moderate muslims or ex-muslims?

Submitted by Jan (Austria), Mar 17, 2006 at 09:20

Dear Vijay,

I think you confuse moderate muslims with ex-muslims who express that they left Islam openly.

Wafa Sultan is an ex-muslim! I got tears in my eyes from admiration when I saw her testimony on Al-Jazeera. It is just a matter of time until she gets the death penalty from somewhere in the islamic world or even from any islamic group in the US. Do not expect any moderate muslims to make a demonstration against any fatwa pronounced against her!

According to Islam, somebody who comes on television and criticizes Islam shows that he or she left Islam and therefore needs to be killed anyway. In the biography of Prophet Mohamed by Ibn Ishaq, it is written that a man who killed a shepherd for merely saying that he would never follow Mohamed and become a muslim, was "blessed" by the prophet himself.

So somebody who follows the sunnah of the prophet can kill any person who criticizes Islam or the prophet on his own initiative without needing any legal procedure. An example of this was the man who killed the Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh on his own initiative and in accordance with the sunnah of the Prophet.

I didn't see any demonstrations from any so-called moderate muslims in favor of Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Tasleema Nasreen who received death threats after openly leaving Islam. If they would do so, they would deny the shariah that requires the killing of apostates and in this way they would be apostates themselves with the death penalty above their head.

People with western thinking consider Irshad Manji a moderate muslim. However, for the muslim public she is an apostate and I did not find any muslim scholar taking her defense.

Jan

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