Silenced

Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide by Paul Marshall and Nina Shea, Oxford University Press, 2011. 

Islamists see freedom of religion as meaning protecting religion by making it free from criticism. Islamists do not believe in individual rights; they believe that only Islam and Allah have rights. The book examines how in various Muslim countries, apostasy and blasphemy are punished. In the early history of Islam, when Islam was spreading through military conquest, apostasy, that is, leaving the religion of Islam, was seen as defection to the enemy. Islamists believe that once you stay at the Hotel Islam, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is a leader of the movement to restrict citizens of Western countries from criticizing Islam. Bernard Lewis, one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of Islam, has pointed out that it is only recently that non-Muslims in non-Muslim countries have been forbidden to criticize Islam. Throughout the rest of the history of Islam, only those individuals living in Muslim countries had to obey sharia. But these days, especially in Europe, the Islamists regard any criticism of Islam, even by non-Muslims living in non-Muslim countries, as a crime against Islam.

Three Danish imams, Raedd Hlayhel, Ahmed Akkari and Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban created the Committee for the Defense of the Honor of the Prophet to protest against the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad. Afghani Taliban leader Maulavi Dadullah offered 100 kilograms of gold from the Taliban to anyone who murdered the blasphemous cartoonists. Minister for Haj and Religious Minorities of Uttar Pradesh, Yakub Qureshi, offered a reward of eleven million dollars for anyone who killed a Danish cartoonist. Out of fear of violence, Borders and Waldenbooks did not carry the issue of the Free Inquiry magazine that reprinted the Danish cartoons. Three prominent Muslim heads of state also said that the cartoons should not have been published: Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Pervez Mussharraf of Pakistan, and Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. 

In Europe, Necla Kelek, a Turkish-born German sociologist of Circassian ethnicity, has publicized the plight of Turkish women imported into Germany and forced to marry Turkish immigrant men. She has argued for a minimum age for foreign brides, and against honor killings. French writer Robert Redeker received death threats because he wrote in the French newspaper Le Figaro that Christianity was a religion of love and Islam was a religion of hate. Iranian-born British feminist Maryam Namazie has criticized the West for not protecting women who have left Islam. She objects to the fact that Muslim and ex-Muslim women who criticize Islam from personal experience are called racists and Islamophobes. She has also criticized the Western philosophy of cultural relativism, which is tolerant of the misogynist aspects of Islam.

Islamists have tried to persuade the United Nations to protect Islam from criticism. Yusuf al-Qaradawi recommended that the United Nations adopt a binding resolution banning contempt of religious beliefs. In recent years, after running into obstacles trying to persuade the United Nations to protect the religion of Islam, the Islamists have shifted their focus to persuading the United Nations to prosecute those guilty of hate speech against individual Muslims. The United Nations objected to the concept of defamation of a religion, because the traditional concept of defamation had applied only to individuals. In the United States, the right of freedom of speech can be restricted only where the hate speech is likely to immediately incite violence.

In Muslim-majority countries, moderate Muslims are under constant threat from Islamist radicals. In 1992 Egyptian human rights activist Farag Foda was assassinated by the Islamists for advocating the separation of church and state. In 1994, Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed and permanently disabled for defending Salman Rushdie. 

In Saudi Arabia, Shia Muslims are treated as second-class citizens compared to Sunnis, and Ismailis are treated even worse. A number of people in Saudi Arabia have been arrested for allegedly practicing sorcery. The Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink was killed in 2007 in Istanbul, for using the word genocide in regard to the million and a half Armenians who mysteriously died in Turkey in 1915. In 1985 in the Sudan Mohamed Mahmoud Taha was hanged for apostasy. He had advocated the earlier, peaceful writing of the prophet Mohammed, as being the true core of Islam, not the more violent passages of the prophet’s warring years. 

There are about three hundred thousand Christians in Iran: Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Protestants. They have been prohibited from printing the Bible in Farsi. In Iran, members of the Baha’i faith have been persecuted, because they claim that Mohammed was not the last prophet, that there were prophets after Mohammed. The mullahs have stolen many Baha’i houses, schools and businesses. The Baha’is have also been persecuted in Egypt. Religious authorities in both countries claim that the Baha’i are spies for Israel. 

When Pakistan was founded in 1947, it was tolerant of religions other than Islam. In more recent years it has grown more restrictive. Blasphemy laws were introduced in the 1980s. The Ahmadis have been persecuted and their mosques burned. An Ahmadi doctor, Dr. Abdul Manan Siddiqui, was killed by Muslim fanatics at his clinic in Mirpur Khas, in Sindh province in 2008. The governor of Punjab province, Salman Taseer, was killed in 2011 for criticizing Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. The Christian politician Clement Shahbaz Bhatti was assassinated in 2011 in Islamabad. In Bangladesh, the government has also become more Islamist since its independence from Pakistan in 1971. Like Pakistan, Bangladesh also persecutes Ahmadis, who number about one hundred thousand. In 1992 religious fanatics attacked the Ahmadiyya headquarters in Bakshi Bazar, Dhaka, Bangladesh. A Bangladeshi woman named Taslima Nasreen won the 1994 Sakharaov Prize for Freedom of Thought. She is a gynecologist, feminist, novelist and defender of the Hindus in Bangladesh. Her books have been banned in Bangladesh. Another Bangladeshi, Salahuddin Shoaib Choudhury, has defended Israel, which got him accused of being a spy for Israel’s Mossad. He was robbed, beaten and jailed for 17 months.