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We Need to Fight the Battle for Enlightenment
The
Fate of Apostates & Infidels under Islam
I am
delighted to be here today to speak at such a wonderful conference.
Here, I talk as an apostate, an atheist who left Islam and religion
altogether at the age of 15, a veteran activist of women’s rights
who survived the atrocities committed by political Islam in Iran.
My
being a Muslim, like all other children who are accidentally born
into Muslim families, was hereditary. My parents were ordinary
Muslims. My father was relatively open-minded but my mother
indoctrinated us and used religious rules for protecting her
children. In my childhood, faith meant that I had an all powerful
all knowing father figure watching over me. Anything bad that
happened to me – he’d take care of me. To me it was comforting to
Know that evil would not triumph, that the anguish of the innocent
in this world would not go un-avenged was comforting. The temptation
to subordinate your being to a deity ; to a god was immense.
My
doubts about god began seriously when I was 12 years old. I would
give a lot to be able to believe. But in the end I had to tread the
rocky and non-comforting path of atheism. I gave up the shelter of a
divine shadow – but I gained a life that could question and explore
the life and human existence. I questioned and rejected religion
and became an atheist because I could not answer the inconsistencies
and hypocrisies of religion to myself, and because religion limited
me as a human being – I remain an atheist because I have discovered
myself as human being not alienated by any god or religion and I do
not need religion to tell me who I am.
But
those years of exploring and searching for truth was soon replaced
by horrors years of brutality and atrocities by political Islam in
Iran. Though I left Islam, I had to live Islam. In my youth and
young adulthood in Iran, I lived through thousands of days when
political Islam shed blood. Since 1979, a hundred thousand men,
women and children have been executed in the name of Allah. I have
lived through years of assassination of infidels, apostates and
opponents of the Islamic republic inside and outside Iran. Years of
suppression of women and brutal treatment of those women who
resisted the misery of mandatory Hijab and the rule of sexual
apartheid. I, along with thousands of non – believers and political
prisoners, was tortured by order of the representative of Allah and
Sharia; tortured, while the verses of the Koran about non-believers
were played in the torture chambers. The voice reading the Koran was
mixed with our cries of pain from lashes and other brutal forms of
torture.
Non-believers - atheists under Islam do not have "the right to
life ". They are to be killed. According to Islamic culture, sins
are divided into great sins and little sins. Among the seventeen
great sins, unbelief is the greatest,
more heinous than murder, theft, adultery and so on. Courageous
apostates aim to skewer the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of a
faith that commands the allegiance of a billion people–as well as
the hypocrisies of those Western defenders of Islam who would not
tolerate its strictures in their own cultures.
A free
discussion of Islam is extremely dangerous not only in countries
under Islamic rule but also in the west. Most keep their feelings to
themselves. Those Muslims who disown or even criticize their faith
publicly are likely to be accused of apostasy, a crime punishable by
death under Islamic law–a penalty enforced by a number of Islamic
states, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan.
The
Islamic position on apostasy has been described as: “total disbelief
that any sane person could possibly have a genuine reason for
leaving ‘the most perfect religion’. He or she must therefore, by
definition, be acting in bad faith. Essential aspects of our
civilised humanity, such as freedom of speech and freedom of belief,
are best exemplified in Islam by those thinkers and writers it calls
apostates. The importance of apostates and other religious
dissidents is crucial.
Freedom
from and of religion does not mean merely the freedom to have a
faith but also the freedom to change one's religion, and freedom to
be free from religion. But under the Sharia, apostasy (either
advocating the rejection of Islamic belief or announcing such
rejection by word or deed) is not permitted and for a man is
punishable by death. The punishment for a woman is more lenient -
she must stay in prison until she reverts, however long it takes.
Even when the death penalty is not applied, those accused of
apostasy can be subject to the most violent treatment. This
discrimination is clearly contrary to freedom of religion and belief
and to the principle that religion should be a private matter for
the individual.
In a
feeble attempt to disguise the Islamic attitude to apostasy,
apologists often quote the Koranic verse: “There shall be no
compulsion in religion”. For a Muslim wishing to leave Islam this is
simply not true. In Yemen it’s punishable by death as it is in Iran,
Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan under the Taliban and other Islamic
states. The most famous incidence of Apostasy was in 1989 when
Ayatollah Khomeini announced a fatwa, or death sentence against
Salman Rushdie for his alleged apostasy in writing “The Satanic
Verses”. In a similar vein in Iran in July 1998 a man was executed
for allegedly converting a Muslim woman to the Baha’i faith, this
was even though the woman claimed that her mother was Baha’i and
that she was raised according to that faith. Freedom House's Centre
for Religious Freedom recently protested the forthcoming trial,
before a Sharia court of Islamic law, of Hamid Pourmand, the 47 year
old lay leader of a small Assemblies of God church in the southern
port city of Bandar-i-Bushehr. Pourmand, a convert from Islam, is
facing charges of apostasy from Islam and proselytising Muslims,
both capital offences in Iran. The government of Iran puts someone
on trial for his life solely for his religious belief. The state's
criminalisation of apostasy is always subject to political
manipulation and indicates an absolute negation of individual rights
and freedom. Iran applies an extremist interpretation of Shiite
Islamic law or Sharia, which harshly represses the free expression
of belief, including religious conversion by Muslims. Iran's Sharia
courts view non-Muslims as second-class citizens, whose testimony is
given less weight than Muslims, and sometimes even as non-persons,
without any legal protections.
In
countries ruled by Islamic law and where political Islam holds sway,
writers, thinkers, philosophers, activists, and artists are
frequently denied freedom of expression. Islamic regimes are
notorious for the violent suppression of free thought. Often, as a
government allies itself closely with Islam, any critics of the
government will be accused of blasphemy or apostasy.
In
Islam, there exists a horror of putting the Koran to critical
scrutiny. Ordinary people do not dare to question the Koran. The
result is tyranny, thought police, and stagnation, no intellectual
and moral progress. Even in the academic community it is a taboo to
discuss the Koran scientifically. While there exist a growing
critical movement to criticise religion, particularly Islam,
Islamists, apologists for Islam, and western governments have come
up with the idea of Islamophobia. They try to silence critics. Islam
must be subject to critical examination. By silencing critics and
calling them racists, Islamists and apologists intend to keep
religious domination intact. In Iran the price for criticising Islam
is death in its most horrendous way. How many more fates of Theo Van
Gogh’s are we expecting in the west?
The
moment you say that any idea system is sacred, the moment you
declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire,
derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible. We
must win the right to criticize the religion without fear of
retribution. Criticism, free speech, is the foundation of an open
society. We need to criticise and use reason to solve our problems.
No
belief, rational or irrational, scientific or divinely inspired,
should be exempt from critical examination. If a belief is sound it
will stand on its own merits. If it is not it deserves to fail. No
religion should seek immunity from the examination of its claims, or
seek freedom from moral criticism of its practices.
In the
West, the Enlightenment brought about defence of individual freedom
and civil liberties. The battle against the Church and backward
culture caused a deep change in society's horizon and values and
advanced the society. Western society shook off backward and
religious thoughts and beliefs. Most of our contemporary ideas about
freedom of speech and civil liberties come from the Enlightenment.
We the
atheist and freethinkers need to fight the battle for enlightenment
in the East. We need to push Islam back to where it rightfully
belongs. We should fight for unconditional freedom of speech
including freedom to criticise Islam. We atheists have to challenge
religious authority. For every vilified and oppressed atheist, two
more, ten more, a thousand more will spring up. No matter how brutal
inquisitions and Islamic holocausts, atheists and freethinkers will
spring up because people's minds and needs cannot be imprisoned
forever. Today our society under political Islam is being held
prisoner by Islamic captors, who fight to dominate this world.
And I
am delighted to say that hopes continue coming from Iran where the
society has changed dramatically and deeply since 1979. The movement
for secularism and atheism, for modern ideas and culture, for
individual freedom, for women's freedom and civil liberties is
widespread. Contempt for religion and the backward ruling culture is
deep. Women and the youth are the champions of this battle; a battle
that threatens the foundation of the Islamic system. Any change in
Iran will not only affect the lives of people living in Iran, but
will have a significant impact on the region and worldwide.
Therefore, we must fight the battle for Enlightenment in Iran and
elsewhere in the Middle East.
Adapted from a speech delivered at a conference entitled “Victims of
Jihad”, held parallel to the UN’s 61st commission of
Human Rights on 18th April 2005, in Geneva -Switzerland.
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