A Putrid Faith

Gulf News:

Egypt's top cleric yesterday denied in a statement that he had said a Muslim can give up his faith without punishment.

He doesn't specify what that punishment might be.

"There is a campaign by secularists to distort the image of Dr Ali Goma'a," a senior official in Al Azhar told Gulf News.

"He cannot deny punishment in this life for the apostate," said Mustafa Al Chaka of the Islamic Research Centre.

Khaybar Oasis makes an excellent comment. An excerpt:

[...] in Islamic societies, publicly expressed apostasy from Islam is considered a threat to the well-being of Muslims.

He [the Egyptian cleric] also wrote: "If the case in question is one of merely rejecting faith, then there is no worldly punishment."

Right; not merely "rejecting faith." The distinction in mainstream Islam, and apparently endorsed by Gomaa, is that the apostasy from Islam must be public, i.e., must be detected through some overt words or acts, to constitute a crime worthy of earthly punishment. So if you keep secret your apostasy, and no other person finds out about it or reports it, you won't be punished, except by Allah. Nothing new there. That is classical Islamic jurisprudence.

I think this Egyptian cleric, Ali Goma, was trying to sugarcoat the vile nature of Islamic law. Now, that his untrue comment has got too much attention, he's backpedaling.

Read this and shudder at what really happens to ex-Muslims in Egypt:

One week ago, on July 16, these same family members openly threatened to kill Al-Sayed for leaving Islam to become a Christian, after spotting her walking through a fair in Alexandria.

Local police promptly took her into “protective custody,” allegedly to prevent her physical harm at the hands of her irate Muslim relatives.

But instead of protecting her, local police and State Security Investigation (SSI) officials have subjected the threatened woman to days of severe physical and emotional torture. Her maltreatment included electrical shocks, beatings and being photographed naked.

The state of Egyptian law:

After becoming a Christian in January 2003, Al-Sayed had obtained Christian identity papers under the name of Maryan Eleya Saleeb and married a Christian man. Egyptian law does not permit anyone born a Muslim to change his or her religion, nor can a Muslim woman marry a Christian.

Comments

[Josh Scholar]

No doubt they raped her too, but no one is saying.

And because of that, her relatives are much more likely to kill her now than they were before custody.

Gotta love the justice that Islam promises to bring us filthy kufir.

[Josh Scholar]

Eteraz is saying that the Gulf News misquoted and that there has been no retraction.

In any case, if the Gulf News has a completely accurate translation, then it was a retraction.

We shall see, I hope.

http://eteraz.wordpress.com/2007/07/24/huge-news-egyptian-mufti-kills-death-penalty-for-apostasy/
and in the Guardian
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali_eteraz/2007/07/islams_organic_liberalism.html

[Isaac Schrödinger]

Eteraz, I think, agrees with the point that the Mufti still sees apostasy as a crime -- it's just that the "criminal" shouldn't be murdered for it.

If so, it's a slight improvement. Though, it's not worthy of the orgasms one sees among the diet Muslim community. It just goes to show just how totalitarian Islamic law really is.

Maybe in a few hundred years, they'll stop thinking of apostates as "criminals".

[Josh Scholar]

Yes, he's only going so far as to say that the death penalty isn't required, but that the government has the right to impose it.

What's missing is the fact that in Egypt the government allows the Muslim Brotherhood (and others?) to kill apostates legally, without the government having to get it's hand dirty.

This, by the way, is the example I give people about the origin of Muslim terrorism. Egyptian society allows anarchy in that anyone (any Muslim anyway) can murder apostates in the name of Islam legally. That means that, in this example terrorism is an institution of the society.

Even though Islam doesn't mandate honor killings, in such a society it's easy to see how one Egyptian parliamentarian attacked a bill that would have mandated significant punishment for honor killings as "attacking freedom of religion." He thought that every individual has a right to murder for morality, and that this was a right granted by Islam.

The tyranny of Islamic terrorism is an Islamic institution.

[Josh Scholar]

Oops, I made a mistake, the bill was in Jordan, not Egypt.