Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide Read Online Free PDF Page B

Afghanistan—appears to be increasing.
    Chapter 7 , “The Greater Middle East,” describes some events in Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, Turkey, Yemen, and elsewhere in the area. Despite their very great differences from one another, each also represses expression deemed insulting to Islam. Algeria has been cracking down on Christians because of fears of conversions, especially among the Kabyle people. There has been a similar pattern in Morocco. In both countries, this might also be tied to fears of conversions by Sunnis to Shiism, and the connection this might have to Iranian influence. Jordan is similar and has also pressured Muslim journalists and a poet. Libya, though varying with Qadafi’s idiosyncrasies, has usually been far harsher in its treatment of converts. In Yemen, Jews, Baha’is, converts, and journalists have been persecuted, and several leading Muslim scholars have declared that those pushing for the reform of marriage laws were apostates. In Turkey, the minority Alevi Muslims suffer widespread discrimination, while writers and other reformers, as well as converts, can be accused of insulting the “Turkish nation,” which can incorporate a religious dimension because Islam is regarded as an integral part of the Turkish nation.
    Chapter 8 , “Africa,” covers three countries: Nigeria, the largest by population; Sudan, the largest by area; and Somalia, which is, in 2011, probably the most religiously repressive area in the Muslim world. In Nigeria, with the growth of more militant forms of Islam, accusations of apostasy and blasphemy have led to riots and murders, with certainly hundreds, and probably thousands, dead. There are also violent militias, such as Boko Haram, which appear to regard everyone else as a blasphemer or apostate who must be attacked. Somalia is torn between rival jurisdictions and rival militias, none of which is open to political or religious difference. Among them is the radical Islamist Al-Shabab—the Union of Islamic Courts—movement. It enforces its radically repressive version of sharia, which bans music and bells, destroys graves and anything else that it believes smacks of Sufism, and is embarked on a policy of exterminating every Christian in the country, including by beheading children. Apart from its genocide of minorities and political repression, Sudan executed its leading Muslim scholar for apostasy and implicitly charged a UN Special Rapporteur with blasphemy, and its agents declared hundreds of thousands of Nuba Muslims apostates who deserved death.
    Chapter 9 , “South and Southeast Asia,” covers Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Maldives. The Maldives bans all religion except Sunni Islam and has used religious restrictions to crack down on religious and political reformers. The other three countries have reputations for moderation, some of them deserved, but there seems to have been an intensification of religious repression in recent years. In Bangladesh and Indonesia, Ahmadis are repressed, as are heterodox groups and Muslims who express reformist and modernist views. While there is government repression, a larger problem is violence by mobs and militias that the government cannot or will not control. Malaysia has had ongoing legal struggles over the conversion of Muslims to other religions, is trying to restrict the religious words that non-Muslims may use, and, claiming that its population is easily confused and so should not be exposed to a range of views, is also repressing heterodox and reformist Muslims.
    This survey of Muslim countries provides insights into the wide range, significance, effects, and baleful consequences of laws and vigilante actions against those accused of insulting Islam in the Muslim world. It is only against this background that the dangerous possibilities such restrictions pose to the rest of the world—either through the United Nations or by direct pressure on Western governments—can be seen.
Attempts to Internationalize