RUTHFULLY YOURS

Angela Merkel’s leftward drift cost her center-right party seats in September’s German election, and her center-left coalition partners fared even worse for having governed with her. Yet now she proposes to move even further left at the behest of that losing partner so she can form another unpopular coalition with them? Go figure.

Mrs. Merkel has failed to form a government since September’s murky result in which her center-right Christian Democrats (the CDU and Bavarian CSU) lost 65 seats. Her first try at a coalition, with the free-market Free Democrats (FDP) and the urban leftist Greens, fell apart when the FDP refused to bend on energy policy and migration.

Yet Mrs. Merkel is resisting a new election or a minority government, on the theory that either would be a post-War novelty in Germany and would echo a less stable and more frightening time in the country’s history. Instead she’s trying to browbeat the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) into negotiating another grand coalition after months of SPD resistance.

The SPD has participated in such coalitions for eight of the 12 years that Mrs. Merkel has been in office and seemed to have concluded after winning their lowest post-1949 vote share in September that voters want an opposition party that opposes.

On the policy merits a grand coalition is likely to be a bad deal. Some SPD leaders think the party can mitigate the political fallout from cooperation with Mrs. Merkel by striking a harder bargain than it has in the past, and Mrs. Merkel might go along to keep power.

That would mean less tax relief than the €15 billion ($18 billion) cuts to personal income taxes Mrs. Merkel promised before the election, or a further retreat from modest pension reforms that raised the retirement age. The SPD also could pull Mrs. Merkel away from a more realistic approach to Middle Eastern migration.

The bigger consequences of another grand coalition would be political. Mrs. Merkel, having been punished by voters for her milquetoast centrism, would be bowing to the policy wishes of a center-left party that now has even less of a mandate than it did before the election. This will be worse than the instability of a minority government or another election because it signals that voter dissatisfaction doesn’t matter in Berlin. That, and not a second election, is what creates opportunity for political extremists on the left and right.

How Shariah Law Handles Family Cases
Some Muslims in Greece are subject to rules based on the Quran governing marriages and legacies

Marriage
In a form of premarital agreement, the groom stipulates a specific amount of gold to be given to the bride in case of a divorce.
How Shariah Law Handles Family Cases
Some Muslims in Greece are subject to rules based on the Quran governing marriages and legacies

Divorce

The wife gets the gold set under premarital agreement, as well as three months of alimony payments. If the husband can’t fulfill the agreement, the couple has to stay married until he has the means to do so.
Inheritance
A dead person’s estate is distributed to all the legal heirs as set forth in Quran. A wife gets a 1/3 share, which drops to 1/8 if there are no children. Two-thirds of the assets are to be distributed among children at a ratio of 2:1 for sons and daughters. Other provisions apply to brothers, sisters and other relatives of the deceased.
Child custody
In case of a divorce, girls are to live with their mothers until age 10, boys until age 8. Thereafter they move in with their fathers, who are deemed more suited to teaching them how to behave. If the mother is found to be sinful, the mufti can decide that boys should live with the father from an earlier age.

KOMOTINI, Greece—In this sliver of land on the border with Turkey, about 100,000 Greek citizens live with a relic of Greece’s historically fraught relations with its neighbor: Shariah law.

In Western Thrace, Shariah law is enforced for Muslim citizens, making Greece the world’s only non-Muslim country that officially applies laws grounded in the Islamic faith.

But that situation could soon be coming to an end, with the Greek government having submitted legislation this week that would make compliance with Shariah optional in the wake of a clash between Muslim rules and Greek laws. Government officials said it would become law before an international court rules that the current arrangement breaches Europe’s human-rights standards.

Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is set on Friday to visit Thrace, where about a third of the 350,000 residents are Muslims who mostly speak Turkish. In a tense exchange with Greece’s president in Athens on Thursday, Mr. Erdogan said the rights of the region’s Turkish minority to uphold their traditions weren’t being properly honored.

His visit and his comments on the sensitive issue come on the heels of Wednesday’s debate in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, on whether to condemn Greece—where about 2% of the population is Muslim—for applying Shariah rules to family law.

The special status for Shariah law in Greece stretches back to the 19th century, when the country regained its independence after more than four centuries under Ottoman rule. Under an agreement set forth in the 1923 Lausanne Treaty, which said Thrace’s Muslim minority should be allowed to live under its customs, Greek legislation enshrined Shariah rules to govern family law for Muslims there.

Today, three muftis appointed by Greek authorities act as judges and enforce Shariah. That arrangement has persisted even after Turkey abolished Shariah in 1924 as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s push to modernize Turkey.

The historian carried secrets too heavy for one man to bear.

He packed his bag with his most treasured possessions before going to bed: the 1 terabyte hard drive with his evidence against the Islamic State group, an orange notebook half-filled with notes on Ottoman history, and, a keepsake, the first book from Amazon delivered to Mosul.

He passed the night in despair, imagining all the ways he could die, and the moment he would leave his mother and his city.

He had spent nearly his entire life in this home, with his five brothers and five sisters. He woke his mother in her bedroom on the ground floor.

“I am leaving,” he said. “Where?” she asked. “I am leaving,” was all he could say. He couldn’t endanger her by telling her anything more. In truth, since the IS had invaded his city, he’d lived a life about which she was totally unaware.

He felt her eyes on the back of his neck, and headed to the waiting Chevrolet. He didn’t look back.

For nearly two years, he’d wandered the streets of occupied Mosul, chatting with shopkeepers and Islamic State fighters, visiting friends who worked at the hospital, swapping scraps of information. He grew out his hair and his beard and wore the shortened trousers required by IS. He forced himself to witness the beheadings and deaths by stoning, so he could hear the killers call out the names of the condemned and their supposed crimes.

The blogger known as Mosul Eye kept his identity a secret as he documented Islamic State rule.

He wasn’t a spy. He was an undercover historian and blogger . As IS turned the Iraqi city he loved into a fundamentalist bastion, he decided he would show the world how the extremists had distorted its true nature, how they were trying to rewrite the past and forge a brutal Sunni-only future for a city that had once welcomed many faiths.

He knew that if he was caught he too would be killed.