Bangladesh Declares Fatwa Illegal

By Effendi | Published: July 8, 2010

All extra-judicial punishment, including passing religious edicts or fatwa, have been declared illegal in Bangladesh.

The petitions were filed following several newspaper reports and investigations by the petitioners into violence inflicted on women in the name of fatwa by local religious leaders and powerful corners.

It was alleged in the petitions that a number of deaths, suicides and incidents of grievous hurt of women were reported arising from punishment given in salish, but the law-enforcement agencies took no action to prevent those unlawful actions.

This can only be good news for the thousands of victims of extra-judicial punishments, the large majority of whom have traditionally been women. A catalogue of abuses against women by decree of sharia court and by fatwa have been recorded in Bangladesh over the years by human rights groups. Some of them have been described in this article. Interesting to find Bangladeshi clerics quoted in that article, warning against the travesties of justice instigated by spurious sharia judges who, for a fee, spout fatwas:

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Posted in Misogyny, Secularism, Sharia | 4 Comments

The History of Alcohol in Islam

By Guest | Published: July 8, 2010

This is a cross-post by Lord Curzon from Coming Anarchy

Muslims are prohibited from drinking alcohol. But why? In objectively reviewing for the ban in the Koran, one can only leave bewildered. Occasional passages that do not refer to alcohol as it is known today is interpreted as being a complete prohibition on alcohol consumption, without exception.

The Koran has a few sections that cryptically refer to alcohol. In 4:43, Muslims are forbidden to attend to prayers while intoxicated; in 2:219, intoxicants are said to contain good and evil, but the evil is greater than the good. In these two sections, the word for “intoxicated” is sukara which is derived from the word “sugar” and means drunk or intoxicated. In 5:90, “intoxicants” are called “abominations of Satan’s handiwork” intended to turn people away from God and prayer, and Muslims are therefore ordered to abstain. Here, the word is al-khamr, which is related to the verb “to ferment,” and probably refers to fermented sugar drinks. This word could be used to describe other intoxicants such as the Roman era wine.

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Posted in Esoterica | 20 Comments

An Unlikely Benefactor

By Faisal | Published: July 8, 2010

And now for some good news. Jewish property tycoon, Robert Harush who grew up in Ashkelon in Israel, donated a fortune towards the renovation of large mosque in Montereau in France.

Father of four Robert Harush, 58, grew up in Ashkelon and having completed his military service tried his luck in the real estate business in Europe. His success has won him many hotels and buildings and he is estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of shekels.

Despite his success Harush did not forget his hometown and has returned to Ashkelon and invested in local building ventures. For the past 10 years he has been dividing his time between Israel and France. His four children all speak Hebrew.

The businessman even chose to stay in the southern city during Operation Cast Lead. He remained in Israel also after a Grad rocket landed near his house.

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Posted in Activism | Leave a comment

Islamism and the misunderstandings of the Left

By Guest | Published: July 7, 2010

This is a cross-post from Harry’s Place by Igor

An article on Comment Is Free lauding the recently deceased Lebanese Grand Ayatollah, Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah, provides a vignette of how leftists tend to interpret the statements and actions of Islamists according to their own frame of reference, and more often than not get it hopelessly wrong.

Ian Williams writes:

In fact, the Ayatollah, who had his own website (http://english.bayynat.org.lb/) epitomised what Western critics, with varying degrees of sincerity have been suggesting Islam should be. He took the West at its face value, decried the idea of theocratic rule in affairs of state and indirectly paved the way for Hezbollah, formerly the party of economically, socially and politically excluded Lebanese Shi’a to become part of a, relatively, democratic polity.

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Posted in Islamism, The Regressive Left | 2 Comments

Hizb ut Tahrir – we hate it here but let us stay

By Guest | Published: July 7, 2010

This is a guest post by Abu Wannabe Arab

The global Islamist group Hizb ut Tahrir recently held an annual conference in Sydney Australia. The speakers at the conference, many of whom were British, spouted all the usual nonsense about western conspiracies and an Islamic state taking over the world. However, in the run up to the conference they produced a propaganda video that has to be seen for entertainment value alone. The video is followed by an interview with a truly clueless member of HT who does so badly that you end up feeling sorry for him. But putting the pathetic interview to one side, I want to look at some of the points raised in the propaganda video.

The HT members doing the talking mention how there is a new brand of ‘secular Islam’ being promoted by western governments, that encourages Muslims to adopt a ‘western reading of history’. I’m not sure what a ‘western reading of history’ is, it’s perhaps history without all the mad and baseless conspiracy theories that characterise Nabhani’s (HT’s founder) reading of history in which no reference or footnotes are supplied. I’m not sure a secular understanding of Islam is new either. I am quite certain that Ibn Rushd, Muhammad Abduh and Ali Abd al-Raziq were not western stooges nor were they recent. In fact, modern secularism owes much to the works of great Muslim scholars such as Ibn Rushd, Al-Farabi and others.

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Posted in Islamism | Leave a comment

Hizb-ut-Tahrir Australia: Spokesman Eviscerated on Live TV

By Effendi | Published: July 7, 2010

This short video should be watched in its entirety. The sound you hear at the end of it is the Australian reporter ripping the pathetic Hizbi chap a brand new fenestration.

That was a party political broadcast brought to you by Hizb-ut-Tahrir.

Posted in Islamism, Obscurantism | 8 Comments

Nasr Abu Zayd is dead

By Faisal | Published: July 6, 2010

Nasr Abu Zayd, an Egyptian scholar who was declared an apostate for challenging mainstream Muslim views on the Koran, died in Cairo on Monday. He was 66.

“Religion has been used, politicized, not only by groups but also the official institutions in every Arab country,” he told Reuters in 2008. The distinction between “the domain of religion and secular space,” he said, had been eroded.

The New York Times covers his passing:

Dr. Abu Zayd’s liberal, critical approach to Islamic teachings angered some Muslim conservatives in Egypt in the 1990s, when President Hosni Mubarak’s government was combating an uprising by armed Islamic militants. Dr. Abu Zayd criticized the use of religion to exert political power. He argued that the Koran was both a literary and religious text, a view that clashes with the Islamic idea that the holy book is the final revelation of God.

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Posted in Hermeneutics | 3 Comments

Stop the stoning of Sakine Mohammadi Ashtiani

By Faisal | Published: July 4, 2010

From Stop Honour Killings:

Sakine Mohammadi Ashtiani is a forty-three year old mother of two children, 16 & 20 year old respectively. Both Sakine’s children and her lawyer tried everything they could to stop the stoning sentence, as a result of committing adultery. However, her stoning is finalized by the Iran’s court. Sakine is in Tabriz prison awaiting her imminent stoning sentence.

The barbaric act of stoning must stop now!

Do not allow our nightmare become a reality,

Protest against our mother’s stoning!

Read the rest.

Posted in Sharia | 20 Comments

Using Muslims to protect Islamists

By Effendi | Published: July 4, 2010

Consider two stories carried by Bob Pitt on Islamophobia-Watch.

Exhibit A, published by I-W on June 25th, is the story of Sureyya Ozkaya:

These are the shocking injuries inflicted upon schoolgirl Sureyya Ozkaya during a brutal daylight assault near her Thornton Heath home.

The 14-year-old’s hair was set on fire and her hands and feet were cut with glass during the attack in Grangewood Park, before her attackers smashed her head against a tree and left her bleeding in a bush.

She was stumbled upon by a woman walking her dog and carried home to nearby Kitchener Road following the attack, at about 7.30pm on June 9.

Sureyya’s mother Pemdegul Kale, 39, said three girls taunted her daughter about her Muslim faith as they carried out the assault, before burning her hair with a lighter and stealing her trainers.

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Posted in Anti Muslim bigotry, Islamism, Moral relativism | 13 Comments

Lahore Attacks: Blame the Foreigners

By Faisal | Published: July 4, 2010

Another barbaric suicide attack in Lahore which shows all the signs of a jihadi mission by the Punjabi Taliban:

The bombing was captured on CCTV and shown on TV. The first bomber was seen running into a basement clutching a bag filled with explosives and ballbearings, pursued by a guard, before a large explosion swept across the room.

As the smoke cleared a presumed second bomber is seen slipping into the building, against the tide of fleeing worshippers, and running up a staircase into the main area, where he also blew himself up.

Images from the site showed debris and body parts scattered across the blood-stained marble courtyard of the shrine.

The motive for this attack can be found in religious dogma, this was no political protest by the “little guy” against the forces of imperialism; quite the opposite. This was an assault fomented by a powerful and wealthy cabal of Wahabi clerics and their royal Saudi patrons enforcing their version of orthodoxy on ordinary believers by an act of terrorism. And it won’t stop here.

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Posted in Terrorism | 3 Comments

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