Pleas for condemned Saudi 'witch'

[frigidmagi]

BBC

Human Rights Watch has appealed to Saudi Arabia to halt the execution of a woman convicted of witchcraft.

In a letter to King Abdullah, the rights group described the trial and conviction of Fawza Falih as a miscarriage of justice.

The illiterate woman was detained by religious police in 2005 and allegedly beaten and forced to fingerprint a confession that she could not read.

Among her accusers was a man who alleged she made him impotent.

Human Rights Watch said that Ms Falih had exhausted all her chances of appealing against her death sentence and she could only now be saved if King Abdullah intervened.

'Undefined' crime

The US-based group is asking the Saudi ruler to void Ms Falih's conviction and to bring charges against the religious police who detained her and are alleged to have mistreated her.

Its letter to King Abdullah says the woman was tried for the undefined crime of witchcraft and that her conviction was on the basis of the written statements of witnesses who said that she had bewitched them.

Human Rights Watch says the trial failed to meet the safeguards in the Saudi justice system.

The confession which the defendant was forced to fingerprint was not even read out to her, the group says.

Also Ms Falih and her representatives were not allowed to attend most of the hearings.

When an appeal court decided she should not be executed, the law courts imposed the death sentence again, arguing that it would be in the public interest.

God Above you have got to be joking. Can we get a doctor to check these charges? Seriously I think all we need to disprove this is one doctor and 25 minutes.

[rhoenix]

Historically speaking, its somewhat funny to watch the switch-off between Islam and Christianity. While Christianity was doing the "kill the witches!" thing, the Islam-believing world was going through a comparative Enlightenment period, even purportedly making a successful airplane. Now, the complete opposite appears to be occurring.

On one hand, perhaps they just wanted a turn doing the Inquisition (what a show...The Inquisition, here we go...) thing.

Less flippantly, this situation is utterly revolting from our perspective.

[frigidmagi]

Islam-believing world was going through a comparative Enlightenment period, even purportedly making a successful airplane.

Okay I am gonna raise the flag on the airplane thing. Make with the sources or go home.

[rhoenix]

Okay I am gonna raise the flag on the airplane thing. Make with the sources or go home.

Consider this a belay, since I have to leave five minutes ago, and already spent too long making my TF post. I remember reading about it when I was taking history classes; I'll look it up and find sources for it when I get back.

So, consider this post a placeholder - I'll edit it when I get back. I'm sorry I can't do so now.

[rhoenix]

Alright, now that I'm home and have looked it up, I was partially right - the hang glider was believed to be invented during the Islamic Golden Age, not the airplane.

Parachutes and Gliders in Umayyad Spain

In 852, Ibn Firnas is said to have jumped off the top in a parachute-like apparatus, and survived with minor injuries.Islamic Spain during the Umayyad renaissance under the Caliphate of Cordoba witnessed several attempts at flight by the Arab polymath and inventor Abbas Ibn Firnas (his name is sometimes Latinized as "Armen Firman", leading to some confusion whether these two are different people), who was supported by the Emir Abd ar-Rahman II. In 852 he made a set of wings with cloth stiffened by wooden struts. With this umbrella-like apparatus, Ibn Firnas jumped off the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba - while he could not fly, his apparatus slowed his fall, and he escaped with minor injuries. His device is now considered to have been a prototype of the modern parachute.

Twenty-five years later, at the age of 65, Ibn Firnas came up with an improved design, which included the first flight control surfaces. He took this set of wings, considered to be the first hang glider, to a small hill called Jabal al-'arus, and apparently managed to fly for quite some time, by some accounts as long as ten minutes. This was the first attempt at controlled flight, as he was able to alter his altitude and change his direction in order to return to where he flew from. After successfully returning to his starting point, he eventually crashed to the ground, and said later that the landing could have been improved by providing a tail apparatus. His flight was apparently the inspiration for Eilmer of Malmesbury, more than a century later, who would fly for about 200 meters using a similar glider (circa 1010).

[frigidmagi]

The same website also talks about the Chinese flying people on kites. Not a huge seller here man. Got something more... Officalish? Something with a fact checker? Like Encyclopedia Britticana?

[SirNitram]

Lynn Townsend White Jr's "Eilmer of Malmesbury, an Eleventh Century Aviator: A Case Study of Technological Innovation, Its Context and Tradition" would be a better choice. It contains several descriptions of Firnas' attempt at flight.

[rhoenix]

The same website also talks about the Chinese flying people on kites. Not a huge seller here man. Got something more... Officalish? Something with a fact checker? Like Encyclopedia Britticana?

The first link I found was Wikipedia, and...yeah - wasn't going to reference that. After another traipse through Google's results, I found something from here:

How often we think of flight as something that's occurred only in the lifetime of people who are still living! Yet not only the dream of flight, but the fact of it as well, have been with us for millennia. The American historian Lynn White digs deeper and finds that Eilmer's flight had its own historical antecedents. He finds two somewhat sketchy accounts that indicate that a successful glider flight was made in the year 875 by a Moorish inventor named Ibn Firnas, living in Cordoba, Spain. It's entirely possible that word of Ibn Firnas's flight was brought to Eilmer by returning Crusaders.

An important thing about Eilmer's and Ibn Firnas's inventions of the glider is that both occurred in intellectual environments that fostered invention. Ibn Firnas lived during the Golden Age of Islamic art and science, and Eilmer belonged to the Benedictine order, which saw God Himself as a master craftsman.

* * *

Lynn Townsend White Jr's "Eilmer of Malmesbury, an Eleventh Century Aviator: A Case Study of Technological Innovation, Its Context and Tradition" would be a better choice. It contains several descriptions of Firnas' attempt at flight.

Ah, thank you - out of nothing else other than intellectual curiosity, I'll have to look that book up.

[frigidmagi]

Okay I'll concede to that with no problems.