In all the outrage and commentary on Benedict XVI’s address at University of Regensburg last week (see my posts here and here) I haven’t seen much commentary on apostasy laws. According to analyst Daveed Gartenstein-Ross in an article originally published in Commentary
…apostasy is punishable by death in Afghanistan, Comoros, Iran, Mauritania, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Yemen. It is also illegal in Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, the Maldives, Oman, and Qatar.
There are also anti-blasphemy laws in a whole host of countries. I’m not a Quranic scholar and it’s unlikely at this late date that I’ll become one but it’s my understanding that nowhere in the Quran does it say that human beings should take the lives of other human beings for apostasy. Perhaps someone can correct me if I’m wrong in this.
Well, surely, these laws are never enforced and are a thing of the distant past? Unfortunately, no. For example, Dhabihu’llah Mahrami, a lifelong Baha’i, was apparently falsely convicted by the Iranian government of apostasy and imprisoned where he either died of his ordeal or was murdered.
Since we’re all in agreement that compulsion in religion is irrational perhaps it’s time that these irrational laws were removed from the books. And proposing international anti-blasphemy laws would not appear to be particularly rational, either.
Afraid there is some grounds to infer apostasy is subject to punishment under Quranic injunction. Death perhaps not.
I am afraid, however, that I don’t get your logic in making this connexion, other than doing what you have complained about in the past: “they do bad stuff too” whanking.
Regardless, apostasy laws are not something that are going to get changed by outside pressure – which in current climate will simply play into conservatives perceptions that the West wants to convert Muslims – that is religious war.
I’m frankly personally sick of cultural busybodyism, it’s a losing proposition. But if Americans want to continue to dupe themselves into Civilising Mission II, well go right ahead.
Of course , one agrees that these measures agasint Blasphemy and Apostasy should be curtailed and renounced. Unfortunately, if you listen carefully to Benedict XVI , this is precisely what he laments in Christendom. It took secular society and secular reason and secular history and secular humanism centuries to liberate Europe from the serial killers of the Medieaval and Spanish Inquisitions, when the RC Church and its varied armies of Dominicans, Franciscans, Bendictines, etc. etc., did to Europeans what they ahd been doing on the Crusades to Muslims for years.
Helping Islam to reflect upon its history is not going to be achieved by European atheists, apostates and agnostics doing a goose step backwards into the middle ages. On the contrary, if we can stop the messianic nonsense of the Christian conquest, we may never need anything but good example through Turkey and the Middle East to let Islam reform itself.
The Crusades never did work –save only to install the Pope as an unquestioned and now an infallible Pharaoh.
Can we not learn from our own history that Darwin is not a dirty word, but a messenger of peace and hope to those who can set down their Bibles and read about themselves. It is still true that ‘The best study of mankind is man.’
Seamus Breathnach
Dublin
http://www.irish-criminology.com