Showing posts with label apostasy in Islam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apostasy in Islam. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Marriage and faith for the poor in third world

Ernest Dempsey — The same ignorance whose fruit of intolerance causes innocent blood to spill was at work again in Lahore (Punjab), Pakistan, when a quarrel in the family was inflated to include threats from the neighbors. Two women in this family had converted from Islam to Christianity and married two brothers, Christian by faith, with whom they lived peacefully in a Muslim neighborhood. Perhaps for fear of persecution or vengeance, the women kept their conversion secret. However, during the quarrel last month, one of them gave it out. Before long, the once good Muslim neighbors turned hostile and gossip started spreading about the Christian couples.

To make things worse, as happens in many of Pakistan’s areas—particularly in Punjab, Sindh, and tribal areas­— an influential leader got involved. He not only assumed the role of God by dictating that the formerly Muslim women couldn’t become Christians and live with their Christian husbands, but also ordered the Christian brothers to leave the locality while leaving the women behind. Thus both couples had to flee the area, taking just a handful of their belongings for fear of life.

While Human Liberation Commission has raised a voice for the affected couple, the matter has brought to public notice the ever-needed necessity of tolerance in order for justice to prevail. In many Muslim-dominated societies, people are always welcome to convert from other religions to Islam. But when they leave Islam and embrace another faith, they are labeled as apostates and hunted or persecuted. The case of the two sisters here is yet another example. Since lack of tolerance in some religions, like Islam, bars followers from inter-faith marriages, people have to give up their religion and embrace that of their future spouse in order to get married and start a family.

How one can just stop believing in a religion and embrace the beliefs of others just to get married or for some other benefit is a doubt that can be raised for any/all such conversions. Belief is a spontaneous mix of thought and feeling about a concept or system. It can’t just be replaced or customized for getting a particular benefit or more in one’s social life. Humanist ethics however would allow ceasing to follow a set of beliefs anytime and start following another one, similar or entirely opposite, whatever. This freedom to believe is a natural right, even if Islam or any authoritarian system doesn’t recognize it.

It is regrettable indeed that that in the 21st century, humans are on a run from followers of belief systems that teach them who a certain character was and how to think of it. Muslims or Christians or whatever religion, nothing is above humanity. The poor women who embraced Christianity had all the right to choose what to believe and who to marry. In their suffering, they have shown the oppressive society that important changes in life can start at the grass root level; that one need not hide one’s conversion from others and that one can ask for respect on the basis of inter-personal interaction, not because of one’s religious belief.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Orator Zakir Naik shifts position on apostasy in Islam

Ernest Dempsey — Banned from entering the west as well as internally from addressing in some states in India on account of advocating fundamentalist, oppressive version of Islam, well-known Muslim orator Dr. Zakir Naik has changed his position on the punishment for apostasy in Islam. In his recent Q and A with Oxford students, conducted via satellite transmission, he claimed that Islam does not suggest death for a Muslim who leaves his faith and adopts another, unless for some other unforgivable wrong committed after conversion.

In a YouTube video of the question-answer session, an American doctoral student is shown posing before Naik the question (starting at 8:50 in the video) why a Muslim who leaves his/her faith and starts following a different faith is liable to be killed as dictated in Islamic law. The student mentions that he has a Muslim girlfriend in Turkey who has left Islam and accepted Christianity as the true faith, but is now worried for her safety, even life, due to her decision to say goodbye to Islam. Answering the student, Naik says he has been misrepresented with regard to his position on the matter and video clips shown of him on YouTube have been posted “out of context”.

Naik then says that earlier he had said that many Islamic scholars are of the opinion that former Muslims are punishable by death, but he did not approve it and instead has taught that death is not the “standard punishment” in Islam for ex-Muslims. He then gives the example of a person who was given death punishment by the prophet but upon the recommendation of his close associate Usman, the prophet forgave that man. Naik goes on to say that according to Islam and according to him (Naik), people leaving Islam are not punishable by death only for walking out of Islam.

This new position of Naik is radically different from his earlier video in which he was interviewed by Pakistani anchor Shahid Masood for a TV channel and was presented with the question why Islam punishes with death penalty those who quit it and adopt another faith. Answering the question, Naik at once claims that if a former Muslim starts propagating his new religion, then this act of his is “as good as treason” and is punishable by death just as treason is punishable by death in military in many countries. Naik never mentions any other scholars here nor does he quote any sources, speaking instead completely on his own and justifying death by trying to rationalize.

Most Muslim scholars do think and preach what Naik used to before the mind-shaking ban last year by UK—that Muslims rejecting Islam and adopting another religion are punishable by death. In a video of a debate between people of various faiths, including the world-famous scientist and atheist author Richard Dawkins kept asking a Muslim scholar about the punishment of an apostate in Islam. After trying to change topics, the hesitant scholar eventually gave his answer, i.e. death for the apostate in Islam.

Islam’s position on apostasy continues to face staunch criticism and usually the Muslim apologists try to avoid the question, though even the layman in Muslim countries is aware that Islam orders you to kill the one who leaves Islam and accepts another faith. Naik’s change of mind (or change of tongue and tone, to be more precise) is to be welcomed, and thanks are due to Britain, Canada, India, and all others whose ban has finally taught the orator to speak some sense. Whether other Muslim scholars agree with Naik or not is to be seen yet. For now, the big question is how to explain the clear Islamic orders in Hadith books encouraging killing of apostates.