Iran executes 'heretic': innovative thinking about religion still a capital offense

Mohsen Amir-Aslani

In some Muslim countries, entertaining your own ideas or engaging in re-interpretations of religious texts and tenets is still a liability. Unfortunately, quite recently other countries than the 'usual suspects' such as - in this case -- Iran or Saudi Arabia, are also tightening the screws on religious freedom. Not only Egypt, but also supposedly more tolerant majority Muslim states such as Turkey and even Indonesia have made a turn for the worse (click here for an article on that subject).

In the present instance, after a tortuous nine-year ordeal, Iranian Mohsen Amir Aslani was sentenced to death and executed on account of insulting the Prophet Jonah and engaging in unlawful interpretations of the Qur'an.

Amir-Aslani was hanged last week for making “innovations in the religion” and “spreading corruption on earth”, but human rights activists said he was a prisoner of conscience who was put to death because of his religious beliefs. He had interpreted Jonah’s story in the Qur’an as a symbolic tale.

“Mohsen held sessions in his own house dedicated to reciting the Qur’an and interpreting it. He had his own understandings [of the religion] and had published his views in the form of a booklet and made it available to his fans,” an unnamed source told the New York-based group, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI).

Possibly because of the weakness of their case, authorities also added 'illicit' sexual activities to the list of charges -- notwithstanding the equally flimsy evidence for those accusations. While this shows the shaky legal foundations for heresy or apostasy cases even in countries such as Iran,  'deviant beliefs' and 'unlawful innovations' (the technical terms are takhayyul, bid'a, khurafat) remain capital offenses, and are used to prevent people from exercising universal human rights such as the freedom of belief, turning the concomitant freedom of expression into real liabilities in some Muslim countries.

To read the full article on Mohsen Amir-Aslani click here

Liberal heresy in the contemporary Islamic cosmopolis

A review of Cosmopolitans and Heretics by Sajjad Rizvi, Associate Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the University of Exeter. Here are a few highlights:

The book under review is [...] an exercise in contemporary intellectual history. [...] Critically, it not only abandons an essentialist reading of religion as a timeless set of doctrines, practices and rituals, but also distances itself from postmodernist approaches to religion by holding onto the category of religion as a meaningful concept and signifier. 

[it] examines the role of three contemporary ‘liberal’ Muslim thinkers who stand outside the mainstream, who have a training in the traditional disciplines of the Islamic space of learning often called the madrasa (or at least have a familiarity with it), and who are not just influenced by but also express the traditions of intellectual fashion current in metropolitan academia and its study of religion. These three voices are Hasan Hanafi, the late Nurcholish Madjid and the late Mohammed Arkoun.

 Kersten’s argument is partly that unlike the earlier generation of colonial, modernists who were simply concerned with making Islam ‘relevant’ to the contemporary world through the adoption of modern ideologies, institutions and practices, this generation of thinkers expresses not only a distrust of the possibilities of modernist commensurability but also of the ‘fundamentalist’ quest for authentic being through an atavistic and ahistorical ‘return’ to the pristine, early generation of Muslims, al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ. 

...the book offers an excellent corrective to the Middle East focused bias of Islamic studies and is a strong advocate for a serious study of South East Asian studies. It is refreshing to see a ‘view from the edge’, especially given the demographic and institutional significance of Indonesia.

Read the full article on Rizvi's MullaSadra blog: Hikmat: Liberal heresy in the contemporary Islamic cosmopolis.

Where are the Arab Intellectuals?

In his news analysis of 29 October 2011 published in the Sunday Review section, New York Times staff writer Robert F. Worth examines the relative silence of intellectuals from the Arab World during this year's 'Arab Spring'. It looks at the disappointment of Syrians due to the absence of any bold challenges by the famous poet Adonis in his open letter to Syrian President Asad.

Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis

This makes Arab intellectuals look meek in comparison to their European, Asian and American intellectual predecessors like Vaclav Havel, Mao, and Thomas Paine. According to Worth it reflects the climate of repression under which many intellectuals in the Arab world live and work, but it is also symptomatic of the post-ideological era in which we live with much less room for 'unifying doctrines' and 'grandiose figures'. 

Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-Azm

Worth continues: 'To some extent the intellectual silence of the current uprising is a deliberate response to the revolutionary rhetoric of previous generations... [...] The protesters who led the Arab Spring had grown tired of the stale internationalist rhetoric of their forebears'. There is a perceptible shift from ideological grandstanding to a more realistic and pragmatic concern with human rights and democratization. Thinkers such as the Syrian philosopher Sadik Jalal al-Azm joined other Syrian intellectuals to sign the 'Declaration of the 99'.  But then again:

But in recent years their voices often went unheard, because their secular language had little resonance in societies where political Islamic was becoming a dominant force. nor did Islamic reformers fare much better when they tried to cast their political critique in religious terms. The Egyptian scholar Hassan Hanafi, for instrance, in the 1980s began calling for the creation of an "Islamic Left", a socialist ideology rooted in religion. He was branded a heretic and had to seek police protection after receiving death threats from jihadists. His work gained an audience in Indonesia, but not in his own country, said Carool Kersten, a lecturer at King's College London who has written on Islamic reformers. 

It appears intellectuals throughout the Arab world are struggling to find a way for giving voice to the frustrations, ambitions and expectations of its citizens. To read the full essay click here.


* those who read Arabic click on this link.