Crosswalk reports:
…Rifqa Bary, who fled her Muslim parents’ home in Ohio last year after her conversion to Christianity, remains in fear of deportation. Her attorney told a judge Monday that the 17-year-old is being blocked by her Muslim parents from fighting the possibility of deportation. Rifqa has been in foster care for months, but is an illegal immigrant, along with her family, from Sri Lanka. She maintains her fear of harm if she is forced to return to the Muslim state.
Perhaps they got their information on the country from pseudo-expert Robert Spencer; last August he regaled FrontPage readers with the detail that
…Rifqa Bary hails from Sri Lanka, where the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence prevails. A Shafi’i manual of Islamic law directs that “when a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed. In such a case, it is obligatory for the caliph (A: or his representative) to ask him to repent and return to Islam. If he does, it is accepted from him, but if he refuses, he is immediately killed.” (‘Umdat al-Salik o8.1-2).
Bary herself has tearfully warned that Sri Lanka operates “asylums” where “they put people like me”.
The notion of Sri Lanka as a “Muslim state” where a fourteenth-century manual of jurisprudence “prevails” is somewhat baffling. The Times reported last month:
An expatriate Sri Lankan woman who wrote two books about her conversion from Buddhism to Islam has been arrested while on holiday in Sri Lanka, apparently for causing offence to Buddhists.
Sarah Malini Perera, who was born in Sri Lanka but has lived in Bahrain since 1985 and converted to Islam in 1999, was arrested last week under the country’s strict emergency laws, according to the police.
…Sri Lanka’s constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but also says that the state “shall give Buddhism the foremost place and accordingly it shall be the duty of the state to protect and foster” the religion.
I blogged previously on Bary here.
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