http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11902068_1
Commentary - February 2005
When Muslims Convert
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
In the bustling religious marketplace of modern America, conversions out
of one faith and into another are not exactly news. They happen every
day, across the full spectrum of belief. But some conversions resonate
more than others, especially at a time when the U.S. finds itself at war
with terrorists who draw their inspiration from one of the world’s great
religions. Consider the case of Jean-Michelle Ajon, the subject of a 2002
article in the women’s fashion magazine Marie Claire. Raised a Catholic
in New York City, Ajon had been thinking about converting to Islam during
the summer before 9/11. After the attacks, a remark that she overheard
while working in Manhattan - “We should bomb everyone, the whole Arab
world” - strengthened her resolve, and she soon made her shahadah
(declaration of faith), thus entering the fold of Islam. Her new faith,
Ajon explained to Marie Claire, had improved her life. “I used to be very
aggressive,” she said. “Now, I am more patient - and spiritually
fulfilled.”
Ajon’s story - no doubt seen by her editors as an inspiring antidote to
widespread anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States - has been multiplied
by many other, similar stories over the past several years. But far less
attention has been paid to voyages in the opposite direction, that is,
outward from Islam. In fact, thousands of Muslims in the West embrace
Christianity each year, and the courage they must muster to do so is of
an entirely different order from the bravado of someone protesting
against supposedly pervasive social prejudice. These converts stand
accused, rather, of apostasy, a transgression against Islam whose
consequences, even in the sheltering confines of the West, are always
serious - and sometimes deadly. In the Islamic world, there is a broad
consensus, both popular and scholarly, that apostates deserve to be
killed. A rich theological and intellectual tradition, stretching as far
back as Muhammad and his companions, supports this position. Though
official proceedings against those who reject Islam are fairly rare - in
part, no doubt, because most keep their conversion a closely held secret
- apostasy is punishable by death in Afghanistan, Comoros, Iran,
Mauritania, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Yemen.1 It is also illegal
in Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, the Maldives, Oman, and Qatar.
The greatest threat to apostates in the Muslim world derives not from the
state, however, but from private individuals who take punishment into
their own hands. In Bangladesh, for example, a native-born Muslim-turned-
Christian evangelist was stabbed to death in the spring of 2003 while
returning home from a film version of the Gospel of Luke. As another
Bangladeshi apostate told the U.S. Newswire, “If a Muslim converts to
Christianity, now he cannot live in this country. It is not safe. The
fundamentalism is increasing more and more.”
Because of this ideological environment, every apostate in the Muslim
world must live in constant fear of death. And unfortunately, as harsh
recent experience has taught us, Islamist ideology is hardly confined to
the Muslim world alone. Advocates of jihad, to say nothing of actual
terrorists, can be found in every corner of the West. More disturbing,
because of what it says about our own ideological self-defenses, is the
respectability that has been granted to spokesmen for Islamic
fundamentalism who have learned to promote their agenda in our own idiom,
even as they argue that mere conversion out of Islam should be considered
a crime.
A prime example in this connection is Syed Mumtaz Ali, the president of
the Canadian Society of Muslims. The Indian-born Mumtaz Ali was the first
South Asian lawyer in Ontario when he set up practice more than 40 years
ago, and has been the intellectual force behind the Islamic Institute of
Civil Justice, a group dedicated to applying shari’a (Islamic law) to
certain civil disputes in the province. Ontario’s Arbitration Act, passed
in 1991, paved the way for this campaign - and for Mumtaz Ali’s emergence
as a respected public figure - by granting religious authorities the
power to arbitrate in family and property matters so long as the parties
involved gave their consent (and with the proviso that the decisions can
be appealed to Canadian courts).
Instituting even so restricted a version of shari’a has been
controversial in Canada, especially among feminists rightly worried about
its effects on Muslim women. But for Mumtaz Ali, this first, modest
concession to the claims of Islam has been just the beginning. As he
declared in defending the shari’a tribunal, “freedom of religion as
guaranteed under Canada’s constitution means not only freedom to practice
and propagate religion but also to be able to be governed by one’s
religious laws in all aspects of one’s life - spiritual as well as
temporal.”
What Mumtaz Ali meant by this portentous remark is made clear in an
astonishing essay under his name that can be found on the website of the
Canadian Society of Muslims.2 Not only does he affirm there the
traditional proposition that apostates must “choose between Islam and the
sword,” but he argues that, if Canada is to be true to its own Charter of
Rights and Freedoms, it must allow the country’s Muslim community to
punish those of its members who renounce or traduce their faith.
[W]hat such a large segment of the Canadian minority believes as a
precept of their faith/religion ought to be fully recognized if the
Charter’s provision respecting freedom of religion are [sic] to have any
real meaning. . . . Failing [to incorporate Islamic law concerning
apostasy and blasphemy into the laws of Canada] will be a flagrant breach
of equality rights. . . . Failing to interpret the guaranteed rights and
freedoms of Muslims in accordance with the true spirit of
multiculturalism results in the effective denial of this fundamental
philosophy of the Canadian constitution. This is a tragic departure from
that cherished “tolerance” (the real tolerance) which is the
distinguishing quality of a cultured people.
Mumtaz Ali allows that recognizing Islamic law in this context “does not
necessarily entail any obligation to enforce the Islamic punishment for
blasphemy/apostasy within the Canadian jurisdiction” (emphasis added).
Apostates, that is, will not have to be stoned or beheaded. But plainly
some punishment by the community itself is in order, and Canada, as
Mumtaz Ali would have it, has no right to stand in the way.
A still more original apologist for the harsh treatment of apostates who
reside in the West is Ali Khan, a law professor at Washburn University in
Kansas. In a recent issue of the Cumberland Law Review, Khan suggested
that Islam can be seen as a form of intellectual property, and Muslims as
“trustees” who have vowed to protect their faith’s “knowledge-based
assets.” These assertions, on their face, seem innocuous enough, if a bit
absurd. But Khan’s argument quickly takes an ominous turn. If Islam is
understood as intellectual property, he contends, the faith should enjoy
what he calls “the right to integrity” - that is, its trustees should be
able to safeguard “the protected knowledge from innovations, repudiation,
internal disrespect, and external assaults.” Thus, Khan continues,
apostasy should be punished because it is aimed at dishonoring the
protected knowledge of Islam. The murtad (apostate) is akin to a
corporate insider who discloses the secrets he has undertaken to protect;
he is akin to a state official who turns traitor and joins the ranks of
the enemy; he is akin to a custodian who destroys the very monument he
was safeguarding on behalf of the community. All legal systems punish
insiders who breach their trusts; Islam punishes murtaddun [apostasy]
too, sometimes severely.
Khan does not specify what punishment should be meted out to those
Muslims in the West who compromise the “intellectual property” of Islam,
and perhaps he has something in mind for them that falls short of capital
punishment. After all, as he surely knows, American law generally does
not countenance the execution of corporate spies and inside traders. The
key point, however, is not the outlandish substance of Khan’s argument.
Rather, it is the fact that he was able to use an American law review as
a soapbox from which to advocate the licensed punishment of apostates -
and that his grossly illiberal views were never rebutted in its pages.
The ugly rationalizations of propagandists like Syed Mumtaz Ali and Ali
Khan do not emerge from nowhere; they are attempts to legitimate the
harsh social reality already faced by the thousands of Muslim apostates
in the West who must constantly worry about their personal safety. For
most of them, this means maintaining an extremely low profile in
religious contexts. Converts from Islam, especially those who become
involved in Christian ministries, often use assumed names, or only their
first names, in order to protect themselves and their families.3 Thus,
Abdullah, whose family hails from Saudi Arabia, kept his new faith secret
for many years after converting to Christianity in 1980 while living in
London. When asked about his religion, he would describe himself only as
a “believer.” Even after he became a churchgoer, Abdullah hesitated to
talk to fellow congregants about his spiritual journey. His new faith, as
he recognized from the start, has placed him directly in harm’s way. The
most common dangers faced by Muslim apostates come from their own
families. At a recent evangelical convention in Falls Church, Virginia, a
couple of female converts from Islam told a reporter about their fears as
new Christians. One woman said that when her family finds out, “I know
they’re going to disown me if they don’t kill me.” The second woman had
similar fears. “My brothers haven’t spoken to me in the last couple of
years, and that was only because I married an American,” she said. “Can
you imagine what they would do if they found out I was a Christian?”
Roy Oksnevad, a missionary with the Evangelical Free Church in
Minneapolis, tells of a Turkish convert whose brother, an ultra-
conservative imam who also owns a lucrative carpet and jewelry business,
threatened to have him killed if he ever returned to Turkey. Kris
Tedford, a Farsi-speaking pastor in Oakton, Virginia, told the Washington
Times, “I’ve seen some people who’ve come from Iran to the United States
to persecute, if not kill, in order to bring back their relatives to
Islam.”
Even when apostates do not face physical danger from their families, they
are often ostracized. This experience is not unique to Muslims, of
course; it is a fact of life for many people who convert out of the faith
into which they were born. But for Muslim apostates, the loss of family
and community support can carry a heavy price, especially if they are
immigrants. If they lose their livelihoods or the means to maintain
themselves financially, they can be forced to return to their home
countries - and that can amount to a death sentence.
Apostates living in the West also face pressure from Islamist radicals.
Consider the case of Khaled, an Iraqi who converted to Christianity in
1990 while still living in the Middle East. Having immigrated to the
Netherlands so that he could practice his new faith openly, he was
surprised by the ferocity of the country’s Islamic fundamentalists, from
whom he received regular death threats. Paul, an Egyptian convert to
Christianity, reports similar experiences in Chicago. Once his apostasy
was known, he was menaced by radical Muslims who frequented the
restaurant at which he worked and became the object of a sustained
campaign of threats and intimidation.
Responding to opponents of Syed Mumtaz Ali’s effort to bring Islamic law
to Canada, an op-ed writer in the Calgary Herald recently chided his
countrymen: “The barbarians are not at the gates, and liberalism is not
under siege.” Stated so broadly, this benign assessment sounds
compelling. Imams will not soon preside over the courtrooms of Canada or
any other Western country, and anyone physically attacking a lapsed
Muslim will not be able to avoid criminal prosecution simply by pleading
religious freedom.
But barbarism takes many forms in our day, and one of them, surely, is
the exploitation of the West’s traditions of tolerance (and, of late,
multiculturalism) in the service of deeply anti-Western ends. It is a sad
irony - and one that casts a harsh light on the limits of our own
principles - that so many former Muslims who have come to the West
seeking religious freedom have instead found, couched in the language of
“equality rights,” a grotesque and insidious form of the very tyranny
they have fled. The danger in which they live is quite real, a rebuke to
the indulgent culture of their new societies and a disgrace to
conscience.
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a senior analyst at the Investigative Project,
a terrorism researchcenter in Washington, D.C.
1 All of these countries either have explicit anti-apostasy laws or
decree capital punishment for the broader offense of blasphemy.
2 The essay is at
http://muslim-canada.org/apostasy.htm.
3 The same concern for security makes it difficult to gather information
on this topic, which has been scantily covered in the press and
elsewhere. Research for this article was largely conducted through
personal interviews.
--
"Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely
helps them to deceive themselves." Eric Hoffer
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