koran's approval of that war until all of humanity is on its knees bowing before Allah should be sufficient to convince the Court that a state of war exists and has existed for more than 1,400 years between those who believe in Allah and His Messenger and those who don't.

Mohammad Momin Khawaja claims he is a soldier in that war and his claim should be accepted at face value for it is the truth as he sees it, as the Taliban see it, and as those who fight for Al-Qaeda see it.

Finally, the Court may need to be reminded that, except for a temporary halt at the gates of Vienna in 1683, a small setback in Spain during the reign of Isabella and Ferdinand, and a temporary reversal during the Mongol invasions, Islam has been on the march, sword in one hand, the Koran in the other, crossing borders to make believers out of unbelievers ever since the Prophet's declaration of war.

I hope the Supreme Court rules that Mr. Mohammad Momin Khawaja was indeed a lawful combatant, and perhaps a traitor as well for wanting to murder Canadians sent to fight by Parliament in what it considered a just war.

If it does, it could be the first formal acknowledgement that we are indeed, as a society based on Judeo-Christian values, at war for our very survival. A war which Wafa Sultan, an outspoken Syrian-American woman characterized during a debate broadcast on Al-Jazeera as:

“a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between rationality and barbarity … between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship … between human rights, on one hand and the violation of these rights on the other … between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings.”

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Should the Court fail to recognize the validity of Mr. Khawaja's claim that he is an enemy combatant and not a terrorist, his lawyers may want to remind the Court that they also have the option of reducing, even abolishing their client’s sentence, because it is clear from the verses presented in the except Unbelievers Everywhere! What Is A God To Do? that he was doing what God expected of him.

The same type of argument was made in Multani v. Commission scolaire Marguerite Bourgeoys. The Supreme Court ruled that children could bring concealed weapons to school if their religion required them to do so, in part, to show that they were prepared to fight for their Faith with weapons at the ready.

At an elemental level, the only difference between the concealed kirpan and what Mr. Khawaja had in mind is the lethality of what he was prepared to do to protect his Faith.

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* The fact that Aisha's wedding to God's Messenger was not celebrated, the meaning of "Neither a camel nor a sheep was slaughtered on behalf of me" may be an indication that he was not proud of what he was about to do and did not want it to be an example for others or, that his people did not approve of their 50+ tribesman marrying and having sex with a child.

This was almost certainly the case with Aisha’s father Abu Bakr, who would have led the celebration and who according to Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her book The Caged Virgin, pleaded with God’s Messenger to wait until his daughter reached adulthood before marrying her, but the Prophet would not be denied.

A tragic consequences of the Prophet’s example is a dreadful infirmity called vesicovaginal fistula or VVF where the inflicted experience "the continuous involuntary discharge of urine into the vaginal vault", the result of violent rape or of children having children.

In sub-Sahara, where Islam is making the greatest inroad we are seeing, according to Modern Ghana newsmagazine, an extraordinary increase in vesicovaginal fistula. In Nigeria's Islamist north, for example, still according to Modern Ghana “thousands of underage child-wives are abandoned by their pedophile husbands when these little girls develop VVF and dribble urine - a complication of obstructed labour during underage child birth.”

Related Does Islam Encourage the Rape of Children?

Bernard Payeur, July 7, 2011