The Stoning of Soraya M. - A Look at the Unapologetic Lack of Rights for Women Around the Globe

[warning: the following post contains graphic and disturbing content]

This is the true story of Soraya Manutchehri.

A 35 year-old Iranian woman and mother of 7 children, who in her own words states that she had become an "inconvenient wife."

She was married off at the age of 13 years-old to a man, Ghorban-Ali, 7 years her senior who was a local criminal. In this marriage she incurred regular beatings and emotional abuse.
According to senior Washington correspondent, Carl M. Cannon in his article on the politicsdaily.com website, "Ghorban-Ali showed himself to be more than a garden variety sociopath and town bully; he was a sadistic monster, and Islamic fundamentalism was his enabler, his aider, his abettor. In the anarchic days of the Iranian Revolution, Ghorban-Ali had found work as a prison guard in a neighboring town. There, he met a 14-year-old girl whom he wanted to marry. Polygamy was encouraged in Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, but Ghorban-Ali didn't want to support two families, and did not desire to return his wife's dowry. How to rid himself of his "old" wife? That was the easy part. Accuse her of infidelity. No matter that her husband had not actually seen anything untoward, or that Soraya was completely innocent, or that her husband's cynical accusations were only backed up by his cousin, who as it turned out had been coerced into concurring with the vaguest of accusations: a smile here, a brushed hand there. What court of law would find someone guilty on such flimsy evidence? A "sharia" court is the answer. And so Soraya was convicted. The sentence was death-death by stoning."



Soraya's story was bravely told by her aunt, Zahra Khanum to Freidoune Sahebjam, a stranded French-Iranian journalist traveling through the remote region. In a desperate attempt for justice for her sister and women tortured through similar circumstances, Zahra tells her story to Freidoune with the hopes that he escapes and communicates the violence of women to the world.

Cannon continues to write, "the practice of stoning is not only characteristic of rural Iran, but continues in such regions such as "Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, or anyplace where sharia is the law of the land. More common, by far, in the Muslim world is the perverse practice of "honor killings" -- the slaying of a woman or girl by male members of her own family on the basis of some presumed sexual indiscretion."

To learn more about stoning, female executions and the human rights violation against women throughout the globe, please visit: stop-stoning.org.