Hassan Al-Turabi
Most surprisingly, similar allegations have dogged one of the progenitors of Sudan’s Islamist regime—a man who has been involved in most of the political machinations in that country for decades and who, therefore, cannot be described as a reformer. Hassan al-Turabi had served as a high-placed religious advisor to the Numeiri and al-Bashir governments, sheltered Osama bin Laden in Sudan during the 1990s, and supported the 1985 execution of Mohamed Taha. Yet, he himself has been accused of apostasy for voicing liberal opinions concerning the status of women under Islam.
Al-Turabi has asserted that the testimony of men and women should carry equal worth in court and that mixed-gender prayers and even female prayer leaders should be allowed. He has also said that Muslim women need not cover their faces and that marriages between Muslim women and Jewish or Christian men are permissible. In response, Sudan’s powerful Muslim Scholars Committee declared that he “should declare repentance or face the Sharia Hadd for heresy.” Critics filed a legal complaint for apostasy against him, though so far without result.66 Al-Turabi, who has roots in the Muslim Brotherhood and has alternated between political power and jail since the 1969 Numeiri coup, broke with his ally, Omar al-Bashir, in 1999–2000. He has since been arrested several times, most recently for his criticism of al-Bashir’s actions in Darfur.67 Whether the accusations of apostasy against him will ever be prosecuted remains to be seen.
Closing
While much of Africa remains religiously free, and a country such as Mali practices a very open form of Islam, the continent is also home to some of the most repressive Muslim regimes in the world and has the dubious distinction of being the site of much of radical Islam’s most widespread nonstate violence. Current repression, due to restrictions on apostasy, blasphemy, and insulting Islam, is clearly not confined to the Middle East. Besides being present in Africa, it is, indeed, worldwide, as we will see in the next chapter, which provides some examples from South and Southeast Asia.
9
South and Southeast Asia
On October 31, 2003, Bangladeshi imam Aminur Rahman preached a sermon declaring that there would be no punishment if Muslims physically attacked Ahmadis. After making this proclamation, Rahman personally led an armed mob to attack the Ahmadi mosque in the Jhikargachha district of Jessore. Mohammed Shah Alam, the local Ahmadi imam, died from injuries received outside his mosque. One Ahmadi described the brutal attack and Shah Alam’s murder:
They started hitting us with bamboo sticks. They beat us and beat us. We tried to escape but it was not possible. Shah Alam was being beaten particularly harshly by Aminur Rahman and Shahid. They continued hitting us with the bamboo sticks, particularly on the head. I could see that Shah Alam was getting badly injured. They beat his brain out of his head. I could see it. We asked them to stop as we could see Shah Alam was dying and had to be taken to hospital. But they did not.
In 2009, Welhelmina Holle, a Christian teacher in Seram, part of Indonesia’s Maluku Islands, was accused of blasphemy for allegedly insulting Islam in a comment she made while tutoring a sixth-grade student. The student reported the offense to his parents, and rumors quickly spread through the local Muslim community.
The local chapter of the Indonesian Ulema Council lodged a complaint with police, and the story spread even more rapidly. Soon 500 Muslims rampaged through Seram, clashing with police and local Christians and setting fire to sixty-seven homes as well as churches and a health clinic; many Christians took refuge in a nearby army barracks. Eventually, the police shut down all the stores and offices in that area. They took Holle into custody and subsequently named her, along with Muslim leader Asmara Wasahua, as a suspect in sparking the riots. She was charged with blasphemy under Article 156 of Indonesia’s criminal code, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.1
In recent years, political dissidents in Malaysia have been accused of “insulting Islam.” In mid-2008, the Malaysian Islamic Development Department, the Federal Territory Islamic Religious Council, and the Federal Territory Religious Department lodged complaints against Raja Petra Kamaruddin, a member of the Selangor royal family. Raja Petra was editor of the website “Malaysia Today” and perhaps Malaysia’s most prominent political blogger. Among other purported offenses, these governmental bodies alleged that his article entitled “I Promise to Be a Good, Non-hypocritical Muslim” insulted Islam. On September 12, 2008, he was arrested under the Internal Security Act, and police confiscated his books and CDs. Also arrested were Teresa Kok, an opposition parliamentarian, and journalist Tan Hoon Cheng. Raja Petra was subsequently held without charge in a prison camp for two months. This continued until Malaysia’s high court finally ruled that the government had overstepped its bounds.2
Introductory Remarks
Several countries covered in this survey—such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—are noted for having strong, extremist, Islamist movements. However, repression on the basis of “insults to religion” is not confined to these more radical countries. It is also present, and growing, in areas usually perceived as epitomizing open interpretations of Islam. This chapter will outline the situation in South and Southeast Asia, covering four countries: Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and, very briefly, the Maldives. At least three of these are usually regarded as sites of moderate Islam, and two of them contain some of the Muslim world’s largest populations. It should be emphasized that, in general, their brands of Islam are largely tolerant; they are not Iran or Saudi Arabia.
These countries have marked differences. Like Pakistan, Bangladesh represses Ahmadis, converts, and reformers, both by state action and by private violence, although at a much lower rate than in Pakistan. In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country by population, there has been increasing radicalization in recent years, with physical attacks on Ahmadis and converts from Islam. Most attacks are by mobs and vigilantes, although many local governments have also fallen under radical control. At the central government level, there has been increasing use of Article 156(a) of the criminal code, which bans defamation of religion. In Malaysia, there is increasing censorship of anything deemed by the government as likely to upset, insult, or confuse Muslims, categories that the government interprets expansively. There has also been a series of court cases undercutting the rights of Muslims to change their religion. While these cases are deeply troubling, Malaysia has so far generally dealt with them through the courts rather than through extrajudicial violence. The Maldives, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, with very few non-Muslims, is becoming one of the world’s most religiously controlled countries and is strengthening laws to further restrict its non-Muslim and dissident Muslim populations.3
As in other chapters, we do not try to list all recent incidents and attacks or to say all that might be said about the cases that we do cover. Even in the more moderate countries, doing so would amount to a very extensive account. But it is clear that apostasy- and blasphemy-based repression in these countries has been increasing. Violence in Indonesia and Bangladesh has grown rapidly over the last fifteen years, as has the number of Malaysian court cases on changing one’s religion. In 2010, Malaysia even began to experience some religious violence.
Bangladesh
After its successful struggle for independence from Pakistan in 1971, Bangladesh was formally established as a secular state. However, in 1975, the government replaced Article 12 of the constitution, which stipulated a pluralistic and secular society, with a declaration that Islam would be among the nation’s guiding principles. A 1988 constitutional amendment made Islam the state religion, although the constitution still formally grants religious freedom. According to the 2001 census, minority religions comprise some 10 percent of the population, and, of these, an estimated 90 percent are Hindu, with the rest divided mainly between Christians, primarily Roman Catholic, and Buddhists, though there continues to be a small Ahmadi presence. The rest of the population is officially categorized as Sunni Muslim.4
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In 2001, in an effort to unify the legal system, the High Court ruled all fatwas illegal, a decision met with violent public protests. On the local level, village religious leaders have nonetheless continued to issue fatwas regarding specific cases, often involving “perceived moral transgressions” by women.5 Meanwhile, radical Islamists complain about what they regard as the country’s “pseudo-Islamization” and call for Bangladesh to be renamed the “Islamic Republic of Bangladesh” with a constitution based on sharia. While most Bangladeshi Muslims appear to want a state distinct from religious authority, radical Islamists campaign, including through widespread bombing, to transform the country into an Islamist state. The December 2008 national elections pitted the relatively secular Awami League against the Islamist Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which had pledged to enact blasphemy laws. The Awami League won in a landslide, gaining more than 250 of Parliament’s 300 seats.6 The league then committed itself to improving the plight of religious minorities, and, in April 2009, the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, promised to repeal all laws and rules held to be discriminatory toward them.7
Despite this recent electoral rejection of Islamism, Bangladesh still sees widespread and virulent persecution of minority religious groups, especially of the Ahmadi community. This includes destruction of property, kidnapping, the killing of leaders, rape—often of young girls—and discrimination in education, employment, and property rights. Most Hindus have lost lands under old Pakistani laws against “enemies,” which, in practice, has meant Hindus.8 Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s largest Islamist party, pledged in the 2008 election campaign to enact a blasphemy law.9 Although it did poorly in the election, persecutions and arrests on the basis of blasphemy charges have continued, despite the fact that the country has no blasphemy law.10 While rejecting such practices, the more secular, democratic parties have been complacent, unwilling to address this persecution and, for electoral gain, sometimes even adopting Islamist rhetoric. The constitutional guarantees of religious freedom have been functionally deficient, as illustrated by the treatment of Ahmadis and dissidents such as Taslima Nasreen, Salahuddin Shoaib Choudhury, and Arifur Rahman, who will be discussed in the following pages.
Ahmadis
Perhaps the chief victims of quasi-legal blasphemy restrictions are the Ahmadis, about 100,000 of whom live in Bangladesh. As in Pakistan, Ahmadis have been declared non-Muslims and apostates by most religious and political leaders and have suffered relentless religious and political attacks.11 Foreign Muslims have encouraged this rejection; in Bangladesh on February 28, 1997, the chief imam of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia, Allama Dr. Shaikh Ali Bin Abdur Rahman Al Huzaifi, condemned Ahmadis as “traitors…misleading others by their self-made and false Quranic commentary.” By January 9, 2004, the government had banned all Ahmadi publications, with the Home Ministry stating that the ban was intended to block any “publications which hurt or may hurt the sentiments of the majority Muslim population of Bangladesh.” (On December 21, 2004, Justice A.T.M. Kharul Islam of the High Court ordered a stay on the ban.)
Attacks against Ahmadis have increased since the early 1990s. On October 30, 1992, the Bahshkibazar Ahmadiyya complex in Dhaka was attacked by over a thousand rioters, who burned books, including Qur’ans, set off some thirty-five crude bombs, and set the buildings on fire. At least twenty Ahmadis were injured. On October 8, 1999, a bomb killed six Ahmadis and severely injured several others at their mosque in Khulna. In November 1999, an Ahmadi mosque near Natore was ransacked, leaving thirty-five people injured. On October 15, 2002, after a brawl broke out outside the Upazila Parishod courthouse in Gajipur—where a case was being filed against Ahmadis—twelve Ahmadis were arrested for allegedly distorting verses of the Qur’an and hadith.
Often the police not only fail to provide adequate protection to Ahmadis but also directly participate in their persecution. Mohammad Mominul Islam describes how the police attacked him on July 19, 2004:
Early in the morning, after the Fajr (dawn) prayers, a mob from the village surrounded my house, dragged me out, and tied me to a tree. Then they started beating me with sticks and rods. Then they carried me to the local market and beat me more, this time even more badly. Just when I thought I was going to die, local policemen came to the spot and took me to another house and then the policemen asked me to leave the Ahmadiyya faith. When I refused, the policemen started beating me. Then they took me to the police station and put me in the lock-up where they handcuffed me and beat me again. The next morning, at about 11 o’clock, the policemen took me to the district headquarters of the police and beat me again.
Converts
Converts from Islam have also suffered persecution. On April 12, 2008, thirty-two-year-old businessman Rashidul Amin Khandaker converted to Catholicism while in Australia. When he telephoned friends back in Dhaka to tell them, several looted his house, threatening to harm his family if he told police about it. Since they could not reach Rashidul, Muslim leaders in Dhaka ordered his father, sixty-five-year-old Rahul Amin Khandaker, to disown his son and to remain confined to his house until his son could be punished: “If he comes to Bangladesh, you must hand him over to us and we will punish him.”12 Then, when Rahul had a stroke, no local doctor would treat him. One neighbor asked. “Why did you not sacrifice your son like cattle before telling the news to us?” In May 2008, Rashidul’s brother wrote him, asking him to break off all contact since Muslim authorities had warned they would ostracize the family. While deeply grieved by his son’s conversion, Rahul does not want to disown his son: “If all of my property and wealth is destroyed, I can tolerate that, but one thing I cannot tolerate is to carry the coffin of my son on my shoulders.… My son changed his faith according to his will, and our constitution supports this kind of activity.”13
In Chakaria, in southeastern Bangladesh, a family of Christian converts was attacked in November 2008. Laila Begum, forty-five, was assisting a local NGO micro-credit agency when a group of Muslims demanded that a Muslim woman repay a loan even though Begum had already repaid it on her behalf. Upon her refusal, the group attacked her with sticks, iron rods, knives, and machetes. Her husband and son came to her rescue when they heard her screaming, at which point Begum reports, “They thrust at my son with machetes and a sharp knife and stabbed him in his thigh…They also beat the kneecap of my husband and other parts of his body.” Her eighteen-year-old daughter was assaulted and partially stripped in front of the crowd. One attacker allegedly said, “Nobody will come to save you if we beat you, because you are converted to Christianity from Islam.”14 On September 25, 2009, William Gomes, a Catholic convert from Islam, fled his burning home after a group of Islamic militants stormed his house and accused him of apostasy. The riot was started after inflammatory sermons in a local mosque, from which the rioters went to Gomes’s house and set it on fire.15
Reformers
Taslima Nasreen in Bangladesh and India
Taslima Nasreen has suffered ongoing persecution in her native Bangladesh, which continued even after she tried to settle in neighboring India. Born in 1962, the daughter of a village physician and a devoutly religious mother, she was trained as a medical doctor. Nasreen gradually became a critic of religion, a feminist, and a self-described atheist.16 In the 1980s, she criticized Islam as a cause of the oppression of women, and her poem “Happy Marriage” depicted physical and emotional abuse within a marriage, matters rarely discussed openly in Bangladeshi society. In her novel Lajja (Shame), she explored the problems faced by Bangladesh’s Hindu minority. She has won many awards, including the 1994 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European parliament and the 2000 Global Leader for Tomorrow award from the World Economic Forum.
The Bangladesh government banned Lajja, as well as other books written by Nasreen, while radical Islamist groups called for her to be killed. In 1993, following complaints about her newspaper columns, she was charged with “deliberately and maliciously hurting Muslim religious sentiments.” A
fter massive and sometimes violent Islamist demonstrations against her, she went into hiding. In 1994, the government ordered her detention, and, after two months, she surrendered to the High Court. Faced with the banning of her books, legal threats, and radical imams issuing fatwas demanding her death, she fled to Sweden after being released on bail and was granted asylum. However, after a decade in exile in Europe, mostly in Stockholm and Paris, she sought to settle in Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal, where much of India’s Bengali population lives.
However, many in India’s Muslim community also turned on her. In January 2004, upon her arrival in Kolkata, Syed Noor-ur-Rehman, a powerful Muslim cleric, promised “20,000 rupees ($440 US) to anyone who can tar her face or put around her a garland of shoes.”17 Hindu radicals passed out copies of Lajja, and Muslim radicals responded by burning the book and calling for her death. Despite this, successive Indian governments denied her requests for asylum. Some Indian Muslim groups asked for a ban on her 2002 autobiographical book, Dwikhondito, (Divided) and demanded that she be deported. In response, and while maintaining that Dwikhondito’s religious references were based on “universally accepted” works on Islamic history, she said that, to avoid hurting people’s feelings, she would be willing to remove “controversial lines.” On November 16, 2004, the Kolkata High Court banned the book, though the ban was lifted in September 2005 after an appeals court rejected it as “unjustified and untenable.”18
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