Contemporary discussions on religious minorities in Islam

Brigham Young University Law Review, 2002 by Nielsen, Jorgen S

Trained in social science and being of Indian origin, Professor Abedin was the founder of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, an institution that had the quiet but active support of the then General Secretary of the Muslim World League, Dr. Umar Abdallah Nasif.41 In an article published just a decade ago, Professor Abedin places the Qur'anic concept of "the people of the book" (i.e. Christians and Jews) into the exegetical context of what he identifies as a Qur'anic distinction between religion as din and as shir'a.42 The former term, often translated "faith" or "religion," represents the eternal divine absolutes and truths that are revealed at various times and various places into particular contexts. There they acquire the trappings of the limitations of the created, finding expression in the circumstances of time and place, "hence multiple ways of life . . . i.e. religious and cultural plurality among mankind."43 Shira is then the term which applies to such ways of life. Islamic scholars have also dealt with apostasy.

Muslims who participated and agreed to the text, most notably Professor Khurshid Ahmad, a leading member of the Jama'at-i-Islami of Pakistan and later its deputy leader. More recently it has been expounded in strong and explicit terms from an unexpected quarter, namely Dr. Hassan al-Turabi of Sudan, in an interview with AlMustakillah newspaper in which he opposes Ayatullah al-Khumayni's fatwa against Salman Rushdie:

If Almighty Allah has granted us the merit of freedom, he who wants to believe is allowed that right and so too the one who wants to disbelieve. If He has chosen to distinguish us from other creatures through His gift of freedom, instead of creating us believers by necessity like stones, mountains and the earth ... then the exercise of that freedom will become a matter of course-a self-evident truth confirmed by the Qur'an as in, "No-one is compelled to believe."45

One question that cannot be avoided in relation to such trends among Islamic scholars and thinkers is the degree of relevance they have to the practical and legal situation in Muslim countries. This is not a matter relating only to the status of non-Muslims. As Ann Mayer has pointed out, bans on apostasy are more likely to be used against fellow Muslims than against those who convert to another religion: "[P]rofessing Muslims may be prosecuted as heretics or blasphemers for what is actually political or theological dissent or may be arbitrarily declared apostates and executed."46 The experience of the Pakistani law on blasphemy supports this analysis, as does the renowned case of the Egyptian scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, whose marriage a Cairo court dissolved on the grounds that he was allegedly an apostate.

A longer-term factor is the nature of the Islamic instruction that is provided in schools and the nature of training in Islamic religious scholarship offered in the Islamic faculties of the universities around the region, the latter usually training the teachers who provide the former. While much of the university training remains traditional, there are signs of change. Nevertheless, this is beyond the scope of this study.