Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (60 page)

Those promoting tolerance and democratic values within Islam are also under threat. One is Syrian-born Naser Khader, who in 2001 became the first person of immigrant background to win a seat in the Danish parliament. A consistent foe of Islamic extremism, Khader formulated “Ten Commandments of Democracy,” among which he included free expression, nonviolence, and a promise to “separate politics and religion” and “never [to] place religion above the laws of democracy.”
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In September 2005, he refused to attend a meeting on Islamist militancy convened by the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, that Khader said
would “legitimize radical religious leaders” who were also invited. Soon after his election, Khader required police protection due to death threats from the Nazi far right and Muslim extremists.
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Amidst the growing cartoon controversy, in 2006, he founded the Democratic Muslims Network to promote the voices of moderate Muslims. Calling himself a “cultural Muslim,” he stresses, “Of course you can be a democrat and a practicing Muslim simultaneously.… The goal is not to vote Islam away, but to vote democracy in.”

Khader also organized a demonstration of moderate Muslims against Saudi Arabia for its assault on Denmark’s freedom of the press. Within a few weeks, his organization had acquired a membership of 1,500 but still remained a minor voice.
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Khader noted that many members had left the group due to threats, a particular problem for women.
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He was threatened with death by Ahmed Akkari, one of the primary cartoon agitators, who said in March 2006 that if he “becomes minister for foreigners, or integration, shouldn’t two guys go see him to blow him up, him and his ministry?”
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After his remarks were captured on hidden camera, Akkari claimed that they were intended as a joke; he was investigated but not charged by Danish police, though the scandal did lead to his removal as spokesman for the Islamic Faith Community.
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Moroccan-born Ahmed Aboutaleb was an Amsterdam alderman who stressed the need for immigrant integration. In 2004, he was denounced by Muslim extremists and Dutch racists alike. In the wake of van Gogh’s murder, he received death threats after he told a mosque audience that Muslims must accept common Dutch values, saying, “Anyone who doesn’t share these values would be wise to draw their conclusions and leave.” Van Gogh’s killer, Muhammed Bouyeri, called him a heretic; for his part, Aboutaleb, who has emphasized the complexity of Qur’anic interpretation, said, “it makes me laugh when a kid like Mohammed B. thinks he can derive enough knowledge from the Koran in English and Dutch to think it is his duty to gun a person down.”

Aboutaleb was one of the few Muslims present at the Amsterdam demonstration protesting van Gogh’s murder. He argued that, despite their possible distaste for van Gogh, others “should have been there to defend the rule of law.” He also contended that the Dutch government should have made stronger efforts to initiate a dialogue after van Gogh’s killing, emphasizing that “we have to draw a line, not between Muslims and non-Muslims, but between the good people and the bad people.”
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As of early 2005, Aboutaleb had to make his public appearances “always surrounded by people armed to the teeth.”
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In January 2009, he was appointed mayor of Rotterdam and has continued to tell his fellow immigrants, “Stop seeing yourself as victims, and if you don’t want to integrate, leave.”
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Writer and law professor Afshin Ellian was a former member of a far-left Iranian party, who fled to the Netherlands in 1989. He quickly gained degrees in law and philosophy and eventually began contributing to Dutch newspapers. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he has stridently criticized both Islamism and its multiculturalist apologists. He responded to the van Gogh killing in an article titled “Make Jokes about Islam!” and has argued: “Free speech is in danger of being increasingly restricted by invoking ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘racism.’ … Luther was not a Catholicophobe. He was critical of the church. Voltaire was not a religiophobe. He was simply critical of the intolerant manifestations of religion. Should the Reformation have been warded off on the grounds that Luther ‘must not stigmatize all Catholics? ’”
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Like Hirsi Ali, Ellian has been written off as an “Enlightenment fundamentalist” by many of his coreligionists, and he, too, has required constant protection. He believes that “extremists are afraid that if Dutch society becomes a safe haven for an intellectual discussion of political Islam, it will be very dangerous for them.”
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In Canada, Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) spokesman Tarek Fatah earned enemies by opposing the use of sharia courts in Canada, advocating for gay rights in Islam, and criticizing a prominent British imam. He was forced to give up his position due to death threats against himself and his family. The leader of the larger and more reactionary Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC), Mohamed Elmasry, wrote in the CIC’s journal that Fatah was “well known in Canada for smearing Islam and bashing Muslims.” Fatah was attacked in 2003 for allegedly insulting Islam’s prophet Muhammad and was called an “apostate” while being assaulted in 2006.
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In October 2006, Farzana Hassan Shahid, the MCC’s president, said that she and her colleagues were receiving threatening e-mails from Islamist radicals and that she was twice called an apostate for her heterodox positions on sharia and homosexuality, as well as her denunciations of terrorism. She called for Ontario’s attorney general, Michael Bryant, to expand hate-crime laws to cover threats made against her and other liberal Muslims, explaining that the law should “include or acknowledge accusations of blasphemy and apostasy into the existing hate laws so the public and legal frame work is sensitized to this issue.”
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Two other Canadian Muslims, Prof. Salim Mansur, of Indian background, who has spoken against self-censorship in the name of sensitivity, and Raheel Raza, a Pakistani-Canadian, have also both been threatened with death for their views against radical Islam. Both spoke together with Tarek Fatah at an October 2008 conference, condemning gender segregation and criticizing the willingness of some Canadian leftists to abet Islamic extremism.
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In April 2007, Pakistani-born journalist Jawaad Faizi was brutally assaulted outside the Canadian home of his editor, Amir Arain of the
Pakistan Post
, over his criticism of the Pakistani Muslim group Minhaj-ul-Quran. His article had questioned whether the group’s leader could really have written the prophet Muhammad’s name on the moon, as he had claimed. Callers began threatening Faizi and announcing to Arain, “You are not a Muslim, you are supporting Christians.” Faizi’s assailants told him he must stop writing against Islam, “or he would be attacked again.”
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In 1972, when she was four years old, Irshad Manji’s family fled to Canada to escape Idi Amin’s regime in Uganda. Between the ages of nine and fourteen, she studied at a Canadian madrassa and was expelled after challenging her teachers on issues ranging from the prohibition of female prayer leaders to evidence for a Jewish conspiracy against Islam and, finally, for asking why Muhammad ordered his army to destroy a Jewish tribe. She became a highly successful television presenter, taking liberal positions and, as an open lesbian, speaking out on gay issues. Manji chose to call for the reform of Islam rather than abandoning her religion. Her 2004 book,
The Trouble with Islam Today
, denounces human rights abuses committed in the name of Islam, including anti-Semitism, crimes against women, and the continuance of slavery under some Islamic regimes. She argues that scriptural literalism, while a problem in all religions, has become mainstream among Muslims, helping shut down religious debate. In her view, the Qur’an should not be treated as the unquestionable, direct word of God.

In addition to denunciations, she has received enough violent threats to convince her to hire a bodyguard and to bulletproof her home. Nonetheless, Manji avoids bringing a bodyguard to speaking engagements so that she can convince young Muslims, many of whom she believes share her concerns, that it is possible to speak out against extremism. Alongside the threats, she reports messages of gratitude from Muslims, especially young women, saying that she “is saying out loud words they have only whispered.” Manji argues: “Muslims in the West are best poised to revive Islam’s tradition of independent reasoning … we already enjoy the precious freedom to think, express, challenge and be challenged—all without fear of state reprisal.”
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In 2001, Jordanian Islamist Abd al-Munim Abu Zant issued a fatwa calling for the scholar Khalid Duran, a U.S. resident who headed the Ibn Khaldun society, to be killed for apostasy. Duran had not left Islam but was subject to a worldwide smear campaign after the Council on American-Islamic Relations attacked his book,
Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Islam for Jews
. Duran, a strong proponent of interreligious dialogue, had written the book for the American Jewish Committee to “lift [the] cloud” over Jews’ perception of Islam as a result of the
Mideast conflict. He wanted to “demonstrate Islam’s sublime spirituality” and to “persuade Jews that Islam should not be blamed for its malpractice by certain contemporary Muslims.” His car was vandalized, and he had to relocate to a safe house.
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During the January 2009 fighting in Gaza, Islamic radicals sent death threats to French imam Hassen Chalghoumi, who was prominently involved in outreach to France’s Jewish community. Oil was poured on his car, and he required a bodyguard and police protection; his house had previously been vandalized after he participated in a Holocaust commemoration ceremony and urged Muslims to honor the victims.
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In a 2004
Independent
column, Islamic scholar Akbar Ahmed mourned the suppression of “the gentle voices of Islam” by governments determined to “stay in power at all costs.” Part of his article also lamented “vicious personal attacks” on the prophet. In the U.K., however, he was “denounced as an Uncle Tom for being too keen to have dialogue with Jews and Christians and far too impressed by Western civilisation.” He spoke at evensong at a Cambridge chapel and gave a lecture for Liberal and Progressive synagogues in the United Kingdom, but “[f]or this I was branded a Zionist agent—and received violent threats both from extremist Muslims appalled at my consorting with the ‘enemy’ and from racist Britons who told this ‘black bastard’ to ‘go home.’”
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Whether atheists or converts to another religion, some former Muslims live in fear of attacks for apostasy, and those who have spoken out against this oppression often compound their endangerment.
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In January 2005, Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad of the militant Al Muhajiroun group, then living in Britain, declared that in the restored caliphate that he wished to bring about, “Muslims could not convert to Christianity on pain of execution.” The Ireland-based European Council for Fatwa and Research—led by the ubiquitous Sheikh al-Qaradawi—sidesteps the question of extrajudicial executions for apostasy by declaring, “Executing whoever reverts from Islam is the responsibility of the state and is to be decided by Islamic governments alone.” The council justifies the (properly authorized) killing of “those who declare their action in public and may cause Fitna by bringing down the name of Allah (swt), His prophet (ppbuh) or the Muslims,” on the grounds that this is analogous to treason.
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This problem goes beyond fiery pronouncements by radicals or disingenuous Islamist figures: according to a 2007 report by the think tank Policy Exchange, 36 percent of British Muslims from the ages of sixteen to twenty-four, 37 percent of those between twenty-five and thirty-four, and 31 percent of British Muslims overall agreed “[t]hat Muslim conversion is forbidden and punishable by death.”
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“Ibn Warraq,” a pseudonym historically used by Muslim dissidents, is a Pakistani ex-Muslim living in an undisclosed location in the United States and began writing critiques of Islam in the wake of the 1989 Salman Rushdie affair. To avoid attack, he keeps his identity and whereabouts hidden. Author of many books, including scholarly ones as well as the popular
Why I Am Not a Muslim
, he rarely appears in public. On one exceptional occasion, he did so wearing a disguise, and he has stated that not even his brother knows where he is. He hopes Qur’anic scholarship will help Muslim society grow “less dogmatic, more open,” as he believes biblical scholarship has done among Christians.
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In 2007, ex-Muslims in three different European countries founded organizations to challenge the repression of apostates, but their leaders have been threatened and have had difficulty finding recruits. In February 2007, Iranian-born human rights activist Mina Ahadi helped establish the Central Council of ex-Muslims in Germany to assist those, particularly women, wishing to leave Islam. The group claimed forty members, many of whom had been active in communist politics in their home countries. Ahadi does not believe in the possibility of modernizing Islam from within but rather hopes to challenge the organizations that claim to represent all Muslims. Shortly after the organization’s launch, she received death threats and was placed under police protection. Other members were also “terrorized.”
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Also in 2007, a group of former Muslims, led by human rights activist and feminist Maryam Namazie, established the Council of ex-Muslims of Britain. The council’s mandate was to challenge traditional Islamic punishments for apostasy and, as in Germany, provide non-religious immigrants an “alternative to the likes of the Muslim Council of Britain because we don’t think people should be pigeonholed as Muslims or deemed to be represented by regressive organizations like the MCB.” Namazie also denounced the British government’s “appeasement,” which she said had created social division by targeting “specific policies and initiatives” at Muslims. At its launch, twenty-five British ex-Muslims allowed themselves to be named as members. Namazie, who had received death threats, suggested that many people were still wary of joining due to “threats and intimidations.”
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