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Russia: Muslim clerics threaten violence over banning of Qur’an translation deemed “extremist”

Sep 23, 2013 1:16 pm By Robert Spencer

It’s actually a “high quality translation,” and so the clerics are up in arms, so to speak, because this is close to banning the Qur’an itself. It is taken for granted by everyone quoted in this piece that banning a holy book is absurd and self-defeating. Very well. Then what exactly should we do about a holy book that regularly incites those who believe in it to commit acts of violence? Our present policy of denying that this ever actually happens isn’t doing a thing to curb that violence. Time for a new strategy.

“Russian Muslim clerics warn of unrest over ban of translation of Koran,” by Alissa de Carbonnel for Reuters, September 20:

(Reuters) – Russia’s senior Islamic clerics warned the country’s leaders on Friday unrest could erupt in Muslim communities in Russia and beyond if a court decision ordering the destruction of a interpretive translation of Koran is not overturned.

Tuesday’s ruling by a court in Novorossiysk, a city in southern Russia, ordered the widely read text outlawed under a Russian anti-extremism law that rights activists say has been abused by local officials out of prejudice or to persecute groups frowned upon by the dominant Russian Orthodox Church.

Rights campaigners said that the decision, which will apply nationwide unless it is overturned on appeal, comes dangerously close to banning the Koran itself.

Russia’s Council of Muftis sounded the alarm in an open letter on Friday to President Vladimir Putin, who has frequently called for unity among the leading faiths and warned that ethnic tension could tear Russia apart.

“Russian Muslims are very strongly indignant over such an outrageous decision,” Rushan Abbyasov, the deputy head of the council, which has close ties with the Kremlin, told Reuters.

If the ruling is acted on, the cleric warned: “There will be unrest … not only in Russia but all over the world, we are talking about the destruction of the Koran.”

That’s not a warning; that’s a threat.

In the letter to Putin, the council drew a parallel with violence in the Middle East and Afghanistan over the actions of an American pastor, Terry Jones, who threatened to burn the Koran on September 11, 2010.

“Is it necessary to discuss how the destruction of books, especially sacred religious books, has been received in Russia in the past?” it said.

“We recall how the burning of just a few copies of the Holy Koran by a crazy American pastor elicited a firm protest not just from Russian Muslims but from our entire society, in solidarity with the stormy and longlasting anger of the global Muslim community and all people of goodwill,” it said.

A lawyer representing the text’s author, Azeri theologian Elmir Kuliyev, said he will appeal the ruling, which calls for the text to be banned and copies of it “destroyed”.

“This is pure idiocy. Some local prosecutor sent this material to a local court and they together decided to ban a holy book,” lawyer Murat Musayev, who has one month to appeal the ruling, told Reuters.

“On the one hand there is freedom of religion in Russia, on the other they are banning fundamental religious texts.”

Experts say the more than decade-old translation by Kuliyev is a respected scholarly work, one of four translations of the Koran into Russian.

“This is one step away from banning the Koran,” said Akhmed Yarlikapov, an expert on Islam with the Russian Academy of Sciences.

“This is a very high quality translation,” he said. “The banning of Kuliyev’s translation is utterly unprofessional, you could ban the Bible just as easily because it also has passages that talk about the spilling of blood.”…

Maybe, but actually the Bible contains no open-ended commands for believers to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers; the Qur’an does. There are no armed groups of Bible believers committing violence and justifying that violence by quoting Biblical passages. There are, however, armed groups of Muslims all over the world committing violence and justifying that violence by quoting Qur’anic passages.

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Filed Under: Qur'an, Russia


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