A few weeks ago a young man sat on television looking, at first glance, like someone who wasn't going to answer.
It was on Højskolen on TV 2, in the episode about Danishness.
Abud Mustafa, as he is called, sat across from Mads Strange of Liberal Alliance. Strange had brought along a survey showing that only 16 percent of Muslim men in Denmark think it is completely okay to be homosexual, and so he asked Abud whether that wasn't a problem for our society.
Abud answered that it was no problem at all, because pluralism means people are allowed to think differently. So Mads asked him directly instead -
Do you think it is okay to be homosexual?
And Abud answered - What does that have to do with anything?
So he wouldn't answer, was the conclusion.
The clip went round the whole country.
You have probably seen it.
Abud Mustafa is a Muslim, an actor, a public debater and a former member of the gang Brothas, and he has never hidden that last part. A week after Højskolen he is sitting on B.T.'s podcast Borgerlig Tabloid across from Joachim B. Olsen, and over the course of an hour he answers all of it. Not just the question about homosexuals. Apostasy. The Quran over Danish law. The caliphate. His daughter.
The headline B.T. ran afterwards read - "In an ideal society there is the death penalty for homosexuality."
I have listened to the whole hour. Twice. And I would like to go through it with you, because it is the most honest hour we have heard on this subject in a long time, and it shows something the headline cannot show, and that the 16 percent figure cannot show either.
It shows what I have been writing about for some years now - what it means to live under a religious law you are not allowed to take a position on yourself.
But first I want to say what I *believe* about Abud Mustafa, so that no one is in any doubt along the way.
I believe him. I don't think he wants to kill anyone, and I don't think he wants anyone killed. He says it himself - "I'm not killing anybody at all." He judges no one. He says that "it's none of his damn business whether people are homosexual", and that he hadn't even noticed there was a homosexual sitting at the table until someone pointed it out to him.
And the headline is not his sentence.
It is Joachim B. Olsen's.
Olsen says - "then it's hard not to infer that in your ideal society you agree that homosexuals should be killed".
And Abud answers - "Yes, if you infer it from that, then I suppose that's what it is." A little later he says "that now people will conclude that he thinks homosexuals should be thrown off a building, and he hasn't said that at all".
Both are in there.
And they do not contradict each other.
That is what I want to show you.
And then he has to be given what he is right about, because he is right about more than most people will grant him.
He is right that Mads Strange used the question as a tool. Strange asked Abud and not Morten Dahlin from Venstre, and he did it because he knew what Islam says on the matter and wanted it said out loud in a TV format where the explanations never make it in. Abud saw that.
He is right that being homosexual is not a core Danish value. It is a core Danish value that you HAVE THE FREEDOM to be, and those are two different things, and he says it more clearly than Strange did.
He is right that no one should force their religion on anyone else, and he says it in both directions.
And he is right about something most people in those chairs don't dare - he doesn't hide. "I'm not going to hide behind anything at all." He is a conservative Muslim, he stands by all of it, and he says it over a cup of coffee at B.T., knowing full well what it is going to cost him.
I have enormous respect for that - I wish more people would speak that plainly.
That is why the hour is worth going through. Because he is honest. A dishonest man would have said what the Danes wanted to hear and been done in thirty seconds, and then we would have learned nothing.
So let us look at what actually happens.
Mads Strange asked a question that looks simple.
"Do you think it is okay to be homosexual?"
There are three ways to answer. You can say yes. You can say no. Or you can say that you disagree with your religion on that point. Three doors, if you like. And what Abud does at B.T., which he couldn't do on TV, is explain, calmly and without beating about the bush, why he cannot walk out through any of them.
And listen carefully, because he is not the one who closed them.
The first option is to say yes. Abud explains - "if I say yes and don't mean an unconditional yes, then I come across as a liar, to Mads and to the rest of Denmark. Because yes can mean so many things. Do you mean homosexuals should have the right to be here? Do you mean they should have the right to marry? Do you mean they should be stoned?" And Abud cannot say yes to all of it, because sharia has rules for this, and he knows them, and they do not say yes. So he CANNOT say yes. Not because he is against homosexuals. But because he won't lie.
The second option is to say no. And here Abud says something I have never heard anyone say so honestly before.
If you boil the question down to whether we should throw people off buildings, and you answer no, then you are not standing behind your own convictions. And if you answer yes, then you are, in his own word, almost sadistic towards those who don't know sharia and understand it. He knows, in other words, that a no in Denmark is heard as a yes to the punishment.
So he can't say no either.
Not because he can't pronounce the word. Because he knows what it makes him in our ears.
The third option is the one most Danes would take.
"I am a Muslim, but I disagree with Islam on this point."
That is how we do it here. That is how we have done it for five hundred years, with our own church. And Joachim B. Olsen tries three times to give him that option. "You have free will," he says. "You can perfectly well say there are things in Islam you find incompatible with being in Denmark, that you simply disagree with." And Abud answers - "You have to be careful about saying disagree." And then. "No, I don't disagree."
And that is it. Because it is not an option for him. To disagree with sharia is to stop being a Muslim.
He doesn't say it in those words, but he says it with all the others -
"I don't contest what Islam holds to be right and wrong. How the penal system is to be carried out, I can't have an opinion on. I'm not an imam or a mufti, I'm not supposed to derive anything at all."
Yes, no and disagree. He can't say any of them. And then all that is left is what he actually says - "if you infer it from that, then I suppose that's what it is". And right after - "Now you've got it. So what? Can't the two of us sit here and drink a cup of coffee?"
He can certainly drink coffee with me, I hear him.
Because hear that sentence properly. That is not a man dodging. It is a man showing you why none of the three answers is possible for him, instead of pretending he has given one of them. It is the most honest thing anyone can do in his situation. And that is why it became that headline. The headline was the only possible outcome of that question, from the moment he decided not to lie.
So who closed the three options for him?
He answers that too.
"Islam is like a tree," he says. It makes no sense to discuss leaves and branches, you have to go down to the root. And the root is whether you are convinced there is a Creator. Because if you are, then the Creator who made us is of course the one who knows us best and knows what is best for us, and therefore we as Human beings must unconditionally give him the right to legislate what is right and what is wrong.
There it is, in his own words.
A Creator who has the unconditional right to decide what is right and wrong. A Human being who unconditionally gives him that right. And who therefore is not to take a position on it himself, because that is not his task.
That is a fundamentally different place to stand from where Western Man stands.
"I don't know all of Islam, Joachim," he says, about thirty-eight minutes in, when Joachim asks how he can back something he doesn't know what is.
He gets no answer to that. And that is not because Abud is stupid - he very clearly is not - and not because he is dodging.
It is because there is no answer to that question inside the order he lives in. The loyalty and the belonging are total, even though he doesn't know the content from one end to the other, and that is not a flaw in him. It is what loyalty is when it is not yours to take a position. Only yours to submit to Sharia. The religious law.
And now notice what happens when Joachim finally asks it the right way.
Do you think Islam's rules should be followed, even when it is uncomfortable? "Yes," says Abud. "If you ask it like that. I thought that was a really good way to ask." He is visibly relieved. You can hear it. Because it is finally the right question.
NOT the therapy language - "what do you think?"
BUT the civilisational and theological - "what are you subject to?"
And that is why the 16 percent is not the interesting part. Mads Strange asked about opinions. But what the hour at B.T. shows is what lies beneath the opinions, and that is what Western man has to see -
A Human being who is not free to answer according to his own reason and conscience, because the answer is not his to give. He is subject to sharia, and sharia is not up for negotiation, and it costs to speak against it. And I don't need to put the price into words. Because he has said it himself, three times, one for each of the three answers. Liar. Sadist. Apostate.
Here I want to stop, because that last word is not a figure of speech.
So. Apostate.
Falling away from Islam is not like leaving the Folkekirken, the Danish national church. In classical sharia, which all four Sunni schools of law have agreed on for over a thousand years, the punishment for apostasy is death.
It rests on a hadith in which Muhammad says - "Whoever changes his religion, kill him."
Around a dozen countries still have the death penalty for apostasy in their legislation, among them Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan. And it is not only in the law books. In 2013 Pew Research asked Muslims in a long list of countries whether they favoured the death penalty for leaving Islam. In Egypt 86 percent said yes. In Jordan 82. In Pakistan 76. In Afghanistan 79.
Those are not extremists. Those are majorities.
In Denmark there is of course no death penalty. But there is something else, and many who were born here have felt it on their own bodies. Danish ex-Muslims tell of being disowned, threatened, cast out and in some cases subjected to violence. Studies of social control among young people with a Muslim background show that it is not the exception but a widespread experience that the family and the community decide what you may think, who you may be with, and what you may say out loud. I am not the one making this up. It is what the municipalities and the ministries have investigated themselves, and it is what the Danish ex-Muslims tell themselves.
That is the background Abud Mustafa is sitting against when Joachim asks him to say he disagrees with Islam. He then says "you have to be careful about saying disagree", and that is not rhetoric. It is a man who knows his community.
And Abud himself speaks out against social control, he has to be given that - he rejects re-education trips, he says you must never turn your back on your child, and he disagrees with many Muslim parents about how they treat their children's choices.
But he cannot take the last step and say that the sharia behind it is wrong.
Because then he is the one who has fallen away.
And now we have come to what the real subject is. Not Abud. But what it means for Denmark if you take what he says seriously.
Not as something he has made up. Because he hasn't. As what he honestly tells us he stands under.
Let us take the points, one at a time, as they actually fall in the hour.
He believes that sharia is the ideal society, if it is implemented one hundred percent.
He believes that the Creator, that is Allah, and not Man has the right to decide what is right and wrong.
He accepts that in sharia the punishment for homosexual acts is death, and that the punishment for leaving Islam is death, and he will not say he disagrees with it, because he can't.
He doesn't vote, because he is not convinced it is permitted.
He gets up from the table when the alcohol comes out, and doesn't come to the Christmas lunch at his wife's family.
And when Joachim raises the argument that if one day there is a big enough majority to democratically abolish democracy and introduce a caliphate, then that is just democracy, Abud says that technically you could argue that. He explains the mechanics himself - every four years you vote in the 179 members of parliament, and if there is a big enough majority, you change the constitution in an Islamic direction. He says that is nothing we need to worry about right now. And he says, word for word - "I don't think the USA and Israel would allow it."
Now take those points and put them together, and see what they add up to.
Our society rests on the law coming from ourselves. From Folketinget, from the constitution, from people who can be voted out and who can change the law when it turns out to be wrong. That is the entire foundation. Homosexuals may marry in Denmark because we decided it. You may leave your religion in Denmark because we decided it. You may say that your own church, priest, bishop and Bible are wrong, because we decided it, and fought hard for it.
Sharia rests on the opposite - that the rules come from God and may not be changed by human beings. That is the WHOLE point of it.
As long as sharia is something Abud himself chooses to follow, and which binds only him, it can be here. He gets up from the table, he doesn't vote, he prays five times a day, and it harms no one.
Our challenge is that sharia was not made to be one man's choice. It was made to be everyone's duty. Because that is what it is. And as everyone's duty it cannot be here, not even as something you keep ready for the day the majority is there.
Because the day sharia becomes Denmark's law, there is no longer anyone who can change it. Not Folketinget, not the people, not the courts. That is precisely what makes it sharia - that it was not enacted by human beings, and therefore cannot be changed or repealed by human beings.
So it is not incompatible that Abud Mustafa lives here. And it is not incompatible that he believes what he believes.
What is incompatible is to keep ready a religious law that may not be changed by Man, and at the same time live in a society whose only foundation is that the law may be changed by Man.
The two CANNOT both be true at once.
EITHER it is the people who can change the country's laws, OR it is not. And Abud has said, calmly and honestly, which of the two he stands under, and that the other is something he accepts as long as there is no majority.
And let me just get ahead of it, because someone is already sitting there composing a comment along the lines of - but you Christians have a God too. What's the difference?
That is the right question, and you deserve the right answer.
Abud Mustafa also answers to something higher than himself. That is not what separates us. He says himself that he might have stayed in the gang if he didn't believe in an afterlife where you have to give an account. I believe that. I believe that is what pulled him out, and that is more than Danish society managed. So the difference is not whether you believe in a Creator. The difference is whether Man himself may take a position on what God has said, or may only obey it.
In Islam, as Abud describes it, sharia - the religious law, the final and unchangeable truth - comes from the Creator, and Man receives it. The imam and the mufti explain what it means, and he doesn't know all of it, and he doesn't need to, because it is not his to decide. That is why he can say neither yes, no nor disagree.
In Christianity it is the other way round, and that is not something the West came up with later. It is in the foundational text itself.
"I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts," says God through the prophet Jeremiah. Not on tablets. Not with the priests. But inside Man himself. What God places in there is Conscience - the ability to tell right from wrong yourself and to answer for it yourself.
"The sabbath was made for Man, and not Man for the sabbath," Jesus says to those who knew all the rules by heart and wanted him punished by them. And Peter, as Joachim himself mentions in the podcast, denied Jesus three times. Yes. And was forgiven. And became the one the church was built on.
That story does not exist in the other order. That is, Islam. There the one who falls away does not become a cornerstone. He becomes someone to be punished with death.
That is why a Dane can say "I disagree with my church" and still be a Christian. Because he has been given a conscience and has to use it himself, judge for himself, stand by it himself. That is not betraying his Creator. It is taking him seriously.
Conscience is not a threat to God. It is the place where God speaks to the individual Human being. And that is why in the West you may question everything, God included, without it being apostasy. And that is why Danish law can be changed - it is WHAT a people with a conscience agree on, and correct when their conscience tells them they were wrong.
That is the fourth answer.
The one Abud doesn't have.
And now you can see why he couldn't answer Mads Strange. Not because he didn't dare. Because that answer DOES NOT EXIST in the order he lives in. Islam. Sharia.
It is not a personal preference. It is religious law that costs you to fall away from in public. And that carries consequences. Here in this country too.
And then there is what I think his opponents won't see, and which I believe has to be said if you want to be honest towards him.
And I do.
He lives here. Almost all the way round. He lives in Nørrebro, he respects Danish law, he doesn't want anyone talking about throwing people off buildings. He is critical of immigration himself, he says, he understands the fear, he doesn't think we should bring "all sorts" here and wreck the welfare state. He tells Joachim the two of them could easily be colleagues. His wife is a convert, and he makes no secret of the fact that it is sometimes hard for them, but that they are doing well. And when Joachim asks whether his daughter could marry a Christian man, he answers that he would be lying if he said he was completely cool with it, and then he says -
"You must never turn your back on your child."
That is not the honour culture's answer.
It is a father's.
All of that is true, and I don't want anyone taking it from him.
But at the same time you have to hear the words that lie around all of it.
"Without me thinking it should be implemented right here and now."
"That's a completely different conversation under an Islamic state with sharia."
"There are many steps to get there."
That is not a rejection of sharia. It is a timetable for it. Everything he lives in here, he lives in because sharia hasn't been introduced yet. And if one day it is, then he is not the one who judges. He has said that too.
You can't ask him to answer differently. I won't ask him to. I don't think you should either. It would be asking him to leave his faith, and you, I and the state have no right to that, and I wouldn't use that right if I had it.
He has his Creator, and his Creator has given him sharia, and there is no way he can speak against it.
BUT you can say what it means for a country where the law comes from ourselves. That there sits a man in that country, at the table, with a wife who is her own, and a daughter he loves, and who at the same time, calmly and honestly and without hatred, keeps another law ready, one he may not take a position on himself, and waits for enough steps to come for it to be introduced.
He doesn't hate Denmark. He lives here. He has just never been allowed to say - and will never be allowed to say - that Allah, Islam and sharia could be wrongly written or understood.
And that is the one thing all of Denmark is built of.
What do you think we should do about it?
