Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide

by Paul Marshall

  In March 2007, the All India Ittehad Millat Council promised 500,000 rupees to anyone who beheaded Nasreen, an offer that would be rescinded only if she “apologizes, burns her books and leaves.” On August 9, 2007, she was physically attacked by members, including some elected members, of the political party Ittahidul Muslimin at the launch of her book’s Telugu translation, Shodh, in Hyderabad, South India. One elected member threatened Nasreen with beheading were she ever to return to Hyderabad. The Hyderabad City Police also filed a case against her for “hurting the religious sentiments of Muslims.”19 In November 2007, the government of West Bengal told Nasreen that it could not ensure her security and deported her from the state. She moved to an undisclosed location—some reports say in a safe house run by India’s intelligence bureau near Delhi.

  On January 9, 2008, it was announced in Paris that Nasreen had been awarded the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for her writing on women’s rights. On February 15, with great hesitation, the Indian government cautiously extended her visa for six months, but, the next day, West Bengal’s Muslim clergy and political leaders warned that they would take to the streets if she were offered ongoing shelter. In March 2008, she short-circuited the debate by leaving India “voluntarily” and went to Norway. However, she returned to India on August 8, 2008, and is again at an undisclosed location. As she has noted, “If India gives in to the fundamentalists’ demand to deport me, the list of demands will become an endless one. A deportation today, a ban tomorrow, an execution the day after. Where will it cease?”20 Indian Muslim Ali Asghar Engineer defended the author’s right to free expression. While agreeing “Taslima has written provocative articles on Islam,” he argued, “We must counter it by arguing on the basis of Qur’an rather than attacking her physically. No one can cite a single verse of the Qur’an or any hadith to support violence against others, even enemies, as long as they are peaceful. On the other hand we can cite several verses from the Qur’an, to support dignified behavior.”21

  Salahuddin Shoaib Choudhury

  Salahuddin Shoaib Choudhury, a man of moderate Islamic religious views, was the editor of The Weekly Blitz and has written about Al-Qaeda’s activities in Bangladesh. He has also criticized anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic attitudes in Muslim-majority countries. His major difficulties began in 2003 when he developed an interest in Israel and started corresponding with an editor of The Jerusalem Post. This led to his article in the Post advocating peaceful relations between Bangladesh and Israel. He was then invited to the International Forum for the Literature and Culture of Peace conference in Tel Aviv to lecture on “[h]ow the media can foster world peace.”22

  On November 29, 2003, as he was about to board a plane on his way to Israel, he was arrested, and his passport was confiscated. He was blindfolded, beaten, and questioned by security officials for ten days to get him to confess to espionage for Israel.23 He was initially charged with, inter alia, criminal conspiracy, sedition, and “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings.” He was held for seventeen months in hellish conditions and suffered isolation, torture, and denial of medical attention. He was released in April 2005 but faced more harassment, threats on his life, attacks on his newspaper’s offices, and a pending trial. PEN Center USA awarded him its Freedom to Write Award in 2005, and the Bangladesh Minority Lawyers Association gave him its Courageous Journalism Award in 2006. When the American Jewish Committee sought to present him with its Moral Courage Award in May 2006, Bangladeshi authorities again kept him from leaving the country, and he addressed the meeting via video.

  While Choudhury was awaiting trial, about forty people, including senior members of the governing political party, looted his offices. He was beaten—his ankle was broken—and robbed. Police did not permit him to lodge charges against his assailants and also denied him any protection, so that he had to go into hiding. At his trial, in Dhaka on November 13, 2006, the presiding judge described his crimes: “By praising the Jews and Christians, by attempting to travel to Israel, and by predicting the so-called rise of Islamist militancy in the country and expressing such through writings inside the country and abroad, you have tried to damage the image and relations of Bangladesh with the outside world.”24 The charges could carry a sentence of up to thirty years’ imprisonment or death. The case dragged on, and February 12, 2008, marked his forty-first court appearance in thirty-four months.25 The only offense that the authorities have been able to pin on him is that he violated the Passport Act by seeking to travel to Israel, a country with which Bangladesh does not have diplomatic relations, which is an offense usually punishable by a small fine. In February 2009, a gang broke into his newspaper’s headquarters, attacking the staff until they found him, brought him out to the street, and beat him in broad daylight, claiming the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, employed him. There is no indication that authorities intervened at all in the situation.26

  Arifur Rahman

  Arifur Rahman was the sole breadwinner of his family and supported his elderly mother, no mean feat for a twenty-three-year-old self-taught cartoonist in Bangladesh. As a young artist with a promising future, he drew comics for Aalpin, the weekly satirical supplement of Prothom Alo, the country’s largest Bengali-language daily newspaper. In 2007, he won first prize in the national Anti-Corruption Cartoon Competition sponsored by The Daily Star. However, on December 18, 2007, he was taken into custody and interrogated about a cartoon titled “Naam” (Name) that he had published the previous day. The text of the cartoon shows a man addressing a boy:

  Q. Boy, what is your name?

  - My name is Babu.

  Q. It is customary to mention Muhammad before the name. What is your father’s name?

  - Muhammad Abu

  Q. What’s this in your lap?

  - Muhammad cat.27

  Arif was certainly not the first to joke about the common practice in Islamic societies to name everything and everyone Muhammad, and similar items had circulated widely in previous years. Arif told police that he had not meant to hurt anyone’s religious feelings and that this was a common joke in his home village. Aalpin’s deputy editor was dismissed, and Prothom Alo not only apologized for publishing an “impertinent” and “unacceptable” cartoon but also promised never to publish Arif’s work again. Despite these abject apologies, Arif was taken to Tejgaon police station and held overnight. He was not told why he was being held, given any opportunity to tell anybody his whereabouts, nor allowed access to a lawyer.28

  Arif was initially detained under Section 54 of the criminal procedure code, which permits police to arrest suspects with neither a warrant nor orders from a magistrate. Under the Bangladesh State of Emergency, he was not guaranteed any legal representation. He was originally held for thirty days on the orders of a deputy secretary of the Ministry of Home Affairs, with three-month extensions ordered October 11 and again in January 2008. For over a month after his arrest, he did not know of the detention order against him. While he was supposedly being held in “preventive detention,” the actual allegation against him was that he had violated Section 295A of the penal code by “hurting religious sentiments” with his cartoon.

  Opportunistic Islamist politicians immediately jumped on the issue in an attempt to silence a newspaper that had often been critical of the military regime. There were street demonstrations and vandalism throughout Dhaka, with protests led by radical Islamist groups, including Hizbut-Tahrir Bangladesh (HT) and Islami Shasantantra Andolon (ISA), under the auspices of the All Party Resistance Committee. Demonstrators burned effigies of Arif and called for his death, as well as for the deaths of his editor and publisher.29 Islamists found a ready partner in the military government, and a delegation led by Obaidul Haque—the khatib (preacher) of the Baitul Mukarram, the national mosque—called on law and information advisor Mainul Hosein and demanded cancellation of Prothom Alo’s license and the arrest of its editor, along with others concerned, “for showing disrespect to the Prophet.” After the m
eeting, Hosein told reporters: “It is a conspiracy to destabilize the country. We are very concerned over the issue.”30

  Hizbut-Tahrir is active in many countries, and a spokesman of its U.K. wing said that the cartoon and article were “deliberate attempts to ridicule Islam’s Prophet.”31 They launched protests in London, calling for the suspension of the publications’ licenses, the arrest of everyone involved with the cartoon, and the reinstatement of sharia and Khilafah laws to “protect Islamic faith and values.” They also charged that Arif’s cartoon was, together with the caricatures of Muhammad published in Danish and Swedish papers in September 2005 and August 2007, part of an international crusade against Islam.

  The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders defended the cartoon as nothing more than “a joke about cultural custom” and said that the “play on words had no intention of attacking the Prophet” and called for Arif’s immediate release.32 On September 25, 2007, the Vienna-based International Press Institute also urged his release in the name of press freedom.33 Nonetheless, the military regime continued to resist international pressure for press freedom.34 After being held for six months in Dhaka’s central jail, Arif was released in March 2008, but, in November 2009, he was found guilty of “hurting the religious sentiments of the Muslim community” and sentenced to six months’ hard labor. Arif says he was not aware that a trial was even taking place and has asked his lawyers to inquire further.35

  Accusations of blasphemy have also infected the political arena and have been used even against Islamist parties. On March 17, 2010, one of the leaders of the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami party (JeI), Matiur Rahman Nizami, complained of the party’s persecution by the government coalition and compared his own sufferings to those of Muhammad. He was then accused of blasphemy by Mohammed Syed Rezaul Haque Chandpur, Secretary General of the Tariqat Federation, which is part of the government alliance. After Nizami and two other JeI leaders, Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojaheed and Nayebe Ameer Delwa Sayeed Hossain, repeatedly refused to appear in court to answer to the charge, they were arrested on June 29 and held for investigation.36

  Indonesia

  Indonesia’s population of some 240 million is about 83 percent Muslim, 9 percent Protestant, 4 percent Catholic, 2 percent Hindu, and 1 percent Buddhist. Most Muslims are Sunni, though there may be up to three million Shiites in the country. Following independence, under President Sukarno, the country accepted the broad state ideology of Pancasila, now enshrined in the constitution’s preamble.37 It proclaims five principles: “One Lordship, just and civilized humanity, the unity of Indonesia, democracy guided by the wisdom of deliberations of representatives, and social justice for all the Indonesian people.”38 Article 29 of the constitution combines this commitment to monotheism with a commitment to religious freedom. It proclaims, “1. The State shall be based upon the belief in the One and Only God. 2. The State guarantees all persons the freedom of worship, each according to his or her own religion or belief.”

  It is the world’s most populous Muslim country, and its religious communities have traditionally coexisted peacefully. However, Indonesian law only recognizes six faiths: Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and, as of January 2006, Confucianism. Consequently, other religious minorities can only register as social groups and thus are prohibited from performing certain types of religious activity. The Baha’ís have been banned, and Jehovah’s Witnesses were banned from 1976 to 2001, while restrictions have been placed on others, especially Islamic groups regarded as heterodox. Atheism is also in principle banned on the grounds that it violates Pancasila, though the government does not seek out atheists. Conversions between faiths are legal and do occur, although, according to a 1979 decree by the Ministries of Religion and Home Affairs, proselytizing is illegal.

  While religious groups have a wide range of freedoms, Article 156(a) of the criminal code states, “Those, who purposely express their views or commit an act that principally disseminates hatred, misuses or defames a religion recognized in Indonesia, face at maximum five years imprisonment.” This provision has been enforced almost exclusively in cases of alleged heresy or blasphemy against Islam. In 1990, journalist Arswendo Atmowiloto published in the newspaper Monitor the results of a survey asking readers to name their heroes: then-president Suharto came in first, Atmowiloto came in tenth, and Muhammad came in eleventh. For this, the journalist was convicted of blasphemy and served five years.39 On February 9, 2010, after challenges by the former president of Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid, and several human rights organizations, the Constitutional Court for the first time began to review the constitutionality of the 1965 law. Hendardi, the chairman of the Setara Institute for Democracy and Peace, argued that the law was used to intimidate Muslim and non-Muslim minorities, especially the Ahmadiyya. The government, as well as Islamist groups, has defended it.40 On April 19, 2010, the Supreme Court, in an 8–1 decision, held that the law was constitutional. Before the ruling, Suryadharma Ali, Minister of Religious Affairs, said, “The law should be upheld because if it is annulled…Islam and the Quran could be interpreted at will and people and figures could declare new prophets and establish new religions.”41

  The largest challenges to religious freedom tend to come from social pressures, vigilantes, and militias rather than from the government. Since the late 1990s, there has been an escalation in radical Islamist activities, and, in addition, many provinces have instituted elements of Islamic law locally. Aceh is the only province with officially recognized Islamic law, but other local governments have also passed laws discriminating against religious minorities, and mobs and other forms of violence sometimes implement these.42 To date, the government has not used its constitutional authority to overturn these laws.

  Ahmadis

  Ahmadis are one of the most heavily persecuted religious groups, as they are in many other Muslim-majority countries. In Indonesia, they have been deemed a heretical sect and, in 1980, the Indonesia Council of Ulemas (MUI)—a government advisory body—issued a fatwa declaring that the Ahmadis are not a legitimate part of Islam. Following this lead, in 1984, the Ministry of Religious Affairs banned Ahmadis from disseminating their teachings in Indonesia.43

  Ahmadis are also subject to increasing violence. On July 15, 2005, some 10,000 people from the Indonesian Muslim Solidarity group attacked the Indonesia Ahmadiyya Congregation (JAI) in Parung, Bogor, West Java. Though armed only with stones and batons, the attackers damaged and set fire to buildings while demanding that the 500 followers living there leave Parung within two hours. The mob leaders specifically cited the 1980 fatwa and a recent ruling issued by the Bogor branch of the MUI, calling for the Ahmadis to leave Bogor. The police detained none of the attackers. The coordinator of the Solidarity group, Habib Abdurrahman Ismail Assegaf, justified his actions by opining, “Ahmadiyah is not a Muslim group…It says that Prophet Muhammad was not the last (prophet) and that its followers can be a haji by carrying out a ritual right here in its compound, so they don’t have to go to Mecca.” The 500 Ahmadis left their compound, and, on July 18, 2005, JAI chairman Abdul Basit went to the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI) for help in preparing legal measures against the MUI and the attackers.44 Specifically, Basit wanted the MUI to annul the 1980 fatwa in order to prevent more violence against the Ahmadiyyah.45 However, the MUI did the exact opposite. On July 26, 2005, its four-day national congress called for an end to “deviant secular and liberal Islamic thoughts” and renewed the fatwa.46

  The renewal of the fatwa prompted yet more attacks, including the destruction of Ahmadi mosques as well as their headquarters near the city of Bogor.47 On September 20, 2005, police detained thirty-five people for attacks against Ahmadis in Cianjur. According to one report, four mosques, three religious schools, and thirty-three houses were damaged. In response, the Cianjur regency banned all Ahmadi activities. In October 2005, the regional office of the Ministry of Religious Affairs in West Nusa Tenggara also banned the Ahmadis. While these regional bans were
purportedly aimed at protecting the Ahmadis and keeping the peace, Ahmadis and their supporters justifiably believed that the government was punishing them and not their attackers.48 Indonesian authorities often did little to prevent the attacks or prosecute those responsible, instead blaming the Ahmadis for “provoking” the violence.49 In February and March 2006, 187 members of the JAI in Mataram, Lombok, had to flee to a refugee camp after local Muslims attacked their houses and mosques. The victims considered seeking asylum in another country.

  On June 9, 2008, the Indonesian government, after persistent pressure from extremist groups, issued a joint ministerial decree ordering the Ahmadiyya community to stop all religious activity as long as they continued to describe themselves as followers of Islam. The decree states, “The followers…of the Indonesian Ahmadiyya Jama’at (JAI) are warned…to discontinue the promulgation of interpretations and activities that are deviant from the principal teachings of Islam.”50 The punishment for disobedience is up to five years in jail. The decree also states that those who attack Ahmadis would be punished, but this has not been systematically enforced. This decree echoed the Ulema Council view that the issue would be resolved if Ahmadis simply formed their own religion. However, apart from the Ahmadis’ own views, Indonesia requires all its citizens to adhere either to Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Protestantism, Catholicism, or Confucianism. Unless this legal framework is altered, Ahmadis will have to find a way to align with the state-sanctioned religion closest to their own beliefs.51