A continuation of the review of: Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Laws are Choking Freedom Worldwide
Read Part I here.
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. In reality, very 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. [2] 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.