I do not actually know Afrah here.
But I came across this post she has written, which I find very interesting. I do, because I thought it was perfectly visible from inside the faith what it is that collides between Islam and the Western world's rights of freedom, and why.
So I am taking the liberty of sharing it and commenting on it.
Perhaps it can create a little clarity, both inwards and outwards.
It is a good idea to read her post before my comment.
Afrah writes here that the West has not understood what freedom and democracy mean.
I think she writes well. And she writes calmly. And she is right about more than many of those who will guaranteed rush to the keyboard will grant her. So don't. If she does not understand it, explanation is worth more than laughing smileys and ridiculous, demeaning comments. Hold yourself above that sort of thing.
She is right that religion is a personal matter. She is right that nobody should have to stand in Netto, the supermarket, explaining why they believe what they believe. She is right that it is tiring to be the group that always has to account for itself. And she is right that freedom is only freedom if it also applies to the one who believes differently from the majority.
So let us take her at her word.
And go all the way down.
Because something happens in her text which, to my surprise, I believe she cannot see herself, because she is standing in the middle of it.
All the concepts she uses to hold the West to account are Western.
Not just the words. The thought itself. That religion is something private. That faith is a choice the individual makes. That you have the right to change faith, or not to believe in anything. That the state should not interfere in what goes on between a human being and their God.
And none of those thoughts are neutral. They come from a particular place.
They come from a man, a carpenter's son, who was asked whether one should pay taxes to the emperor, and answered that one should give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's. And With that sentence the World was divided into two rooms. A room where people make rules for each other, and which can be changed. And a room where the individual Human Being stands alone before his Creator, and where no emperor has access.
That is what we call Conscience. And that is why religion in the West became a personal matter. Not because we stopped believing. But because our faith itself said that it lived in the Heart and not in the penal code.
She writes as if it were a given that everyone can agree on.
It is not.
And that is precisely where the difference lies.
Because Islam has never divided the World into those two rooms.
The word Islam means submission, and what one submits to is not only a faith, but a law. Sharia is not a set of recommendations. It is God's law, revealed once and for all, and it covers not only prayer and fasting, but marriage, inheritance, testimony, punishment, the relationship between man and woman, the relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim, and what is to happen to the one who leaves the faith.
Again. It is not me saying this. It is every one of the classical schools of law. It is what Muslims themselves have been taught for fourteen hundred years. Religion in Islam is not a personal matter. It is a social order.
And so we come to the thing she mentions herself, and which I would like to stay with a little longer than she does.
She writes that democracy means the right to choose your own faith, including the right to change faith or not to believe in anything at all.
Yes.
But what does her own tradition say about that?
All four Sunni schools of law and the Shia school of law agree that leaving Islam is a crime, and that the punishment for a man is death.
That is not written in a pamphlet by the enemies of Islam. It is written in the schools of law themselves, and it rests on a report from the Prophet that they all regard as authentic.
Today that punishment is still on the statute books in about a dozen countries, and in large Muslim populations outside the West, when you ask those who want sharia as the law of the land, there are solid majorities for enforcing it.
She quotes verse 2:256, there is no compulsion in religion.
It is a beautiful verse. But in the classical reading it is about the entrance, not the exit. You cannot be forced in. But the one who walks out has broken a law that cannot be changed. And in the whole history of Islam the verse has never meant that Jews and Christians under Muslim rule stood equal with Muslims. They were allowed to live, in return for paying a special tax and knowing where they belonged in the order of rank.
So when she writes that you do not have to be a Muslim to recognise a good principle from the Quran, I agree. I gladly recognise it. I would just like to know whether the principle applies the other way. Whether it applies to the young woman in Vollsmose who takes off her headscarf. Whether it applies to the man in Tingbjerg who one day says out loud that he no longer believes. Whether it applies to the ex-Muslims who in Denmark live at secret addresses, not out of fear of the Danes, but out of fear of their own families.
That is THE ONLY test that matters. Not whether the principle is in the book. But whether it applies to the one who walks the wrong way.
And that is where the answer to her big question lies.
She asks why Muslims have to explain themselves again and again. Why it is always them being debated. Why nobody puts the microphone in front of the Buddhist or the Hindu.
The answer is not that the West hates Muslims.
The answer is that the Buddhist did not arrive with a law he thought should apply to his neighbour.
We do not ask Muslims what they believe. That is their own business. We ask what they want instead. Whether the woman may go out without a veil and without belonging to anyone. Whether the one who draws the Prophet may live. Whether the one who leaves the faith may remain in the family. Whether the laws passed by Folketinget, the Danish parliament, stand above sharia when the two disagree. Those are not questions of faith. They are questions of how the house is to be arranged.
And one has the right to ask them, WE have the right to ask them, when someone moves in. As one does everywhere in the world. And especially in the countries Islam comes from.
She calls it arrogance.
So let us try the mirror.
Can she build a church in Saudi Arabia? Can a Christian in Pakistan say publicly that the Quran is wrong, and go home afterwards? Can a woman in Iran do what she herself does in Denmark, namely write publicly that those in power have not understood freedom?
She can write her text here because she lives in a house arranged according to the very principle she asks us to live up to. And she can write it without fear, because there is nothing in our faith that says she must be punished for it.
But try turning it around.
No. No. And. No.
And then the thing about the debate.
She writes that Muslims have become an eternal topic of debate, and that this is incompatible with freedom of religion.
But in the West religion is not protected.
It is FREE.
Those are two COMPLETELY different things.
Christianity is the most ridiculed, criticised and parodied religion in the World, and it is so in the West, by Westerners. We have films that make fun of Jesus. We have newspapers that make fun of the Pope. We have priests who say publicly that they do not believe in God, and keep their jobs. We have a bottle of urine with a crucifix of Jesus in it - which some call art.
Here that is not a sign that the faith is oppressed. It is what freedom of religion looks like when it is whole.
The freedom to believe is the same freedom as the freedom to criticise belief. You cannot have the one without the other.
What she is asking for is not to be treated like everyone else. It is to be exempted from what everyone else is exposed to. And that exemption has a name in her own tradition.
It is called blasphemy law.
It already exists. It just has not been the West's. Even though Lars Løkke is crawling around somewhere on all fours looking for one more corner he can add to it.
So, finally.
She writes that democracy means every human being has the right to choose for themselves.
Again, yes. But democracy rests on a premise that goes deeper than the right to vote. The premise is that the law is made by human beings, and can therefore be changed by human beings. That is the whole point. If the majority wants something else tomorrow, we change it.
Sharia rests on the opposite premise. That the law is God's, and that no assembly of human beings has the right to change it.
Those two sentences cannot both be true at once. And every society MUST CHOOSE which of them applies when they disagree.
The West chose long ago. It is that choice that means she can write her text. And it is that choice we are asking about when we ask Muslims where they stand.
She is right that the West must practise its values and not just talk about them.
We just have to agree on what they are.
Freedom to believe.
Freedom not to.
Freedom to leave.
Freedom to say so out loud afterwards.
The day that applies in her world as it applies in ours, nobody will ask anymore.
❤️🔥🪽
