From Family Security Matters
November 4, 2011
By: Paul Marshall and Nina Shea
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 480 pp.
ISBN: 0199812284
“Apostasy is, in principle, subject to sharia hudud
rules, which means that the punishment---death---is believed to be
fixed by divine order and not subject to judicial discretion...,” write
Paul Marshall and Nina Shea in chapter two of Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Laws are Choking Freedom Worldwide (p. 23), without further explanation.
Silenced falls
far short of the landmark study it might have been, had the authors
honestly addressed foundational Islamic principles, history and texts
that support offending modern codes, and stated the stupefyingly
consistent and pervasive use of sharia laws throughout Muslim history. Specifically, hudud refer to Islamic behavioral limits thought divine since Mohammed established the creed. Sharia's heavenly status and its stubborn exercise rest squarely on Koran (considered sacred and immutable) and sunnah, or “traditions.” The latter includes hadith and sira, Mohammed's recorded speech and deeds; and his life (usually, the Ibn Ishaq biography). Apostasy---rejecting Islam---is but one offense to divinity. Adultery similarly requires capital punishment, and theft demands amputation.
To assert that hudud are rarely enforced, or fearing them is “lunacy,” as do Sadiq Reza and other Islamic law professors, is sheer absurdity. But readers of Silenced will not learn here that the horrors the book describes represent unadulterated use of classical hudud and sharia laws, as always practiced.
Three Muslim essayists
Abdurahman Wahid (Gus Dur).
In
order “to show that such temporal punishments are not required by
Islam,” the authors deliberately avoid discussing the history of
apostasy and blasphemy laws and “systematic treatment in Islamic
jurisprudence and theology” (p. 287). They leave that topic to “three
noted Muslim scholars” whose essays they include. The Nahdlatul Ulama
(NU) party provided the forward by the late Indonesian president,
reputed Muslim reformer Abdurahman Wahid (1940-2009). Wahid misleadingly
casts the “original” meaning of apostasy (as named in the index), and
its required punishment---death---as only
“the
legacy of historical circumstances and political calculations
stretching back to...early ...Islam, when apostasy generally coincided
with desertion from the caliph's army and/or rejection of his authority
and thus constituted treason.... [E]mbedding (i.e. codification) of
[its] harsh punishments...into Islamic law [is] a...byproduct of these
circumstances, framed [by] human calculations and expediency, [not] the
eternal dictate of Islam sharia on the issue....
“The...development
and use of the term sharia to refer to Islamic law often lead those
unfamiliar with [it] to conflate man-made law with its revelatory
inspiration, and...to elevate to Divine [status] products of human
understanding, ... necessarily conditioned by space and time.
Wahid further attempts to distinguish sharia and its purported embodiment of “perennial values” from Islamic law. He says the latter resulted from “itjihad (interpretation),” depends on circumstance (al hukm yadur ma'a al'illah wujudan wa 'adaman)
and must be “continuously reviewed” to adapt and prevent Islamic law
from obsolescence, rigidity and failing to connect with contemporary
Muslim lives and sharia's own “perennial values.” He thus claims that Islam's greatest fiqh (jurisprudence) scholars, were “deeply grounded in tassawuf,”
Islamic mysticism, and balanced “the letter of the law with the spirit”
of accommodation to differing culture and practice across the Maghreb,
Sahara, sub-Saharan Sahel region, southern Africa, Persia, Asia, the
East Indies and the former Roman empire.
Reformer or not, Wahid headed an Islamic party, co-founded in 1926 Java by his grandfathers, both members of its sharia
council, which purveyed strict Islamic law, according to Dr. Andrew
Bostom. It required that members follow one of four Sunni schools of
(Islamic) law---of “Muhammad bin Idris As-Shafi, Imam Malik bin Anas,
Imam Abu Hanifa or Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal---and to do everything
beneficial to Islam.” Al-Shafi'i (d. 820) himself interpreted Koran 2:217 “to mean that the death penalty should be prescribed for apostates,” the scholar Ibn Warraq explains in Leaving Islam. [1]
Moreover, all Sunni sharia schools had closed the “gates of itjihad,” freedom to interpret, 500 years ago. Lately, a few conservative Sunnis favor its reinstatement. Yet the Shi'a kept “benefits of ijtihad” alive, and witnessed no modern reforms, notes analyst and retired U.S. Army officer W. Patrick Lang. Iran maintains draconian sharia-based laws. Its current-day effects are detailed in chapter three.
Unsuccessful reformists
Ultimately, Wahid failed to improve Indonesia's political landscape. Educated at Islamic schools, he joined NU at his grandfathers' behest and took over in 1984, planning a secular “religious movement” to give social progress to all. He opposed Islamic supremacism. Muslims reacted violently. In 1998, as Suharto stoked anti-Chinese riots, Wahid sought calm to no avail. Hardline Muslims burned Chinese homes and shops, raped hundreds and killed at least 1,000---just as they had 100,000 ethnic Chinese in the mid-1960s. Wahid opposed East Timor's secession, although before its 2002 independence, he apologized for Indonesia's 1978 occupation and atrocities. Yet jihadis continued to attack Javanese and Maluku Christians (often with military aid), raided dozens of villages, forced thousands to convert and killed at least 5,000. Genocide has raised Indonesia's Muslim population to nearly 90% of its total.
The
late Muslim reformer Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd (1943-2010) wrote “Renewing
Quranic Studies in the Contemporary World.” Although director of the
International Institute of Quranic Studies (IIQS), he was declared an apostate
by Egypt's Court of Cassation (its highest). He fled. His marriage was
forcibly dissolved. He viewed Koran from an “objective historical
perspective,” asked how it “was transmitted, propagated, codified, and
ultimately canonized,” and sought “interpretive diversity.” He condemned
blasphemy and apostasy laws projecting Koran as “eternal and
uncreated,” and opposing modern concepts and life principles of freedom,
justice, “human rights and dignity of man....”
Indeed, apostasy and blasphemy laws embedded in 1400 years of Islamic jurisprudence prohibit such thoughts. In Sept. 1978, the fatwa council at Cairo's al-Azhar University,
the closest Muslim equivalent to the Vatican, issued an official ruling
on the case of an Egyptian emigre and convert to Christianity:
“...This
man has committed apostasy; he must be given a chance to repent and if
he does not then he must be killed according to Shariah.
“As
far as his children are concerned, as long as they are children they
are considered Muslim, but after they reach the age of puberty, then if
they remain with Islam they are Muslim, but if they leave Islam and they
do not repent they must be killed and Allah knows best.”[2]
Finally,
a chapter on reform of classical Muslim apostasy and blasphemy laws
came from Maldives-native Abdullah Saeed, the Sultan of Oman Arab and
Islamic studies professor at Australia's University of Melbourne. He
includes an internet fatwa by Muhammad Salah al-Munajjid on punishment of a murtadd, referencing the classical Bukhari hadith,
“if someone changes his religion, kill him.” Like Wahid, Saeed insists
on the socio-political genesis of apostasy's prescribed punishment that
specified those “in a state of war against Muslims.” It was more “akin
to treason” than a simple matter of changing one's belief. He also
argues that “clear textual proofs that guarantee certainty of knowledge ('ilm qat'i)
were lacking in this debate.” If any, his second thought would most
likely gain limited acceptance by Muslim jurists in 2011. Ordinary
Muslims and non-Muslims in Islamic regions increasingly oppose classical
apostasy laws and other religious restrictions, he writes, increasingly
pressuring them to comply with human rights standards like the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights
of 1948. Yet Saeed's own homeland banned the 2004 book on apostasy,
co-authored with his brother and former Maldives attorney general Hasaan
Saeed, on which he based this chapter.
How ready are Muslim jurists to change? The evidence suggests, not very.
Harsh reality
The
hopes of Muslim reformers put them sharply at odds both with
present-day reality and age-old Islamic conventions. Usefully, the book does
catalog myriad effects of current legal codes for eight Muslim nations
and regions, mostly penalties for allegedly criticizing or rejecting
Islam. In Part II, chapters note dozens of cases that ended in
execution, murder, or exile. Readers little aware of legal doctrines
ruling Muslim nations, regions and groups likely will find their dire
results quite shocking.
Saudi
Arabia, “perhaps the most repressively controlled Muslim country in the
Sunni world,” often victimizes citizens and foreigners, alike. Not for over 300 years
have North American courts routinely tried people for witchcraft. But
sorcery charges often precede Saudi death sentences, as for Lebanese
Shi'a TV psychic Ali Hussain Sibat after his May 2008 Medina pilgrimage. In prison for 30 months, he won (with foreign help), a new trial and alternative, deportation.
But few escape. In Sept. 2011, Sudanese Abdul Hamid al-Fakki was beheaded for alleged “witchcraft and sorcery.” A sharia court in 2008 condemned an illiterate and ill Fawza Falih for allegedly causing a man's impotence. In 2011 officials admitted she had choked on food and died in prison last year.
Under the Saudi takfir principle (p. 30-31), Muslims may likewise accuse others
of leaving Islam---and often do. Those letting men and women to mix at
school or work are infidels. “Either he retracts or he must be killed,”
said sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Barrak in Feb. 2010. “He who casts doubt
about their infidelity leaves no doubt about his own infidelity,” wrote
Grand Mufti Bin Baz in a 2005 Saudi government brochure at its U.S.
embassy, of an unnamed European cleric who had said “declaring Jews and
Christians infidels is not allowed,” instantly making the cleric a
murder target. Similar Saudi tracts denounce “innovative imams” as
“heretics [whose] prayers are invalid.”
Egypt also commonly alleges apostasy, despite contrary claims by sharia law professor Reza.
“Islamic jurisprudence is the principle source of legislation,” Anwar
el-Sadat added to constitution Article 2 in 1971 (p. 62). Thus Muslims
often use the hisba doctrine to legally prosecute those considered “harmful to Islam,” chiefly against traditionally repressed religious minorities like Coptic Christians. In fact, penal code article 98 (f) criminalizes “ridiculing or insulting heavenly religions,” facilitating frequent charges of blasphemy and apostasy from Islam---the only faith to which Egypt applies the statute.
In Jun. 1992, days after al-Azhar University clerics listed free thinker Farag Foda first among “helpers of evil,”
two al-Jama'at al-Islamiyya members shot him dead. Foda sought to
separate mosque and state. He exposed Islamic atrocities from first
caliph Abu Bakr to the end of Abbasid Arab caliphate. And at Cairo's
Jan. 1992 book fair, he debated orthodox clerics whose fatwas he had mocked (including that against Salman Rushdie). At their trial, Muslim Brotherhood cleric Mohammed al-Ghazali defended Foda's killers, noting that any Muslim could kill an apostate (p. 74).
Pakistan's blasphemy laws, instituted in 1980 under Zia al Haq, have also abetted minority persecution. State sharia
courts value male non-Muslim testimonies at half that of Muslims, and
of non-Muslim women, one fourth (p. 86). Hundreds of Christians have
been prosecuted, far more proportionately than their two percent of the
population. Believing Christians natural blasphemers, Muslims easily act on cues to attack, murder, and burn homes and churches. They target Hindus, Sufis and even Muslims, stoning men for alleged blasphemy, or for simply stating what a Westerner considers common sense.
Conditions
vary only slightly elsewhere in the Muslims world, and the authors
supply a long list of atrocities committed against victims of blasphemy
or apostasy accusations. Such charges and attacks occur almost as
regularly as clockwork---precisely because they track classic sharia, a key point the authors omit.
Apostasy goes global
Part
III reviews parallel efforts at the United Nations to globally bar
“defamation of religion,” a thinly veiled attempt to shield Islam alone
from criticism. The chief culprit is the 57-nation Organization of
Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a Saudi-based and funded organization founded in 1969
(as the Organization of the Islamic Conference). Here again, the book
focuses on modern, Western hate-speech statutes and the real-world
effects of limits that resulted from worldwide OIC pressure---not the
foundational sharia law upon which the OIC built its frighteningly successful campaign.
The
names and events that fill this 113-page section have also filled the
pages of savvy online news magazines and channels for well over a decade
now, and will be familiar to most who have paid more than glancing
attention to the innumerable attacks on genuinely open-minded,
free-thinking individuals of all persuasions. If nothing else, it is
useful to have brief but well-documented studies of dozens of cases all
in one place. Readers are reintroduced to Satanic Verses author
Salman Rushdie, whose Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was in 1993
shot three times but survived. Also reported: the unusual genesis of 12
cartoons of Mohammed published in late 2005 by Denmark's Jyllands Posten
and the global repercussions. After illustrators refused to sign their
own work for Kare Bluitgen's biography of Mohammed for children, editor
Flemming Rose commissioned the cartoons in protest of self-censorship in
a Western democracy. Within weeks, the newspaper required security
protection.
As I reported in Feb. 2006, Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb Ut Tahrir
cleric Issam Amayra had the previous spring had incited Muslims in
Denmark---from Jerusalem's al Aqsa Mosque---to launch jihad there. [3] A jihad plot began months before Flemming Rose dreamed of commissioning Mohammed cartoons. Jyllands Posten merely supplied the excuse to trigger global riots. In Jan. 2006, trigger it the OIC did.
Violent “reaction” to the cartoons went viral after the paper refused
to back down and Denmark's prime minister refused to meet with Muslim
ambassadors. A call by Muslim Brotherhood “spiritual leader” Yusuf
Qaradawi for a U.N. Resolution against “affronts to prophets” set off
thousands of Mideast “demonstrations,” Pakistani attacks on Christians
and on and on. As recently as Jan. 2010, a Somali man attacked the home
of cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, then 74.
Victims in the West
In
addition to additional Muslim reformers, the book covers several other
cases of apostates, Christian converts and former Muslim critics,
including the especially heroic Ibn Warraq and former Syrian physician Wafa Sultan
(280-286), most of them fairly. It cannot go without comment, however,
that the authors seriously insult Dr. Sultan: “She maintains that many
verses in the Koran say that you must kill those who do not believe in
Allah,” they write (p. 283). Or, Koran may not say it, she just thinks
so.
To set the record straight, Koran 2:217 states:
“They
ask thee concerning fighting in the Prohibited Month. Say: "Fighting
therein is a grave (offense); but graver is it in the sight of God to
prevent access to the path of God, to deny Him, to prevent access to the
Sacred Mosque, and drive out its members." Tumult and oppression are
worse than slaughter. Nor will they cease fighting you until they turn
you back from your faith if they can. And if any of you Turn back
from their faith and die in unbelief, their works will bear no fruit in
this life and in the Hereafter; they will be companions of the Fire and
will abide therein.”
If
commentary by the founder of Sunni Islam's Shafi school (cited above)
insufficiently explains its classical meaning, consider the exegesis on 2:217 by 13th century Maliki jurist Qurtubi (d. 1273):
“Scholars
disagree about whether or not apostates are asked to repent. One group
say they are asked to repent and, if they do, they are not killed. Some
say they are given an hour and others a month. Others say they are asked
to repent three times, and that is the view of Malik [founder of the
Maliki school of Islamic Law]..It is also said they are killed without
being asked to repent.”[5]
Additionally, Islamic jurists routinely cite Koran 4:89, which states:
“They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as they): But take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of God (From what is forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks;”
Baydawi (d. 1316) writes on 4:89: “Whosoever turns his back from his belief [irtada], openly or secretly, take him and kill him wheresoever ye find him, like any other infidel.” [6]
The OIC role
One hopes Silenced
will spur readers to question the founding purpose of the OIC, which
the authors do not detail. The Saudis established the it in 1969 to
follow classical sharia and Muslim Brotherhood principles, and in 1973 created the Islamic Development Bank to advance the “Islamic way of life.” Its biggest project: the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, which 57 members signed.
Significantly, the preamble opens with the ummah's keen awareness of “the place of mankind in Islam as viceregent of Allah on Earth,” a clear reference to Koran 3:110 and expected Islamic supremacy:
“Ye
are the best of peoples, evolved for mankind, enjoining what is right,
forbidding what is wrong, and believing in Allah. If only the People of
the Book had faith, it were best for them: among them are some who have
faith, but most of them are perverted transgressors.” [4]
Not coincidentally, the OIC convened for the so-called Cairo declaration shortly after the Feb. 1989 fatwa
of Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, calling upon Muslims worldwide
to track down U.K. citizen Salman Rushdie and execute him. Members
agreed, the declaration would serve as their guide on “human rights.”
These rights, its preamble specified, reaffirm the “civilizing and
historical role of the Islamic ummah [nation]” divinely made
“as the best community” to give “humanity a universal and well-balanced
civilization” and to establish “harmony between” temporal and the
afterlife and fulfill Muslim “expectations...to guide all humanity,”
confused by conflicting beliefs and ideologies.
The
OIC Cairo declaration proposed to contribute to global assertion of
“human rights, to protect man from exploitation and persecution, and to
affirm his freedom and right to a dignified life,” but only in accordance with sharia. Briefly, it supports the opposite of “human rights” in the West: unequal rights.
The
OIC, then, functions chiefly as a rising barricade---dangerously
invisible to Western leaders, journalists and educators---to cow and
herd free-thinking Western democracies on every continent into
ever-tightening iron-clad boundaries to guard Islam against free speech,
which the authors understand, despite their seemingly wishful thinking.
The
book paints a global landscape, exposing a decades-long campaign to
silence Islam's internal and external critics via modern legal
principles that clearly offend basic human rights. Example after example
shows Muslims, through acts,
expressing the belief that their creed, alone, is beyond criticism.
Their actions suggest that many Muslims feel specially licensed to
demand “cultural respect,” plus suppress infidels in their homelands,
and everywhere else. Particularly those wanting equal human rights for
all, even freedoms of faith and speech---free enough to criticize Muslim
theology and Islam.
Further
examples continue to accumulate daily. In Iran, Christian pastor Yousef
Nadarkhami, now 32, has lived precariously under a sword of Damocles
since his 2009 arrest for apostasy---and converting from Islam at age
19. In 2010, he was convicted of apostasy and sentenced to death, though
Iran now claims he was sentenced for rape. The mainstream press has
remained largely silent over this outrage, albeit among many in Iran. Meanwhile in Paris, Islamic thugs bombed the office of satire magazine Charlie Hebdo (a Gallic version of Britain's Private Eye) after its latest cover changed its name to Charia Hebdo and listed Mohammed as a “guest editor” to mock Tunisian and Libyan Islamic law. Yet Daily Beast (in the U.S.) headlined the satirical cover---not the bombing---as “shocking.” I'm choking.
Sadly, however, Silenced
does not address the most important fact: Egregious violations of basic
human rights, heretofore, have stemmed directly from Islamic
texts---the Koran, hadith and sira---not only “human interpretation” thereof. In the Koran itself (3:110) originated the claim that Muslims are the best of peoples, notes Australian writer Geoff Dickson. [4] Muslim jurist Ibn Kathir (1301–1373) in his tafsir (exegesis) explains the verse to mean:
“You
are the best of peoples ever raised up for mankind; you enjoin
Al-Ma`ruf (all that Islam has ordained) and forbid Al-Munkar (all that
Islam has forbidden), and you believe in Allah. And had the People of
the Scripture (Jews and Christians) believed, it would have been better
for them; among them are some who have faith, but most of them are
Fasiqun (rebellious).”
Theoretically
anything is possible. So, theoretically, is Islamic reform. But the
rest of humanity meanwhile deserves and needs the truth about Islamic
expansionism and irredentism, including where and how those beliefs and
practices originated.
NOTES:
[1] “...But
whoever of you recants and dies an unbeliever, his works shall come to
nothing in this world and the next, and they are the companions of the
fire forever.” As cited from Samuel Zwemmer, The Law of Apostasy in Islam, pp. 33-35, (see also http://radicaltruth.net/uploads/pubs/Zwemer—Law of Apostasy.pdf), in Ibn Warraq, ed., Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, (Amherst: Prometheus, 2003), pp. 17, 35. Verse 2:217:
“They
ask thee concerning fighting in the Prohibited Month. Say: "Fighting
therein is a grave (offense); but graver is it in the sight of God to
prevent access to the path of God, to deny Him, to prevent access to the
Sacred Mosque, and drive out its members." Tumult and oppression are
worse than slaughter. Nor will they cease fighting you until they turn
you back from your faith if they can. And if any of you Turn back from
their faith and die in unbelief, their works will bear no fruit in this
life and in the Hereafter; they will be companions of the Fire and will
abide therein.”
[2] Pamela Geller, “Exhibit A, the document: fatwa (death penalty) for apostasy,” Atlas Shrugs, Sept. 21, 2009, http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2009/09/rifqa-bary-death-threat-exhibit-a-the-document-fatwa-death-penalty-for-apostasy.html (first viewed 9/21/2009).
[3]
Jonathan Dahoah Halevi, director of Orient research Group in Toronto,
Canada, translated Issam Amayra'a April 2005 sermon from the Arabic.
[4] Koran 3:110, as translated by Yusuf Ali, Yet Another Quran Browser, http://qb.gomen.org/QuranBrowser/cgi/bin/retrieve.cgi?version=pickthall+yusufali+khan+shakir+sherali+khalifa+arberry+palmer+rodwell+sale+transliterated&layout=auto&searchstring=003:108-112 (last viewed 11/3/2011).
[5] From Tafsir Al Qurtubi: Classical Commentary of the Holy Qur'an (Volume 1), translated by Aisha Bewley, p. 549, as cited by Dr. Andrew G. Bostom in his Sharia versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism. (Amherst: Prometheus, forthcoming).
[6] From Samuel Zwemer, The Law of Apostasy in Islam, London, 1924/1925, p. 33, as cited by Bostom, in the forthcoming Sharia versus Freedom, id.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Alyssa A. Lappen
is a U.S.-based investigative journalist, with a focus on the Middle
East and Islam. A former Senior Fellow of the American Center for
Democracy (2005-2008), she previously covered the economy, business and
finance, as a Senior Editor at Institutional Investor (1993-1999), Working Woman (1991-1993) and Corporate Finance (1991); and an Associate Editor at Forbes (1978-1990).
She contributes regularly to Family Security Matters, the Terror Finance Blog and International Analyst Network and her work appears frequently in Pajamas Media, Front Page Magazine, American Thinker, Right Side News, the Washington Times and many other Internet and print journals.
Ms. Lappen is also an accomplished poet, whose work has won several awards and honorable mentions, and appeared in dozens of books and (print and online) literary journals, including the 2007, second edition of Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and issues of Wales' notable Seventh Quarry: Swansea Poetry Magazine.
Ms. Lappen is also an accomplished poet, whose work has won several awards and honorable mentions, and appeared in dozens of books and (print and online) literary journals, including the 2007, second edition of Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and issues of Wales' notable Seventh Quarry: Swansea Poetry Magazine.
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