http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-terrorism-radicalization-almarayati-blowback-20130107,0,4903155.story#ixzz2pkLFq1Wo
Here is the comment I added to the LA Times thread:
"Mariyati has been engaged in ccunter-terrorism for 20 years? Don't make me laugh. MPAC has taken a leading role in condemning law enforcement arrests of terrorists through the use of undercover stings that have thwarted numerous would be massacres. In addition, Mariyati is one of some 200 Muslim leaders in the US who received the Freedom Pledge letter in 2009 and 2012 from Former Muslims United, a group of Muslim apostates. The letter asked these leaders to sign a simple letter stating that Muslim apostates should not be harmed. Mariyati has refused to sign it. I confronted him with it personally at the 2012 MPAC conference in Pasadena. He said that it was not necessary because there is no retribution against those who leave Islam. That is a lie. The penalty under (Hudud) sharia law is death, and it is affirmed by virtually all of the major Islamic schools of thought."
5 comments:
He said that it was not necessary because there is no retribution against those who leave Islam. That is a lie. The penalty under (Hudud) sharia law is death, and it is affirmed by virtually all of the major Islamic schools of thought."
If he says there is no retribution, then in the variant of Islam he espouses there is no retribution. I would hesitate to accept Gary Fouse as an authority on what constitutes a major Islamic school of thought, much less on what each major school thinks.
If I said, there is no Christian teaching that communicants receive that actual physical body and blood of Christ, I would be telling the truth as Presbyterians and Methodists understand it. I would be telling a lie based on what Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches teach (they are all major schools of Christian thought). And Lutherans are in a kind of wishy-washy in between position that Gary would ridicule for not admitting to either position -- because in fact they DON'T believe either position is quite right.
Come to think of it, while Roman Catholics and Calvinists have both burned heretics at the stake, I can't recall that that is part of the Orthodox tradition.
I was thinking of al Bukhari, Al Azhar University and even Yusuf al Qaradawi (who I think is a madman, but is regarded as one of the top scholars within Islam-certainly by the Muslim brotherhood.)
The Muslim Brotherhood is a rather small minority of Muslims -- even the quasi-theocratic Saudi state consider the Brotherhood to be anathema, which is why the Saudis are subsidizing the post-coup Egyptian government, making the U.S. kind of irrelevant. Al Azhar is a recognized center of Muslim scholarship, but not anything like a Vatican. Also, if you dug a little, you would probably find over a period of five decades rather a lot of different opinions coming out of Al Azhar.
Siarlys,
I never said Al Azhar was a Vatican. Indeed there are many scholars there who may have differing views. If I am not mistaken, they have one there called the Grand Mufti. What does he think?
Last I knew, the Grand Mufti was a hereditary religious fifedom based in Jerusalem. I don't much care what he thinks. Do you? More important, how many of the world's one billion plus Muslims hang on his every word as the definition of their faith?
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