Apostates are seldom killed; whew
Nesrine Malik lets us know that all this fuss about death for apostasy is silly.
Reading AC Grayling’s latest article and listening to the protestations of the Council of Ex-Muslims, you would think that the death penalty is being gratuitously and frequently applied to those who renounce Islam or harbour thoughts of apostasy.
Oh. So if the death penalty is being purposefully and seldom applied to those who renounce Islam, there would be no reason for a Council of Ex-Muslims to exist and no article for Anthony Grayling to write? The death penalty for renouncing Islam is a bad thing only if it’s applied gratuitously and frequently? A rare and cautious execution for renouncing Islam is all right?
I have several friends and family members who are non-believers and apart from some efforts to return them to the straight and narrow or at least go through the motions of religious observance, they have not come into any physical danger.
One, that’s nice, but it tells us nothing. I have several friends and family members who have never been thrown into prison for writing a book someone didn’t like; that doesn’t mean no one has ever been thrown into prison for writing a book someone didn’t like. Two, efforts to coerce people to ‘return to the straight and narrow’ are intrusive and presumptuous enough; they’re nothing to boast of.
Although the Council of Ex-Muslims and AC Grayling depict the threat to life and limb as an indisputable fact, in reality there are differences of opinion among Muslim scholars (ostensibly the hard core of the religion) regarding the death penalty for apostates.
Oh hooray! Goody goody goody goody – some ‘Muslim scholars’ don’t think people should be killed for leaving Islam. Well I’m all of a heap; how liberal is that; I’m so impressed. Imagine if only some ‘Catholic scholars’ or ‘Jewish scholars’ thought people should be killed for leaving the Church or Judaism; imagine the Guardian publishing articles (even on Comment is Free) bragging of that.
Nawal El Sadaawi, a prominent Egyptian writer and social activist, has clashed several times with religious authorities and has even dismissed some of the rituals of the Hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca) as pagan, but I do not believe she lives in any fear for her life.
Oh really. She should have looked that up before telling us what she ‘believes’ – in fact Nawal El Sadaawi does fear for her life.
Of course, there is always the possibility that violent individuals will take matters into their own hands, as in the case of the Nobel prize-winning writer, Naguib Mahfouz, but these are a minority found in all religions.
Really? Really? Violent individuals in all religions murder people for abandoning their religions? Who, where, when?
Rejecting Islam and being anti-Islam are two different things, as are rejecting religion and being anti-religion. One is a spiritual lifestyle decision while the other entails some action, some campaign to eject religion from public life.
No. Dead wrong. She could perhaps claim that leaving Islam and being anti-Islam are two different things, but rejecting and being anti are pretty much the same thing, and they are not ‘a spiritual lifestyle decision,’ they are a substantive cognitive decision. People ‘reject’ religions for reasons, and those reasons are often such as to make them anti the religion in question. One good reason for rejecting Islam is that it seems to motivate people to produce terrible stuff like this article.
“Although the Council of Ex-Muslims and AC Grayling depict the threat to life and limb as an indisputable fact, in reality there are differences of opinion among Muslim scholars (ostensibly the hard core of the religion) regarding the death penalty for apostates.”
So then no one is ever harmed for apostasy unless there is first a perfect consensus among all Muslim scholars? Really?
I listened to a phone-in featuring Richard Dawkins the other day (BBC Oxford, I think). They had an Imam call in (supposedly being offended about a computer game). RD’s second question to him was: Is it true that death is the penalty for apostasy in Islam. The Imam claimed he’d never heard such a thing. Dawkins said he was astonished because, he, a non-Muslim had heard it from Muslims several times, including someone in fear for her life.
The Imam could have come from a super-liberal part of Islam or he could have been indulging in a little Takiyya…..
NB: “Although the Council of Ex-Muslims and AC Grayling depict the threat to life and limb as an indisputable fact, in reality there are differences of opinion among Muslim scholars (ostensibly the hard core of the religion) regarding the death penalty for apostates.”
In other words, some Muslim scholars think that it’s off with the heads of apostates, while others are not so sure. Call them the eliminators as against the vacillators, but consider them all in flux, with some eliminators tending to vacillation and vice versa, so that the relative strengths of the two imam camps will change over time.
Which will enhance the spread of Islam: eliminators prevailing over vacillators, or the other way around?
Historically, Islam has not been spread by the force of its philosophical argument so much as by the force of its military argument. Its own internal logic understandably drives it towards the ‘death to apostates’ position.
It is not so long ago that the Catholic Church was eliminating those the clergy perceived as apostates, but called heretics. Church power was enhanced because it retained the final decision on whether or not an accused person was a heretic, and many of the latter died professing a belief in Christian doctrine as they saw it.
The associated religious wars in Europe have a modern counterpart in the mutual terrorism of the Islamic Sunnis and Shias. I suggest that there has been precious little philosophical persuasion involved in progressing that dispute towards a settlement.
Religion in order to survive must cover the eyes and ears of the rising generation against contrary argument, and emphasise the connection between intellectual submission and physical security. Maximising the time believers spend together in mass acts of submission, prayer and associated ritual is vital for this. Thus the madrassa.
From the Wikipedia entry on them: “Madrassas fulfill the demand for religious training for clerical functions in Pakistan in common with other Muslim societies. They draw their students and faculty from the poorest sections of society and provide them with free education, food and even clothes. However, they do not allow their students exposure to differing world views, so graduates are strongly committed to the particular interpretation of Islam which they have been taught. This predisposes them to bias against secular ways of thinking, other religions and sub-sects of Islam different from their own. This would not necessarily translate into active militancy but for the recent policies of governments which have armed and radicalised some of them. It appears that only reduction of poverty and the perception of just national and international policies can reduce the number of students in these institutions and prevent them from becoming militant.”
I know this is repeating what you’ve said, OP, but, well, it does bear repeating. This is so great!
“Oh hooray! Goody goody goody goody – some ‘Muslim scholars’ don’t think people should be killed for leaving Islam. Well I’m all of a heap; how liberal is that; I’m so impressed. Imagine if only some ‘Catholic scholars’ or ‘Jewish scholars’ thought people should be killed for leaving the Church or Judaism; imagine the Guardian publishing articles (even on Comment is Free) bragging of that.”
Can someone explain why the Guardian tends to publish shit like this? How is it that editors think it’s okay to publish an article that says, straight up, that it’s okay to kill people for apostacy, so long as you don’t do it very often, and do it thoughtfully? If Christians or Jews were saying things like this, wouldn’t someone at the Guardian notice? So, why do they think it is okay to publish something by a Muslim giving at least qualified approval to murdering apostates?
Ah, but of course, it’s okay for Muslims to do it, since, as she says:
“While this is in no way acceptable, it is an extension of the general lack of enshrined civic human rights and evolved political institutions and processes – a historical, social and geo-political reality in many Muslim countries that makes a mockery of any comparison to the experience of those renouncing Christianity or Judaism.”
What does she mean that ‘this is in no way acceptable’? She’s just said that there are differences of opinion amongst Muslim scholars regarding death for apostates. Are these differences of opinion not also ‘in no way acceptable’? Apparently not. In fact, she uses this disagreement to back up her idea that ‘the threat to life and limb’ of apostates is not an indisputable fact. Apparently, it only happens once in awhile.
But perhaps the most disturbing part of her op-ed piece is where she denies that political Islam and state-sponsored Islam are close cousins. If they are not, and if political Islam is the form of Islam that is often encountered in more radical expressions of Islam in Western countries, then we really are in trouble, are we not? Political Islam is, indeed, repressed by some Islamic states, but with good reason, since political Islam, as seen in perhaps its purest form in Taliban Afghanistan, is a form of political order that is justly feared by every thinking person, even those who exercise milder forms of oppression. And the Taliban did not hesitate to murder people for apostacy, and for lesser offences too. And there, Nesrine Malik would not have been asked for her opinion. She should ‘suck on that thought’ for a little while.
Sorry OB, not OP.
“Can someone explain why the Guardian tends to publish shit like this? “
Eric, Yes, it’s part of their marketing strategy, their internet advertising revenue is based partly on hits-per-column on CiF, (a cynic may pose to help shore up the appalling losses the Guardian newsaper is currently making for the Guardian Media Group.) They publish some appalling dross online, as long as it pisses lots of people off, then they’re ‘selling’ adevertising space.
Unless you were being rhetorical there, in which case, apologies. It really isn’t the worst thing they’ve published there by a long chalk.
No, thanks Nick. I wasn’t being rhetorical. I just didn’t know. Of course, I do know that this isn’t the worst that they have published!
Perhaps Nesrine should read this:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-dare-we-stand-up-for-muslim-women-969631.html
Eric and Ian great stuff.
The list of people from whom the Guardian Comment is Free editor commissions articles (or who, presumably, volunteer articles) is here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/list/contributors
Does anyone know if some of these articles appear in the print edition, and if so, how one would know from the online posting?
In response to the question “Can someone explain why the Guardian tends to publish shit like this?”
Nick S. replied:
>Eric, Yes, it’s part of their marketing strategy…< I think there’s more to it than this, Nick. I think the editors at the Guardian (print and online) genuinely think that people who write from a Muslim point of view should be heard – and that includes views that from a different quarter would be anathema to the self-same editors.
“Can someone explain why the Guardian tends to publish shit like this?”
Orientalism. The funny foreigners with their primitive ways *must* have violent tribal tendencies. So the only way to not be racist and to represent the authentic identities of -er- funny foreigners is to find people with violent tribal tendencies and – hang on…
I wonder if the Guardian would think it okay if there was a debate in say, the British Conservative Party about whether or not people choosing to leave the party should be subject to death. I suspect not.
I was grateful to Nick for putting me in the picture about the Guardian. The point (brought up by Allen) that “the editors at the Guardian (print and online) genuinely think that people who write from a Muslim point of view should be heard – and that includes views that from a different quarter would be anathema to the self-same editors,” is rather troubling. Is there any way to find out what the Guardian’s editorial policy is regarding this? Some of the op-ed pieces are very good, but some, like Nasrine Malik’s piece, need a bit of work with the editor’s pencil.
>Some of the op-ed pieces are very good, but some, like Nasrine Malik’s piece, need a bit of work with the editor’s pencil.< Leaving aside that I think “op-ed” is a misnomer for these CiF articles, the point is surely (from the Guardian’s point of view) that contributors present their position on the relevant issue, in which case use of “the editor’s pencil” would be entirely inappropriate. If they’re going to include a particular person among their list of authors, then they have to let that author say what he or she wants – otherwise we wouldn’t be getting the writer’sview.
Hell, let’s re-cast this into a completely secular context and see how it flies: it’s okay if various states in the US have death penalty laws on the books as long as they only execute prisoners every now and then, because the US is a backwards country that doesn’t understand human rights.
Nope. Doesn’t work.
The Guardian’s take on Islam is of course very troubling, but this isn’t news. Various observers have been troubled about it for years. The issue has featured here to the point of tedium.
>>One good reason for rejecting Islam is that it seems to motivate people to produce terrible stuff like this article.<< Well, this is only true to an extent as even the ones (on CiF) who ostensibly claim to have rejected islam like say, Khaled Diab, make similar apologetics for Islam. Khaled, an Egyptian who lives in Brussels anyway, has no problem with his relatives as regards his lack of faith, thus he glibly assures Cif readers that the situation is not as dire as it is made out to be. Conveniently forgetting the plight of Copts and Bahais, muslim apostates who make, this is the clincher of course, OFFICIAL moves to leave the loving embrace of Islam. I bet that Khaled has made no move to , say, make the change from islam to atheism on his egyptian id card. Then you have the weasels like Brian Whittaker, the Al Guardian’s ME editor, who sanguinely notes that the ‘scholars’ of islam have no consensus on the issue which is just a little less than a lie because the 4 sunni as well the shia schools of jurisprudence do agree on heavy penalties for apostasy, including the death penalty. There are a lot of willing dupes who pop up on Cif to say that the apostasy death penalty has been confused with the ‘justifiable’ penalty for treason (yeah right, for 14 centuries!) Of course, nearly everyone then forgets to mention the MANY other forms of disenfranchisement an apostate suffers – loss of inheritance, civil rights (in family law, for example, custody of children or even loss of spouse; an egyptian was forced to divorce her supposedly apostate husband some years back), religious rehabilitation camps like in dear old Malaysia , imprisonment, fines, the whole gamut! A few religions may be dangerous to leave but none have the menacing clout of Islam.
Just popped over to Cif which is highly entertaining at the moment. All that inchoate believer rage against the atheist bus ad. Mary Kenny is so funny. And such a frightened little bunny – reduced to spluttering against humanist funerals for being, wait for it, NOT FUN enough. Shame on the brit atheists for letting our side down, someone quickly organise a necrophiliac drunken orgy and invite the woman, please!
Ariane Sherine is DA woman! Brilliant of her to take a half-joke this far.