The Hated Sect

Pakistan already has explicit laws that declare that Ahmadis are non-Muslims. An Ahmadi who says otherwise can be sentenced to jail. The same punishment can be applied if they call their place of worship a mosque.

Now, Indonesia is going down the same wretched path:

On 27 July last year, the Indonesia Council of Ulemas issued a fatwa, which declared that the Ahmadiyah followed an unlawful illegitimate religion.

There followed physical attacks upon the sect in Indonesia, such as the incident on September 20 where a mob of 1,000 people attacked the local Ahmadiyyah community at Sukadana in West Java, damaging more than 70 homes and six mosques.

It's interesting that when Americans in Iraq return fire to snipers who shoot from mosques, the response from Muslims is indignation, yet a thousand people, likely all Muslim, have no qualms about damaging mosques...if the structures belong to an "illegitimate" sect.

Matters for the sect were exacerbated by a decree made by Indonesia's Religious Affairs Minister, Maftuh Basyuni (pictured) who declared in March that the Ahmadiyah in the country should stop calling themselves Muslims and announce that they follow a new religion. "If they refuse to do so, they should return to Islam by renouncing their beliefs," he said.

Islamic organizations in Western countries bitch and moan about discrimination against Muslims and the Islamophobia of Western nations and the phantom apartheid in Israel. However, when it comes to real oppression and persecution of minorities in Muslim nations, not a word is uttered.

Comments

[mts]

So much for the "common knowledge", often repeated notion that Islam is whatever each individual Muslim makes of it (Islamic interpretation sits in a huge tent, big enough to fit many opinions), and that is why there are no multitude of denominations like in Christianity.

But the more the West learns, hopefully the more they realize that there is an agreed-upon interpretation of the book and the example of the Prophet. That the fundamentalists like bin Laden and the Muslim Brotherhood really did their homework, and you can't really touch them in regards to their theology. Hence, they didn't hijack the religion as much as fulfill it.

[Isaac Schrödinger]

Quite right. Sadly such fundamentalism is the loudest force in Islamic nations right now.