bring on the reformation...please! http://sg.news.yahoo.com/021126/1/352r3.html Nigerian state slaps "death sentence" on Miss World reporter The government of a mainly Muslim state in northern Nigeria called for believers to kill a woman journalist who wrote an article on the Miss World pageant which was seen as insulting to the Prophet Mohammed. Zamfara State's information commissioner, Umar Dangaladima, told AFP that the state government endorsed a "fatwa" -- an Islamic religious decree -- calling for the death of fashion writer Isioma Daniel, whose report triggered bloody riots. There is no danger that the decree will be carried out -- Daniel lives far from Zamfara in Lagos and is said to have fled Nigeria -- but the statement marks another dispute between the leaders of the Muslim north and Nigeria's secular government. Information Minister Jerry Gana, who acts as a spokesman for Nigeria's secular government, dismissed the decree as both "null and void" and unconstitutional and vowed it would not be enforced. "The federal government under the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria will not allow such an order in any part of the federal republic," he told AFP. Last week more than 220 people died in the northern city of Kaduna in rioting, which has been blamed on the report, and the Miss World organisation was been forced to abandon plans to stage the spectacle in Nigeria. Dangaladima told AFP: "The state government did not on its own pass the fatwa. It's a fact that Islam prescribes the death penalty on anybody, no matter his faith, who insults the Prophet. "Therefore the state government has retained this verdict as it applies to Isioma. This is our position," he said, explaining that Islamic youth organisations had come to the Zamfara government to ask for action against the offending journalist. Zamfara's deputy governor Mamuda Aliyu Shinkafi said late Monday in a speech to religious leaders in the Zamfara State capital Gusau which was rebroadcast on state radio: "Like Salman Rushdie, the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed." "It is binding on all Muslims wherever they are to consider the killing of the writer as a religious duty," he said. But Lateef Adegbite, general secretary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs in Nigeria, distanced his influential body from the fatwa, refusing to endorse it. He told AFP that the council would study the ruling, but would also take into account that Daniel is a Christian, does not live or work in Zamfara and that her paper had apologised. A "fatwa" is a legal statement in Islam, issued by a mufti or a religious lawyer after reference to precedents, to decide on an issue of jurisprudence. In an interview with CNN late Monday Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo defended the right of Zamfara and 11 other states to reintroduce Islamic Sharia law. "I have always maintained Sharia has been part of Nigeria since we have lived together as Christians and Muslims," he said. "We are practicing a federal form of government in this land... because of our diversity. Anybody who tried to enforce a unity form of government in this land would destroy it overnight." But Obasanjo also said that he opposes the death sentences handed down by some Sharia courts for offences such as adultery, and vowed that the federal courts will quash them on appeal. Daniel resigned from the newspaper This Day after fury erupted over an article she authored on November 16 on the Miss World pageant, in which she suggested that the Prophet Mohammed might not have opposed its being held in Nigeria. "The Muslims thought it was immoral to bring 92 women to Nigeria to ask them to revel in vanity. What would Mohammed think? In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from one of them," she wrote. Daniel is described by her paper as "a style writer who had only just joined This Day a few months back after a short journalism career in the UK". Her mobile telephone was not accepting calls on Tuesday and a senior source at the paper said she had fled the country. On Wednesday a group of Muslim youths burned down This Day's local offices in Kaduna, an attack that proved to be a prelude to three days of sectarian violence. At the weekend the contestants and organisers of the Miss World pageant left Nigeria under a cloud of disastrous publicity surrounding the violence. The show has now been moved to London and its organisers have blamed This Day for the violence.
That is absolutely ridiculous. Muslims won't even take responsibility for their own actions. They have to blame this one writer for all the events that happened afterwards. To kill someone for something they say or write is unimaginable. That is the opposite of freedom. On the one hand, we have Muslims who want the US to spare the life of that killer who killed two people who work for the CIA with an AK-47. On the other hand, we have Muslims who want to kill someone for something they wrote or said AND who started deadly riots killing any non-Muslims in their path. There's something terribly wrong with that picture.
I am beginning to dislike the muslim religion. What is it about this suppossedly PEACEFUL religion that creates so many religious zealots? I mean, seems to me, that the muslim religion is like a bunch of rednecks. Anti Women...etc. DaDakota
Agreed. Of course, not all muslims are like that. However, it is alarming how often terrible acts are ordered or committed under the pretense of "following Islam".
You mean you haven't seen all the examples of peace attributed to Islam such as, ummm.... well there's...... remember when..... you know that time......errrrrr..... Well, they're against any attacks on muslims. That's peaceful.
There was Salad-man back at the beginning of the Crusades (oops, didn't mean to say Crusades...). He was supposedly peaceful and lovey. That was only eight hundred years ago.
The Muslim religion has no monopoly on crazy fanatics. 1) the Christian phalangists that Sharon supervised while they slaughtered Palestinians at Shatila. 2) The Christians of Serbia in their ethnic cleansing campaigns. 3) Many of the Nazis of Germany were Christians. I think Hitler was even an ex-seminarian. 4) I think the only generality you can make is that many of the great hatreds and misdeeds in history have been done by religious fantics of many faiths.
Glynch, No doubt there have been crazies in all religions. However, the Muslim religion seems to spawn a fair greater percentage. DaDakota
you're absolutely right...no religious group has a monopoly on murderous fanatics...nevertheless, we are seeing this as WAY too prevalent within Islam today. we are not seeing church leaders calling for violence (even in the instances you mentioned) in the name of Jesus Christ en masse like we're seeing with clerics in islam right now. Khan made a great point the other day...when the church leaders in the days of the crusades were the only ones who were allowed to read scripture and interpret it...and few of the parishoners could read anyway...and the government and the church were one...the potential for abuse was abundant. that is exactly what we're seeing in the islamic world today, unfortunately. It took a reformation of the church to put that crap behind them...I see it as taking nothing less within Islam.
I think that is relative DaD ... cuz we're living in these times and are experiencing it and facing it more than any other extremism. Maybe if we lived in some other time when extremism and fanaticism was high in another faith, we'd think otherwise. But these folks need to just go away. Everyday it's another story using religion as a crutch to explain things.
Interesting but one point to consider is that in each of these examples there is more than a religious conflict happening. In these cases there are disputes over territory and economics, for example, with particular ethnic groups being used as scapegoats. In the Miss World fatwah there is not. Not to mention that at least in 2 & 3, Christians took an active role in vanquishing the guilty party. In comparison the only thing you hear from Muslims is 'its not the religion' even though the examples continue to stack up.
Many of the Nazi Germans we're ordinary soldiers like any ally soldier. They were only fighting for their country. Also, they were not doing it in the name of religion.
His mother wanted Comrade Stalin to be a priest and he spent some time in a seminary, but was eventually dismissed. Hitler had an interest in the arts, but the seminary angle is something unknown to Toland and others. To suggest that Hitler and/or Stalin were even moderately religious is beyond a reach.
It's not Islam, it's idiots...Religions of every flavour have been used to condone just about every kind of atrocity we could think of...including atheism. Sadly, although not universal, religion tends to appeal to people who share certain charecterisitcs; unquestioning of authority, reactionary, aggressive when they feel threatened, judgmental, and hypocritical...This is also true of the modern western religion of worshipping science and capitalism as the answer to all the questions...I am not a Muslim, but have studied their religion, and there is nothing any more inherently violent in it's fundamentals than in any other, saving possibly Daoism. In terms of the Anti-women thing, same deal...that's cultural...Christianity is 'anti-women' from several slants, and has been used to defend many practices of same...
