Obscurantist par excellence Shamim rants in his obscure forum!

 A.H. Jaffor Ullah

Published on April 02, 2006

Readers may not know that one Shamimul Huq runs a yahoogroups by the name �Future of Bangladesh.�  Shamim is known to me and quite a few Mukto-monas for he is a tireless fighter against Razakars and Bangladeshi nationalists; also, he is a pro-1971 liberation war and a great fan of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.  However, we have problem with Shamim vis-�-vis Islam.  He thinks the Mukto-monas are doing harm to Islam.  His pet view is that Koran has all the guidance and it truly is a book of God (Allah).  He thinks Islam could function without hadith.

 

In my latest article on the plight of an Afghan Christian convert I mentioned about the pathetic case of apostasy labeled against the poor Afghan guy, Abdur Rahman.  Reading the article Shamim made some caustic remarks (unbridled too!) about me.  The rest of this short article is rebuttal to his acerbic comments.     

 

Shamim�s ignorance knows no bounds.  He was incensed reading my article because he thought I may have maligned Islam.  He thought I gave apostasy in Islam a bad name.  The article that I wrote on the recent plight of an Afghan Christian convert was not on apostasy in Islam.  The Sha�ria Court in Afghanistan had already done the deliberation.  Shamim as usual had missed the salient point of my article.  Karzai had buckled under pressure from the West, did you get it right, dummy!  In my article I also discussed the precarious situation that exists in that God-forsaken country.  The ousted Talibans are actively regrouping and many of the war lords are disgruntled souls who would like to create trouble for Hameed Karzai.  What these two sworn enemies of Karzai need is an excuse to destabilize the American-backed regime of Karzai.  That was the main emphasis of my article; however, Shamim, who has an attention span of a teenager, did not quite see the main thesis of my article.  Instead, he jumped on a controversial issue � the fate of an apostate in Islamic country.  I did not add any color to the ground reality of Islamic nation where apostasy is a serious crime.  Have we forgotten what Ayatollah Khomeini did to Salman Rushdie for his supposedly blasphemous writing?  Intolerance is the hallmark of Muslims, lest Shamim had forgotten blithely.  

 

Shamim should visit the likes of Saudi Arabia and tell the Mullah not to follow the dictums of hadiths.  Let me see if he could come back to America unharmed.  The religion of Islam sans hadiths will be similar to a snake without fangs.  Islam as we know of today will fall flat without hadith.  Muslim holy book Quran hardly tells a faithful how many times one needs to pray.  The rituals of Islam that gave the religion its distinctive personality all came from hadiths.  Taking away hadith will take the dictums of Muhammad.  Would Shamim like to see an Islam minus Muhammad�s teachings?  He may have to wait another millennium, at the least for that to happen. These days, he thinks he has the difficult onus on him to defend the �virtues� of Islam.  No wonder he jumps on others unjustifiably if he thinks Islam is maimed by the write-up of any freethinkers.

 

May I suggest Shamim to write something in the way of rebuttal rather than writing a two-liner in his forum?  At least, he will do a service to Islam.  The way he reacts with acerbity, he won�t be able to convince anyone that Islam is a religion of peace.  One needs to pen rebuttals with scholarship, which is truly lacking in his usual rants.     

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A.H. Jaffor Ullah writes from the campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

 

 

In Future of Bangladesh forum Shamimul Huq wrote,

 

Jaffor writes: �In Islam, apostasy is a serious crime for which the punishment is death.  An apostate (in Arabic Murtaad) is a fair game; any Muslim can kill an ex-Muslim.�

 

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Jaffor as usual fails to distinguish between the Koranic version of Islam and the contradictions that appear in Hadith. 

 

Hadith is, we should all know, is not part of the Koran. As Muslims we are required to follow only the Koran and nothing else. Any Hadith that contradicts the teachings of the Koran is typically labeled as false.

 

So always be wary of Jaffor's writings. He thrives on misleading folks, just as badly as the so called clerics and shysters.

 

- Shamim.