This DW story doesn’t say it, but Abdel-Samad was declared an “apostate,” and hence is under the threat of death, for envisioning an Islam “without sharia or jihad, without gender apartheid.” So this is yet another example of someone who would reform Islam being threatened with death — those who think that the solution to our problems is a reformed Islam should ponder just how difficult such an Islam will be to attain.
An update on this story. “German author in hiding after receiving Islamist death threats,” from DW, June 11:
A German author of Egyptian origin has gone into hiding after having recieved [sic] death threats from Islamists. Hamed Abdel-Samad is one of Germany”s highest-profile experts on Islam.
The news of the death threats against Abdel-Samad was announced by his publisher on Tuesday.
“Hamed Abdel-Samad is taking the call for him to be murdered seriously and has gone into hiding,” the head of the Munich-based Droemer Knaur publishing house, Margit Ketterle, said in a statement.
Radical Islamists have killed four US diplomats in Libya during protests over an American film about the Prophet Muhammad. There were also anti-American protests in Cairo. (12.09.2012)
The calls for the author to be killed apparently came after a speech he gave in Cairo last week in which he criticized radical Islam and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, accusing them of spreading “religious fascism.”
Abdel-Sadam reportedly also said he did not intend to insult Islam but had a right to express his views.
Shortly after his speech Assem Abdel Maged, a leading member of the radical Egyptian group Gamaa Islamiya, used a television appearance to declare Abdel-Samad an “infidel.”
Numerous Islamist web sites subsequently published a picture of the author with the words “wanted dead” written above.
“We are shocked by the persecution of our author and support him as much as we can,” said Ketterle, who spoke of a “smear campaign that came directly from the sphere of the Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi.”…