From the first link, Usama Hasan’s opinion piece in Prospect titled “Charlie Hebdo attacks: time for Islam to reform”:
From the second link, Usama Hasan’s pamphlet titled “No compulsion in religion: Islam & freedom of belief”:
From the third link, Abdullah al-Andalusi’s review of his Big Question appearance posted on his own website:
From the fourth link, a comment that “Edward Woodward” (an atheist YouTuber and blogger who regularly attacks Islam and Muslims in his videos and articles) made to his own blog post criticizing al-Andalusi’s above review:
Anything else I can help you with?
Yes, there is an unlimited, unqualified right for anybody to leave Islam without consequence.
I quoted one of the typical “it’s too bad they got murdered, but here’s 9000 words on why they deserved to be murdered” launching pads that have been coming from the left wing nonstop since Muslims murdered 12 people for drawing a cartoon.
These are all playing the translation two-step where they first claim that the concept of “apostasy” doesn’t apply to Islam since it’s not an Arabic word, and then make a lot of dancing around claims like “no coercion in religion” where “coercion” and “religion” are never defined to include “killing someone for leaving Islam.”
I actually don’t find it that implausible that al-Andalusi personally is opposed to killing people for living Islam, or that he told some blogger such, but the fact that he’s not willing to directly say it himself is indicative of the real problem, which is that no Muslim leader can maintain credibility among Muslims if he makes a clear, unequivocal condemnation of penalizing people for leaving Islam.
Very good. Perhaps **Miller **et al can follow this example of how to simply state a basic moral fact?
Did you not read the part I quoted where Hasan explicitly stated the rule that “apostates from Islam, i.e. Muslims who leave their faith and/or convert to another, must be killed” (doing exactly that thing which you claim is never done) “blatantly contradict[s] the Qur’anic principle that ‘There is no compulsion in religion’”, and since that “basic, universal Qur’anic principle of freedom of religion and belief overrides all other interpretations”, the “death penalty for apostasy has been formally abolished by the Shaykh al-Islam of the Ottoman Caliphate as well as by al-Azhar of Egypt”?
Or are you just an even bigger dumbass than you’ve been so far?
And yet, for some reason, Egypt prosecutes blasphemy, including with the death penalty, on a regular basis, and enjoys widespread majority support for doing so.
Some more commentary on Charlie Hebdo’s actual content and the actual meaning of the award, from people who have read the thing and don’t reflexively look for reasons to castigate anyone attacked by Muslims.
Pssst! Haberdash! Put those goalposts back! We were talking about Usama Hasan and Abdullah al-Andalusi, neither of whom are the nation of Egypt, you know.
So are you going to admit that Hasan, in his pamphlet, did everything you falsely claimed he didn’t do (and didn’t do what you falsely claimed he did do)? Or are you going to stick with being a goalpost-moving, lying dumbass?
No, you claimed that Egypt has abolished the death penalty for apostasy. Strange how people still get executed for apostasy in Egypt regularly, and 88% of Egyptians say they support this. Maybe nobody is listening to al-Azhar?
I repeat, not that it needs any repeating: Teju Cole’s publicly expressed support for writers who’ve been victims of Islamist violence is way more courageous and meaningful as a defense of free expression than anything your self-congratulatory anonymous messageboard posturing has ever accomplished.
If someone Teju Cole has a personal relationship with is, by random chance, one of the people in a shopping mall when it is attacked by Muslims, he will express admiration for that person.
If someone unknown to Teju Cole is specifically targeted and killed for writing against Islam, he will furiously distance himself from and condemn that person, and make it clear to anyone with a brain that he believed their murder was justified.
Well there’s your problem: you think you’re someone with a brain. You’re not. You’re someone who is incapable of reading an essay without substituting what you want the author to be saying for their actual intent, and the text.
I am a free speech absolutist, and every position I have staked is in line with such a purview. Re-read the thread I made months ago. In there I am defending terrorist apologists and their right to speak their opinion. Hypocritical to take such a stand only if one foolishly condemned me an “Islamophobe.”
None of this is true, of course. I wonder what it is like living in an alternate reality where facts do not ever matter and hatred is the driving force for all opinion and action.
No, I quoted Usama Hasan stating that al-Azhar had abolished the death penalty for apostasy (by issuing a fatwa to that effect in 1958).
Or you don’t know how al-Azhar and its relationship with the Egyptian government, past and present, works (or how fatawa work, for that matter).
Mahmud Shaltut, named Grand Imam of al-Azhar by General Nasser in 1958, was a reformist disciple of Muhammad Abduh, and was the one who determined that there is no death penalty for apostasy (a view shared by the Grand Imam of al-Azhar from 1996 to 2010, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy).
Egyptian law doesn’t mention apostasy at all. Prosecutions for apostasy are done by using other laws, such as individual prosecutors using Egypt’s hisbah laws, which are broad, extremely vague laws which allow suits brought against anyone for any reason if the person filing the suit believes that by so doing they are following the injunction to impose good when it is absent and forbid evil when it is present (Nasr Abu Zayd, for instance, was prosecuted under hisbah).
I see your dumbassery extends beyond your inability to read my links, and into an inability to read your own.
That’s a cute abbreviation for “move the goalposts” you’ve got there.
Gee, I hope you’re not too exhausted from your recent goalpost-moving, because I’m afraid you’re going to have to move them again. Here’s what Teju Cole wrote about a group of innocent students with whom he had no personal relationship at all, who were murdered by Muslim extremists in Nigeria in 2012:
Yeah, I think Teju Cole is doing okay at publicly condemning and drawing popular attention to Islamist-terrorist violence, even when the victims don’t happen to be friends of his.
He’s certainly making a much more significant and positive impact than ignorant bigoted anonymous keyboard warriors like you, that’s for sure.
“Make it clear to anyone with a brain that he believed X” is apparently Haberdash-speak for “explicitly contradicted X”.
You’ve decided to cast Cole as one of your “Sharia-compliant coward” fantasy villains, completely regardless of anything he actually says or does that contradicts the beliefs you want to pretend he holds.
Haberdash, Stringbean, you show a noteworthy aptitude for changing the minds of those who disagree with you. This relentless persuasiveness surely influences all manner of success in your lives, and I imagine that I am quite jealous.
Apparently, you can’t understand the difference between 9000, and 73. Also, those 73 words had nothing to do with what they deserved, and everything to do with what they don’t deserve: namely, an award. So, you also can’t seem understand the difference between not receiving an award, and being shot.
There’s really just no end to the number of things that you can’t understand, is there?
Yeah, about that. You never answered my question. Should those people who made those comments receive awards for their exercise of free speech? If you were invited to the award ceremony, would you attend? If you declined to attend an award ceremony for anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers, would that undermine your claims to be a free speech absolutist?
If the award is for martyrdom for free speech and I am a member of an organization which is devoted to free speech and giving such awards? Yes. You’re trying to paint this as if someone accosted Cole on the street and demanded that he agree with [the fictitious racist version of] Charlie Hebdo [created by Cole and other leftists in a furious attempt to avoid acknowledging that Muslims killed liberals]. He chose to join an organization devoted to free speech and chose to distance himself from an award for being a free speech martyr; this is not “a random award for being an anti-Semite” or anything analogous to it.
With that distinction that you consistently refuse to acknowledge made, the other point is of course that there are few to no opportunities to give awards to anti-Semites, white supremacists, or homophobes killed for their speech, because Jewish, black, and gay organizations don’t use machine guns to settle hurt feelings. There’s only one group of people whose vision of stamping out “phobia” involves constant blood-soaked massacres, so it’s an irrelevant comparison.
I think the United States should offer them an award as political prisoners and our president should be criticizing the French authorities for their hypocritical censoring of language.
I would certainly attend that ceremony. Most would disagree with me and consider my attendance a “defense” of the content of their hateful or otherwise offensive speech. As an absolutist, I don’t care what they said. The killing of people to stifle their ideas is the greatest expression of undemocratic totalitarianism. What I am saying is, don’t call yourself a “fundamentalist” if you disagree with this position; Cole lacks the backbone to do the dirty work.