New Park51 Imam on Homosexuality and Apostasy

chanel

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Jun 8, 2009
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The new imam at the Ground Zero mosque and cultural center believes people who are gay were probably abused as children and that people who leave Islam and preach a new religion should be jailed.

Abdallah Adhami's remarks on homosexuals, religious freedom and other topics have brought renewed criticism of the proposed community center and mosque near the World Trade Center site, which purports to be an inclusive organization.

Jordan Sekulow, a lawyer at the Pat Robertson-founded American Center for Law and Justice in Washington, questioned why the mosque project, called Park51, would choose a leader who advocates retribution for those who leave the faith.

"To be in the United States of America and to tell former Muslims to 'keep your mouth shut' is against the Constitution," said Sekulow, whose organization is suing to stop Park51 from being built.

Outrageous teachings by new GZ mosque big - NYPOST.com

Building bridges?
 
The new imam at the Ground Zero mosque and cultural center believes people who are gay were probably abused as children and that people who leave Islam and preach a new religion should be jailed.

Abdallah Adhami's remarks on homosexuals, religious freedom and other topics have brought renewed criticism of the proposed community center and mosque near the World Trade Center site, which purports to be an inclusive organization.

Jordan Sekulow, a lawyer at the Pat Robertson-founded American Center for Law and Justice in Washington, questioned why the mosque project, called Park51, would choose a leader who advocates retribution for those who leave the faith.

"To be in the United States of America and to tell former Muslims to 'keep your mouth shut' is against the Constitution," said Sekulow, whose organization is suing to stop Park51 from being built.

Outrageous teachings by new GZ mosque big - NYPOST.com

Building bridges?

Have you forgotten? Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance.
 
Just from reading your link I see that neither claim is quite true...but whatever, he sounds just like a Christian fundie. I'm really surprised most of the rightwingers on this board haven't become Muslims.
 
Yep their are Christian "fundies" who are radicals too. The difference is they are not labeled "moderates". I guess since he just wants people jailed, and not stoned, he's embraced by people like Bloomberg.
 
Without context it is hard to say what he believes. He very well could have been talking about life in Saudi Arabia not his own personal beliefs.
 
Without context it is hard to say what he believes. He very well could have been talking about life in Saudi Arabia not his own personal beliefs.

Do you make excuses like this for the Christian fundamentalist? Maybe you can explain why it is you make such excuses for Muslims?
 
I'd like to see a llist of Christian fundies who are calling for the imprisonment of those who leave the faith.
 
Shaykh Abdallah Adhami was born in Georgetown, Washington, DC, of the noble lineage of the family of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. He began his studies of shari’ah at the age of eight, and heard his first scholarly narrative in 1975. He earned scholarly licenses from many eminent scholars from Damascus, Egypt, and Morocco. As a certified narrator of hadith, he is honored with the highest doctoral credential in the interdisciplinary legal canon.

Shaykh Abdallah also holds a degree in architecture from Pratt in New York City, and has seven years of international corporate experience in the area of organizational development and executive training.


Sakeenah: Home

Something tells me he wasn't discussing Saudi Arabia. He's a New Yorker.
 
The new imam at the Ground Zero mosque and cultural center believes people who are gay were probably abused as children and that people who leave Islam and preach a new religion should be jailed.

Abdallah Adhami's remarks on homosexuals, religious freedom and other topics have brought renewed criticism of the proposed community center and mosque near the World Trade Center site, which purports to be an inclusive organization.

Jordan Sekulow, a lawyer at the Pat Robertson-founded American Center for Law and Justice in Washington, questioned why the mosque project, called Park51, would choose a leader who advocates retribution for those who leave the faith.

"To be in the United States of America and to tell former Muslims to 'keep your mouth shut' is against the Constitution," said Sekulow, whose organization is suing to stop Park51 from being built.

Outrageous teachings by new GZ mosque big - NYPOST.com

Building bridges?

But it's a religion of peace and love.:eusa_angel:
 
I'm trying to think in what context it would be "okay" to jail people who leave one religion or share information about a religion.

There is none. It's a fundamental violation of human rights.
 
Without context it is hard to say what he believes. He very well could have been talking about life in Saudi Arabia not his own personal beliefs.

Do you make excuses like this for the Christian fundamentalist? Maybe you can explain why it is you make such excuses for Muslims?
I tell you what...find a Christian fundamentalist church being built that people are protesting against and I will defend the fundies right to build it.

:thup:
 
Shaykh Abdallah Adhami was born in Georgetown, Washington, DC, of the noble lineage of the family of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. He began his studies of shari’ah at the age of eight, and heard his first scholarly narrative in 1975. He earned scholarly licenses from many eminent scholars from Damascus, Egypt, and Morocco. As a certified narrator of hadith, he is honored with the highest doctoral credential in the interdisciplinary legal canon.

Shaykh Abdallah also holds a degree in architecture from Pratt in New York City, and has seven years of international corporate experience in the area of organizational development and executive training.
Sakeenah: Home

Something tells me he wasn't discussing Saudi Arabia. He's a New Yorker.
Turns out he was discussing apostasy historically and then went on to give his views about it...as I suspected, taken totally out of context.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you so much for a very interesting talk. You've spoken at length about tolerance and about accepting differences, but you've also spoken about how treason in almost all religious philosophical traditions is a major for problem for many [unintelligible] to deal with. I was wondering what in your opinion what Sharia said about apostasy and how we should deal with that today.
ADHAMI: OK. The question of apostasy has two perspectives. There is the -- of course, when we grow up in the West, we have different kinds of apostasy that are not called as such. So for example, we have cultural apostasy, and the only difference is we call a cultural apostate a dweeb, at least in the U.S., we do. So a cultural apostate -- this is a real phenomenon. A dweeb is somebody who has -- who doesn't have the latest model of gadget that everyone else does -- you know, sort of, you know. I don't know if the definition has changed; I haven't been out much for the last two years because of an injury. But I think, relatively speaking, the notion of cultural apostasy is very fascinating as an antidote, not as a major discussion. I know that's not what you asked. But let's put that aside but keep it in mind for a moment. Let's put a cognitive bookmark and come back to it.
Apostasy, amazingly in Quranic language, it means to abandon something that you belong to. So literally, it treats the Quran, treats the religion of God as one entity, and it has many prophets who basically taught the same things with different Sharias, right? And God says in the Quran [speaking Arabic]. God chose for each people a different quote-unquote Sharia, a different path. The same prophets, the prophetic message is the same, but the Sharia is different. So the Quranic definition of apostasy, or ridda, literally is abandoning God's law or God's path. Now, in that is a very empowering and very ennobling definition because it treats the person as inherently righteous, inherently sinless, inherently pure.
The concept of apostasy today is -- you asked for my personal opinion, and again, as a Westerner, I can sympathize with a very secular angle to this question for a very simple reason. The right to leave my religion and still be subject to God's grace is like the discourse between the Calvinists and the Arminians about whether God's grace applies to someone who doesn't believe in salvation, remember? How they -- that was something that was -- so for the Muslims, actually, because there is no concept of salvation, that -- but you have to remember something else. This is post-Reformation Christian discourse that is asking this question, "Am I subject to God's grace if I reject God's grace?" In Islam, in the Quran, theoretically, if you look over the Quran from cover to cover, you literally have the right to the choice to reject God's message. The only thing that you do not have the right to do is to spread this conviction, lest you, quote unquote, pollute others. In every religion prior to Islam, apostasy was to be executed, regardless of whether you were a public or private apostate. Islam came with a revolution. It said if someone is an apostate -- and I know that, again, this is a call, a clarion call to competence, not the clichéd answer, "Oh, apostasy was like that because the Muslims had to execute people because it was a new religion, and if you left Islam it meant" -- that's a very temporal answer. And it means, well, what about now? If you left Islam, nothing happens? The Muslims are 1.3 billion people; they are not going to be hurt by a few thousand leaving.
So make the argument not something temporal, but why don't we make the argument based on the Quran and the path of the prophet, peace be upon him. And in essence, you will find something revolutionary in the Quranic addressing of this issue and in how it was implemented by the companions of the prophet as well. The Quran distinguishes between public and private apostasy. If someone leaves the din, leaves the path privately, they cannot be touched. If someone preaches about apostasy or preaches their views, they're jailed. I'm telling you about the official canonical position, not the variations and not the -- yes, many jurors said they have to be killed -- but, the position of the state was the position of Imam Abu Hanifa, which -- who thought they must be jailed so that to -- so that they are contained. Don't kill them, but don't allow them to interpollinate the thoughts of others and, and so forth.
What's fascinating about this is that this is also true of people who would today -- I don't know how to label it properly, but it would be poets who engaged in unorthodox thought, poets who were -- who had an erotic twist to their literature, who had a sexual twist to their literature. What happened to these people? What's remarkable about the Sharia's dealing with these people is, they were never censored. There was no censureship, and they were not censored from anything other than -- I'm mixing between two things because -- there's censorship, right, and then there is censure, which is punishment. So, I'm talking that there was neither. There was neither censorship, nor was there censure for these people. What's the proof is that today, 1,200 years later, we have the most riveting anthology of erotic poetry completely intact with [unintelligible] too, to people like Abu Nuwas, to people like [unintelligible] who during their time caused a lot of headaches for people, but the state did not allow them to be censored because this is the -- this is their, this is their quote-unquote right to creative expression. This is their right as long as they didn't get open, public audiences to preach this. And there's no more eloquent testimony about this rather -- other than the fact that the anthology of Abu Nuwas still exists until today. Many libraries all over the world would have it, even without buying it in full.
So the question of apostasy in the prophetic tradition had to do with whether it was public or private and because it was so -- and because there's so many examples of people intervening on behalf of those who had apostatized, and the prophet forgave it. Very famous example where Uthman, the third caliph, intervened on behalf of a relative who had apostatized, and the prophet allowed it. The prophet let go -- you know, he released the person from prison. What's unique here -- remember, the prophet is a legislator. This is not, "OK, we like this man, we're going to let your guy go." You can't do -- there's no favoritism here. The fact that Uthman was allowed to intervene on behalf of an apostate means that the ruling about apostasy in a private realm is not from a legal perspective 100 percent definitive. So therefore, there is some equivocation about what the position is and therefore, as a jurist, you have to -- you have a legal obligation to not be definitive about something that Sharia left a question mark about. And talk about something, divine foresight. Sharia left question marks about things that may become problematic in the future. And sometimes not even problematic; sometimes useful things, like the question of music. Sharia stayed non-definitive about this question because eventually the Muslims would pioneer music therapy to heal people in mental health wards. The fact that there was a quote-unquote debate between the jurists on -- you know, music is questionable, music is semi-not liked or disliked or however -- did not impede the fact that there is scientific progress that needs to happen in order to take care of people.
So I think -- is there something else you asked about apostasy? In terms of its implementation, we already answered that question. Yes, in terms of historically, there is even something very unique -- and I don't have the full answer to this -- but in the historical chronicles, there was somebody who was called the apostate prince. And he was actually the head of a municipality in Mamluk, 9th century Cairo. And Ibn Iyad an-Hanafi, actually, in his historical chronicle -- and it's shocking. He's called the apostate prince. And the first question anybody has is, how come they didn't kill him?
So again, I really appreciate this question because it highlights something -- the cognitive bookmark that we put, we're going to draw that back just to close this. There are a lot of issues that are brought up, in my opinion, by us as Westerners in order to, as we say, psych out the Muslims, so to speak, and at the same time use that question as a foil to our own self-definition. So, by the grace of God, honesty and competence in the service of our tradition is ultimately what would bring more solace. Thank you.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ku_HAgqBZk&feature=player_embedded[/ame]
 
I'm trying to think in what context it would be "okay" to jail people who leave one religion or share information about a religion.

There is none. It's a fundamental violation of human rights.
Yep...you agree with this Muslim man...oh the horror!!!
 
Without context it is hard to say what he believes. He very well could have been talking about life in Saudi Arabia not his own personal beliefs.

Do you make excuses like this for the Christian fundamentalist? Maybe you can explain why it is you make such excuses for Muslims?
I tell you what...find a Christian fundamentalist church being built that people are protesting against and I will defend the fundies right to build it.

:thup:

Try Baghdad.

They don't just protest it. They kick down the door and AK-47 their asses. This has become a common occurrence in Iraq.

Now defend the folks that were murdered. I won't hold my breath waiting.
 
Do you make excuses like this for the Christian fundamentalist? Maybe you can explain why it is you make such excuses for Muslims?
I tell you what...find a Christian fundamentalist church being built that people are protesting against and I will defend the fundies right to build it.

:thup:

Try Baghdad.

They don't just protest it. They kick down the door and AK-47 their asses. This has become a common occurrence in Iraq.

Now defend the folks that were murdered. I won't hold my breath waiting.
I'm an American, not an Iraqi...and while I find that sort of behavior revolting it is immaterial to the discussion of what goes on in America.
 
I tell you what...find a Christian fundamentalist church being built that people are protesting against and I will defend the fundies right to build it.

:thup:

Try Baghdad.

They don't just protest it. They kick down the door and AK-47 their asses. This has become a common occurrence in Iraq.

Now defend the folks that were murdered. I won't hold my breath waiting.
I'm an American, not an Iraqi...and while I find that sort of behavior revolting it is immaterial to the discussion of what goes on in America.

Using your own argument, if the imam was talking about historical islam, and not America, isn't it immaterial as well? Yet you spent time researching a video, an article, ANYTHING to give your argument credence?

And why are you defending him, why do you care?
 
If the guy's preaching inspires terorism then throw his ass in prison.

Additionally, if his preaching inspires terrorism then his mosque ought to be prepared to pay for damages in a civil case, too.

That's how we treat our homegrown White Supremeicists and that's how we ought to deal with emmigres who advocate violence, too.
 

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