Blasphemous act
The Holy Qur'an teaches to respect the dignity of every human life, regardless of religion or ethnicity, and makes it clear that whoever kills a human being is as if he has killed all of humanity.
For sure, we are saddened if someone insults and defames the honour of our prophet, but there is no permission and justification for a Muslim to take the law into his hand and respond violently, even to provocations or blasphemous acts. Of course, we can and even must constantly question in our pluralistic societies the definition of the "right of opinion" in order not to allow hate speech in the name of freedom. On the contrary, the Prophet was a model in guaranteeing religious freedom and respecting freedom of opinion. There is not a single verse in the Qur'an, not a single incident in the entire life of the Prophet Muhammad where he would have shown any violent reaction or punished anyone because of his blasphemous acts. In short, the term "blasphemy" is the dark cloud that overshadows the followers of Islam and is often used as an open licence to eliminate and persecute any opinion that is different, critical or considered inconvenient.Īs a Muslim, the most worrying thing for me is that some groups justify violence in the name of God, even though there is no punishment for blasphemy in our religion.
Blasphemous act full#
Even on the same Friday morning as the attack on Rushdie, an Ahmadi Muslim was murdered in Pakistan in broad daylight in a street full of pedestrians due to his "crime" of belonging to the Ahmadiyya Community, which is constitutionally persecuted in Pakistan for blasphemy. It is not only Salman Rushdie who has been condemned for “blasphemy.” The journalists of Charlie Hebdo magazine, Sri Lankan businessman Priyantha Kumara and a long list of others have also suffered. His book was considered by different sectors of the Islamic world as a blasphemous act and several religious leaders at the time issued a “fatwa" (an Islamic legal pronouncement) in which they demanded capital punishment for the author. Salman Rushdie is well known amongst Muslims for his controversial novel The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, in which he fictionalised the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam.