Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (2 page)

Nina Shea

An international human-rights lawyer for thirty years, Nina Shea is Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute, where she directs the Center for Religious Freedom, a foreign-policy center she helped found in 1986. For seven years ending in 2005,
she helped organize and lead a coalition of churches and religious groups that worked to end a religious war in South Sudan against Christians and traditional African believers, which led to the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement and culminated in a vote for South Sudan to secede and become an independent country in 2011; she is a long-time advocate for persecuted religious minorities around the world; and she has authored and edited three widely acclaimed reports on Saudi Arabia, which translate and provide original analysis on official Saudi textbooks and educational materials. She regularly presents testimony before Congress, delivers public lectures, organizes briefings and conferences, and writes frequently on issues pertaining to religious freedom in American foreign policy. Her best-selling 1997 book on anti-Christian persecution,
In the Lion’s Den
, remains a standard in the field. Her writings and articles about her advocacy have been published in the
Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Weekly Standard
, and
Huffington Post
, among others, and she is a frequent contributor to
National Review Online
. Since 1999, Shea has served as a congressionally appointed Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent federal agency. She previously served as a U.S. public delegate to the United Nation’s main human rights body, appointed by both Republican and Democratic administrations, and currently serves as a commissioner on the U.S. National Commission to UNESCO.

Abdurrahman Wahid

The late Abdurrahman Wahid was President of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, and head of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim organization. An outspoken critic of radical Islam, he has been recognized by members of all religions throughout the world for his defense of religious and ethnic minorities and promotion of religious liberty for all. Among the many positions he has held are cofounder and senior advisor of LibForAll, which generously arranged for his foreword to this book.

Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd

The late Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd was Academic Director of the International Institute of Qur’anic Studies (IIQS), a branch of LibForAll Foundation. He is the author of numerous scholarly works on Islam in both Arabic and English and is known for developing a humanistic interpretation of the Qur’an. Formerly Professor of Arabic Literature at Cairo University, he left when Egypt’s highest court ruled that, because of his views, he was an apostate and must be forcibly divorced from his Muslim wife. He also received death threats from Ayman Al Zawahiri of Al-Qaeda. Abu-Zayd held the Ibn Rushd Chair of Humanism and Islam at the University for
Humanistics in the Netherlands and was awarded the Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2005. He died in Cairo on July 5, 2010.

Abdullah Saeed

Abdullah Saeed, originally from the Maldives, is Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne. He obtained his B.A. in Arab/Islamic Studies in Saudi Arabia in 1986 and his doctorate at the University of Melbourne in 1992. He has written on the interpretation of Islamic texts, Islam and human rights, and religious freedom, among other areas. Together with his brother Hassan Saeed, former Attorney General of the Maldives, he authored the book
Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam
(2004), which is currently banned in the Maldives.

KYAI HAJI ABDURRAHMAN WAHID

Nothing could possibly threaten God who is Omnipotent and existing as absolute and eternal Truth. And as
ar-Rahman
(the Merciful) and
ar-Rahim
(the Compassionate), God has no enemies.

As revered Muslim intellectual K. H. Mustofa Bisri
¹
wrote in his poem “Allahu Akbar”: “If all of the 6 billion human inhabitants of this earth, which is no greater than a speck of dust, were blasphemous … or pious … it would not have the slightest effect upon His greatness.”

Those who claim to defend God, Islam, or the Prophet are thus either deluding themselves or manipulating religion for their own mundane and political purposes. We witnessed this in the carefully manufactured outrage that swept the Muslim world several years ago, claiming hundreds of lives, in response to cartoons published in Denmark. Those who presume to fully grasp God’s will, and dare to impose by force their own limited understanding of this upon others, are essentially equating themselves with God and are unwittingly engaged in blasphemy.

As Muslims, rather than harshly condemning others’ speech or beliefs and employing threats or violence to constrain these, we should ask: Why is there so little freedom of expression and freedom of religion in the so-called Muslim world? Exactly whose interests are served by laws such as Section 295-C of the Pakistani legal code, “Defiling the Name of Muhammad,” which mandates the death penalty for “blasphemy”? Pakistan’s Federal Shari’a Court has effectively defined this law as:

reviling or insulting the Prophet in writing or speech; speaking profanely or contemptuously about him or his family; attacking the Prophet’s dignity and honor in an abusive manner; vilifying him or making an ugly face when his name is mentioned; showing enmity or hatred towards him, his family, his companions, and the Muslims; accusing, or slandering the Prophet and his family, including spreading evil reports about him or his family; defaming the Prophet; refusing the Prophet’s jurisdiction or judgment in any manner; rejecting the Sunnah; showing disrespect, contempt for or rejection of the rights of Allah and His Prophet or rebelling against Allah and His Prophet.
²

Rather than serve to protect God, Islam, or Muhammad, such deliberately vague and repressive laws merely empower those with a worldly (i.e., political) agenda and act as a “sword of Damocles” threatening not only religious minorities, but also the right of mainstream Muslims to speak freely about their own religion without being threatened by the wrath of fundamentalists—exercised through the power of government or mobs—whose claims of “defending religion” are little more than a pretext for self-aggrandizement.

No objective observer can deny that Pakistani society—like so many others in the Muslim world—has undergone a process of coarsening under the influence of such laws, in tandem with the rise of religious extremism and the loss of true spirituality, without which the profound meaning and purpose of Islam remain veiled from human understanding.

The renowned Qur’anic injunction, “Let there be no compulsion in religion” (2:256), anticipated Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
³
by over thirteen centuries and should serve as an inspiration to Muslim societies today, guiding them on the path to religious freedom and tolerance.

In its original Qur’anic sense, the word
sharia
refers to “the way,” the path to God, and not to formally codified Islamic law, which only emerged in the centuries following Muhammad’s death. In examining the issue of blasphemy and apostasy laws, it is thus vital that we differentiate between the Qur’an—from which much of the raw material for producing Islamic law is derived—and the law itself. For while its revelatory inspiration is divine, Islamic law is man-made and thus subject to human interpretation and revision.

Punishment for apostasy is merely the legacy of historical circumstances and political calculations stretching back to the early days of Islam, when apostasy generally coincided with desertion from the caliph’s army and/or rejection of his authority and thus constituted treason or rebellion. The embedding (i.e., codification) of harsh punishments for apostasy into Islamic law must be recognized as a historical and political by-product of these circumstances, framed in accordance with human calculations and expediency, rather than as the eternal dictate of Islamic
sharia
on the issue of changing one’s religion.

The historical development and use of the term
sharia
to refer to Islamic law often lead those unfamiliar with this history to conflate man-made law with its revelatory inspiration, and thereby to elevate to the status of Divine the products of human understanding, which are necessarily conditioned by space and time.

On the one hand,
sharia
, properly understood, expresses and embodies perennial values. Islamic law, on the other hand, is the product of
ijtihad
(interpretation), which depends on circumstances (
al-hukm yadur ma‘a al-‘illah wujudan wa ‘adaman
) and needs to be continuously reviewed in accordance with ever-changing circumstances. This is necessary to prevent Islamic law from becoming out of date, rigid, and noncorrelative, not only with Muslims’ contemporary lives and conditions, but also with the underlying perennial values of
sharia
itself.

Throughout Islamic history, many of the greatest
fiqh
(Islamic jurisprudence) scholars have also been deeply grounded in the traditions of
tassawuf
, or Islamic mysticism, and have recognized the need to balance the letter with the spirit of the law. The profoundly humanistic and spiritual nature of Sufi Islam facilitated the accommodation of different social and cultural practices as Islam spread from its birthplace in the Arabian Peninsula to the Levant, North Africa, the Sahel and Sub-Saharan Africa, Persia, Central and South Asia, and the East Indies archipelago. By many estimates, a majority of the Muslim population in most of these regions still practice a form of religious piety either directly or indirectly derived from Sufism. And the greatness of traditional Islamic art and architecture—from the wonders of Fes and Granada, to Istanbul, Isfahan, Samarkand, and Agra—bears testimony to the long line of Sufi masters, guilds, and individual artists who strove to ennoble matter, so as to transform our man-made environment into “the veritable counterpart of nature, a mosaic of ‘Divine portents’ revealing everywhere the handiwork of man as God’s vice-regent.”
⁴

Indeed, the greatness of classical Islamic civilization—which incorporated a humane and cosmopolitan universalism—stemmed largely from the intellectual and spiritual maturity that grew from the amalgamation of Arab, Greek, Jewish, Christian, and Persian influences. That is why I wept upon seeing Ibn Rushd’s commentary on the
Nicomachean Ethics
, lovingly preserved and displayed, during a visit some years ago to Fes, Morocco. For if not for Aristotle and his great treatise, I might have become a Muslim fundamentalist myself.

Among the various factors that have contributed to the long decline of Arab and Muslim civilizations in general, and have greatly hindered their participation in the development of the modern world, was the triumph of normative religious constraints, which ultimately defeated the classical tradition of Islamic humanism. Absorption of “alien” influences—particularly in the realm of speculative thought—and the creation of individual, rational, and independent sciences not constrained by religious scholasticism were defeated by internal control mechanisms exercised by religious and governmental authorities, thus paralyzing Muslim societies.

These same tendencies are still on display in our contemporary world, not least in the form of severe blasphemy and apostasy laws that narrow the bounds of acceptable discourse in the Islamic world and prevent most Muslims from thinking “outside the box” not only about religion but also about vast spheres of life, literature, science, and culture in general.

Anyone who is sincere in understanding his or her faith necessarily undergoes a process of constant evolution in that understanding, as experience and insights give rise to new perceptions of the truth. For as God states in the Qur’an: “We will
display Our Signs upon the horizon, and within themselves (humanity), until it is clear to them that God is the Truth (
al-Haqq
)” (41:53).

Nothing that exists is self-sufficient, other than God. All living things are interdependent and owe their very existence to God. Yet because God’s creatures exist within time and space, their perceptions of truth and reality differ from one to the next, conditioned by their personal knowledge and experience.

As referenced above, Islam views the world and whatever information we may obtain from it as signs leading to knowledge of God. Muslim scholars traditionally classify three stages of knowledge:
First
, the science of certainty (
‘ilm al-yaqin
), which is inferential and concerns knowledge commonly held to be true, whether by scientists, intellectuals, or
ulama
themselves.
Second
, the vision of certainty (
‘ain al-yaqin
) represents a higher level of truth than the first. At this stage, one directly witnesses that information about an objective phenomenon is indeed true and accurate.
Third
, the truth or reality of certainty (
haqq al-yaqin
), that is, truth that reaches the level of perfection through direct personal experience, as exemplified by a saint’s mystical communion with God.

The fact that the Qur’an refers to God as “the Truth” is highly significant. If human knowledge is to attain this level of Truth, religious freedom is vital. Indeed, the search for Truth (i.e., the search for God)—whether employing the intellect, emotions, or various forms of spiritual practice—should be allowed a free and broad range. For without freedom, the individual soul cannot attain absolute Truth, which is, by Its very nature, unconditional Freedom itself.