http://www.crosswalk.com/news/11553910/
Ex-Muslim 'Apostates' Organize in Europe
By Patrick Goodenough
(CNSNews.com) - An Iranian-born Dutch politician under fire from Muslims for his dissenting views on Islam on Tuesday officially launched an organization to support people who have renounced the religion.
Ehsan Jami, a 22-year old Labor Party member elected to the council of a city near The Hague last year, announced at a press conference the establishment of an organization called the Committee for Ex-Muslims.
Similar groups have begun in recent months in Britain, Germany and Scandinavian countries.
According to leading Islamic schools of thought, apostasy is a crime, punishable by death in the case of a sane male who renounces his faith. Jami also is controversial for his strong public comments on Islam, including the view expressed last June that Mohammed, the Islamic prophet, was a "criminal."
At Tuesday's press conference, timed for the sixth anniversary of 9/11 and attended by leaders from the British and German organizations, Jami declared that Islam was not a religion of peace.
"It's a religion of submission ... of its followers, submission of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, infidels, the whole world," he was quoted as saying.
Last month, he was attacked by three men, in an incident believed to be linked to his views and the new organization. Although Jami was not hurt in what his spokesman said was the third such incident, Dutch law enforcement agencies decided to provide additional security for him.
Dutch critics of Islam have been targeted and threatened by radicals before. In 2004 a filmmaker was shot and stabbed to death by a Dutch-Moroccan extremist after making a provocative short documentary on violence against women in Islam.
The attack on Jami prompted a right-wing Dutch lawmaker, Geert Wilders, to pen an open letter calling for the Koran to be banned in the Netherlands. The call was widely rejected.
More than 80 leading figures in the Netherlands, including authors and leaders of several political parties - although not Jami's own Labor Party - have signed a declaration of support for him and the Committee for Ex-Muslims.
The declaration in Dutch, published in De Volkskrant newspaper on Tuesday, said that although the right to change religion is established in the Netherlands, it is "withheld from a substantial portion of the Dutch population, namely the Muslims."
About six percent of the Dutch population is Muslim.
3 comments:
Seems to me that apostasy and treason were one and the same during the birth of the Ummah. In fact hypocrites undermined the political life of the umma at the time, and would join and renounce Islam for political ends.
In a group-oriented culture where conformity is critical to the survival of the group and therefore the individual such strong-handedness was inevitable.
In the modern, comfortable world (which is primarily but not limited o the west), this tight dependency no longer exists and apostates should be free to go about their business because they no longer threaten the state
assalaam alaikum,
i am not an alim, so please do not take what i say for granted.
i believe that islamic law does only aply in dar al islam, not in dar al harb. in nations where sharia is not the base for the legislation, we cannot demand the punishment for apostacy for people who live in non-islamic countries.
we should also be careful about who we call an apostate. if a person turns away from a backward, tribalist, oppressing, superstitious and even sometimes blasphemous form of islam, and she becomes an atheist, this may be a big step ahead. she may just, by turning away from superstious tradition, have realised the first part of shahada: "la ilaha", there is no deity worthy of worshiping. her false idols have vanished, her cup is empty. is she keeps on looking, incha'allah she may also realise the beautiful truth of the second part: "ila allah", exept allah(swt).
please read this shourt article on takfeer.
http://www.themodernreligion.com/ugly/kafr.html
assalaam alaikum,
redwasp
The following letter is very popular in Indonesia.
An Ex-Muslim’s Open Letter to Muslims of the World
http://www.islam-watch.org/authors/63-letters/961-an-ex-muslims-open-letter-to-muslims-of-the-world.html
By Roman
Post a Comment