We are much more enlightened in the West. We don’t jail people for insulting Islam. We simply excoriate them as “racists” and “Islamophobes,” ostracize them from polite society, and rejoice when they’re deplatformed by the social media giants. We are much more advanced in the West.
“Iranian spiritual leader sentenced for ‘insulting Islam,’” Middle East Monitor, August 19, 2018:
An Iranian court has sentenced the founder of a spiritual movement to five years in jail, his lawyer told ILNA news agency on Saturday, after he was accused of corrupting Muslims.
Mohammad Ali Taheri, founder of Erfan Halgheh, which calls itself “Interuniversalism” in English, was arrested in 2011 and charged with “insulting Islamic sanctities” and “spreading corruption on earth”.
Taheri was sentenced to death by a Revolutionary Court in 2015, but acquitted on appeal in 2016. The court then re-imposed the death sentence in 2017, but the five-year sentence replaces it….
Taheri founded Erfan Halgheh after receiving what he claims were “spiritual inspirations” that empowered him to connect with a larger “cosmic consciousness”.
He practised his beliefs, along with his thousands of followers, in “healing sessions” often involving alternative medicine….
Amnesty International says he is a prisoner of conscience, targeted for the “peaceful exercise of his rights to freedoms of belief, expression and association”….