Arab West Report Egyptian press summaries and media research for dialogue

In their persecution of intellectuals, Islamists reinforce censorship with takfīr [the act of accusing someone of unbelief]. Indeed throughout his life, the author states that Khomeini boasted about the fatwa he issued ordering the death of Iranian thinker Ahmad Kasrawī in 1947.



When asked in 1979, the year that Khomeini’s Islamic revolution toppled the shah, why he had issued such orders, he replied that his opponents were guilty and that there was no need to waste time on trials.



Khomeini’s hard-line successors, under the name of shari‘a [Muslim law], went on applying such law to intellectuals inside and outside Iran. Two million dollars bounty was placed on the head of novelist Salman Rushdie by an institution that belongs to the leader of the revolution, and Islamist political police issued a hit list that contained the names of 180 Iranian intellectuals. Four of them were already assassinated by the time former President Muhammad Khatami intervened.



In Sudan, Hasan al-Turābī ordered in 1985 that Sufi philosopher, Muhammad Mahmoud Taha be hanged on charges of ridda [apostasy]. In 1999, the Khartoum Court of Appeal handed down a ruling against an artist to receive 260 lashes of the whip under the charge of "offending the religion [Islam]."



In Egypt, Islamists filed a lawsuit of apostasy against late singer Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahāb for his song Min Ghayr Leh [No whys]. They managed to obtain a court ruling confirming the apostasy of Dr. Nasr Hāmid Abu Zayd and stabbed Najīb Mahfouz, the Egyptian Noble laureate in literature in the neck in concordance with a fatwa that rendered him murtadd [apostate] for his story Awlād Hāritnā [The People of Our Alley]. Writer Faraj Fouda was assassinated by Islamists after a fatwa.



When asked his religious opinion of assassins, Shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazālī, a key outlawed Muslim Brotherhood figure, said "they have just carried out the hadd [penalty] of apostasy which the ruler failed to do.”