Islamic Justice as Injustice

On 14 February 1989 a fatwa was imposed on Salman Rushdie. But the tool called takfir, or "declaring someone a heretic" has since then be applied frequently to eliminate political opponents, says Katajun Amirpur, scholar of Islamic Studies

Twenty years ago the Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared in a legal opinion – a fatwa – that writer Salman Rushdie had forsaken his faith. According to the fatwa, his book The Satanic Verses proved that Rushdie was no longer a Muslim.

And although most Islamic schools of law and legal scholars say that the loss of faith – apostasy – can only be judged by God himself in the great beyond, a few believe that the pious should take things into their own hands instead. Rushdie's fate is well known.

Crippling political adversaries

What most people don't know is that the tool called takfir, or "declaring someone a heretic" has since then be applied frequently to eliminate political opponents or to send a political message – the message that not everything can be said with impunity.

In 1992 the critical Egyptian journalist Farag Foda was denounced from the pulpit as an apostate. A few days later he was dead.

Forced divorce

Another sensation was caused by the case of the Egyptian literary scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd. Abu Zayd was forced to get a divorce because he had allegedly abandoned his religion. And Islamic law forbids marriage between a Muslim and a non-Muslim. But the legal code of the nation of Egypt says otherwise. It does not have any clauses dealing with apostasy, and so renouncing one's faith cannot be prosecuted as a crime.

Nevertheless, Abu Zayd's opponents had found a way, via forced divorce, to outlaw his behaviour. His life in Egypt now endangered, the literary scholar has lived in exile in the Dutch town of Leiden since 1995.

Resistance to reason

All the same, Abu Zayd continues to consider himself a devout Muslim. He has admittedly made some enemies. After all, he had written that the ostensibly secular regime in Egypt and the Islamist opposition both make use of interpretations of the Koran that do not demonstrate a rational reading. Thus they were in his opinion more similar than they would have people believe.

The target of this criticism was not fundamentalist Islam but rather its supposed antithesis, the "state-sanctioned version of Islam", i.e. the Islam propagated by the government nationwide via the media. That was too much for the powers that be. Abu Zayd was silenced.

He still works today as an internationally renowned literary scholar. But he was compelled to leave the country where he was so prominent as a "public intellectual".

Violation of dogmas

Political aims were already at work behind Rushdie's being labelled a heretic. Ayatollah Khomeini wanted to raise his profile as opinion leader of the Islamic world and warrior against the West. And in the case of Abu Zayd the regime simply turned a deaf ear to all criticism.

This recitation of cases where Islam has been instrumentalised to achieve political ends could be continued ad infinitum. A few years ago, for instance, Iranian theologian Hassan Yussefi Eshkevari was accused of apostasy because he had declared that the headscarf could not be counted among the incontrovertible Islamic dogmas of faith.

Denouncing political opponents as apostates hence remains a proven means for practicing politics in the Islamic world. This was already the case in the Islamic Middle Ages and it will remain that way as long as more cogent arguments are lacking for rebutting the positions of adversaries.

Katajun Amirpur

Translated from the German by Jenifer Taylor

Katajun Amirpur studied Islamic Studies in Bonn and Teheran, and holds a doctorate from Bamberg University. She teaches at the Universities of Berlin, Bamberg and Bonn, and is both author and journalist. In November 2003, Herder Verlag published her book on the Iranian lawyer Schirin Ebadi, 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner, and the Iranian Reform Movement.

Qantara.de

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