The Slow Death of European Democracy<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

On 18th April, in collaboration with the Association of World Citizens and the Association for World Education, IHEU hosted a one-day conference at the Palais des Nations, Geneva in conjunction with the 61st Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights. This report is based on the on-line report © 2005 by Yali Noriega Curtis, Maria Lazarte and Nicolas Jaquier, of International Conference Volunteers. The report can be seen at www.ngoCHR.org

Abuses of human rights cannot be justified even if it is carried out in the name of religion. With this statement Mr. Roy Brown opened the conference on Victims of Jihad. The victims of this movement are not simply Christians, Jews and other minorities, but also Muslims. Human rights abuses committed in the name of Islam are a serious problem in the Muslim World. Mr. Brown called on Islamic leaders in the region to address this issue.

Muslims

Professor Johannes Jansen, from the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />University of Utrecht explained how Jihad has been used by Muslims against both Muslims and other groups since the 9th century. Small but strong extremist sects, who do not tolerate any deviations from their interpretation of Islam, have disseminated this ideology. Any “apostate” who refuses to pray five times a day, to fight the infidels or introduce innovations, among other “crimes”, must be severely punished. It is all based on the principle that you cannot express an opinion that opens a debate on the interpretation of Islam – which makes reform extremely difficult.

Dr. Hamouda F. Bella, a victim of torture, spoke of his own experiences and his personal view of Islam.  For Dr. Bella, jihad is a religious ordinance directed towards oneself. This interpretation aims to purify the self rather than combat others. Dr. Bella was tortured by the Sudanese authorities and still does not know why. He stressed the importance of bringing the perpetrators of jihadi violence to justice and argued that the International Criminal Court could play a key role. The Sudanese government, he claimed, uses jihad as a political justification for abuses committed throughout the country. Sudan used to be a country where

Christians and Muslims lived together in peace, until the coup d’etat. When confronted on the issue, the president of this new regime stated “how can we introduce equality, if inequality is the will of God”.

Dhimmis

Mr. David Littman talked about the role of schoolbooks in Egypt and Saudi Arabia in promoting jihad and martyrdom among the new generation. These books speak about the obligation to fight the infidels and subject them to rule of Islam, or else behead them.

The books provide a justification for jihad through examples of heroic martyrdom and the promises of rewards in paradise. A growing number of Muslim intellectuals are condemning these textbooks and advocating educational reform. Mr. Littman urged UNESCO to play a stronger role in the review of textbooks worldwide.

Apostates and women were the subject of the second part of the parallel conference. All of the speakers strongly condemned the massacres taking place in Sudan. David Littman expressed the view that if the Commission did not pass a resolution condemning what was happening in Sudan, this would justify it’s demise.

Apostates

Ms. Azam Kamguian from Iran was the first speaker in the session on ‘Infidels and Apostates’. She started by describing her own experience; growing up with a powerful father and pious mother. The temptation to subordinate her being to God was very strong but when she was an adolescent she decided that she did not need religion to tell her who she was. “Even though I left Islam, I had to live with it”, she stated.  According to an extremist interpretation of the Sharia Law, the greatest sin is disbelief. Non-believers and Atheists do not have the right to life and apostasy is punishable by death. In one case in Iran, a man was executed for having converted his wife. Even in the academic community, discussions of the Koran are considered to be taboo. For Ms. Kamguian, Islam should be subject to criticism. Currently, if someone criticizes Islam in Iran they face death. One of the most important points is to “win the right to criticize religion” and “if a belief is sound, it stands on its own merit”. Ms. Kamguian believes that any change in Iran will also have a significant impact everywhere else in the Islamic world. If there is any hope in the Middle East, it comes from Iran.

Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides for the “freedom to change religion or belief”. Mr. Ibn Warraq observed the discrepancy between this standard and the situation in Muslim countries. He first described the evolution of Islam in regard to its position on apostates. The Koran prescribes condemnation for apostates only in the next world, but this has evolved to mean those who change religion must be killed. In some countries, such as Sudan and Mauritania, the penal code provides the death penalty for apostasy. Also, Muslim theologians are aware that apostasy can tempt Muslim women to free themselves from Sharia law and they have taken measures to prevent this from happening.

In fighting causes of apostasy and bringing changes to the Muslim world, Mr. Warraq sees one solution: “without any post-colonial guilt, we must defend our values. We still have freedom of expression and the right to criticize Islam”. In this sense, publications in the West are very important in helping populations in Islamic countries.

Slavery

“Jihad is the worst evil facing the world and the people of Sudan have experienced its cruelty more than any other group on earth”, began Mr. Simon Deng, a former Sudanese slave. He continued by denouncing the Islamization, Arabization and enslavement of the Southern Sudanese. These are accompanied by atrocities such as mass murders, slavery, systematic rape, religious persecution, enforced starvation and exile. The perpetrators of these crimes are “the radical jihadist regime in Khartoum”. According to Mr. Deng, the only reason for these attacks is their faithfulness to their religion, and the African culture of the Southern Sudanese.

“I was a slave. I am not ashamed to say it”, Mr. Deng continued. When he was nine years old, his village was raided, children shot dead, disabled or burned in their huts. He was abducted and given to an Arab family as a gift, but “when you look at me, do you see a gift? Do I look like an object?” He was forced to sleep next to the animals and eat his “masters” leftovers. However, “there is no shame in being a slave. It is not a choice. There is only shame in being a master”, he stated. Overcome by emotion, he was unable to continue and the remainder of his speech was read for him.

Mr. Deng strongly criticized the international community and especially the UN, for being indifferent when “millions of African blacks were being slaughtered”. After the Holocaust, after Pol Pot’s massacre in Cambodia and even after Rwanda, despite its inaction, the international community said “never again”. In the case of Sudan, “nobody said anything at all. Our fate seems largely invisible to the world”. He saw two reasons for this silence. First, because the victims are black, the Southern Sudanese are victims of a global racism; second, they are victims of the Arabs. Indeed, “when it comes to the ideology of Jihad, the Commission on Human Rights is muted, no one wishes to be seen as anti-Islamic”, he explained.

Finally Mr. Deng called on all Muslims to speak up in order to condemn these crimes. Otherwise it would be assumed that their religion condones them. Since “to be silent is to condone, the international community must accept responsibility for every evil that it could end, yet chooses not to”, he concluded.

Radical Islam

Caroline Fourest, a French writer, talked about the specific characteristics of radical Islamism that make it so dangerous. “Why does it take Taslima Nasreen, Bangladeshi exiled humanist activist, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, member of Dutch Parliament, more courage to fight Islamic extremism than it took me to fight Christian extremism for ten years?”. Ms. Fourest does not think that the explanation is to be found in differences between religions themselves, since extremists of all kind share the same obsession: the oppression of women. For example, resolutions on planned parenthood and HIV/AIDS prevention have always been blocked at the UN by a coalition of the Holy See, American Pro-life delegates and the Islamic countries, she argued.

Ms. Fourest listed three main reasons why Muslim extremism is more threatening today. First, Muslim movements compete by rejecting and resisting western modernization. This, in turn, encourages them to add extreme elements to their religion, such as the veil or genital mutilation. These used not to be commonplace, but now “the veil has become almost the sixth pillar of Islam”, she stated. Second, the degree of secularization in Muslim states is non-existent. On that point, Ms. Fourest drew a comparison. Jewish women in Mea Shearim may face the same oppression as those of Tehran, but the former have access to justice, whereas the latter will be put in jail by the state itself. The third factor, mostly playing in places where Islam is a minority religion, is cultural relativism. The minority is expected to continue its “cultural” practices, including wearing the veil, genital mutilations or stoning, for reasons of “folklore”. Indeed, cultural relativism is a real danger and must be addressed first, since it deprives those who are fighting extremism of the support that progressive Humanists should grant them.

The fight for human rights should not be based on texts, but on facts. “I will not support the worst acts, whatsoever their origin”, Ms. Fourest said. “If we take the debate to the Koran, we prove them right. The debate is at the human rights level”. Moreover, if the debate is about texts, the fundamentalists will win because they are always closer to Allah than modernists who are supposedly influenced by the West and therefore are deemed “fake Muslims”.

Women

Taslima Nasreen who had planned to attend the conference was unable to leave India because of visa problems and her statement was read for her. She described the plight of women and young girls in her own country, Bangladesh, and called for an end to oppression in the name of religion. She described the looming conflict as not between different religions, between Christianity and Islam, or between East and West, but between rational, logical thinking and irrational, blind faith.

Finally, Ms. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, member of the Dutch Parliament and women’s rights activist, recalled all the discriminations and atrocities suffered by Muslim women in the world. These include the need to be granted permission by a man in order to leave the house; the right of men to divorce their wives by repeating ‘I divorce you’ three times; wearing the veil; inheriting less than men and feminine genital mutilations. “The only way out is education. We must stop financing faith based schools in Europe”, Ms.  Hirsi Ali said. The film she wrote on that subject, directed by Theo Van Gogh, aimed at denouncing these crimes. Congratulated by a participant for “putting her life in danger to make this kind of necessary criticism”, Ms. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was warmly applauded.

The full text of all of the speeches can be found on the IHEU

website at: www.iheu.org/humanrights