Now, he is being branded as “Somalia’s Salman Rushdie” a reference to the British–Indian novelist whose book, “The Satanic Verses,” provoked worldwide Muslims protests and a fatwa from Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989.
Abdisaid Abdi Ismail’s book, “The Rule of Apostasy In Islam: Is it True?” was published in Kenya in September.
Ismail was following the Meriam Yahya Ibrahim case before starting work on the book. She is the Sudanese woman sentenced to death for converting to Christianity, but later freed. Her case outraged the world and drew attention to the growing abuse of apostasy in Islam. (Ibrahim said she has always been a Christian.)
The book, written in the Somali language, is being read in Western cities such as London, Toronto and Minneapolis, where there are large populations of ethnic Somalis.
Ismail said the book furthers the growing voice of Muslim scholars, intellectuals and prominent clerics worldwide who are increasingly rejecting the abuse of Islam by extremist groups such as the Islamic State, Nigeria’s Boko Haram and Somalia’s Al-Shabab.
“What we need are secular states where there is democracy, justice and equality for all,” he said. “Not theocratic ones where leaders rule by the name of God.”
Ismail’s concern is that Somali Islamic militants, clerics and other extremist groups in Muslim-majority countries are applying apostasy as a political tool, branding those with contrary opinions as apostates who need to be killed. He has watched Al-Shabab justify the deaths of those who oppose their hard-line interpretation of the Quran by branding them apostates. Somali civil servants, national army officers, local or international nongovernmental organization officials, are considered devil’s spies who deserve death, he added.
“I wanted to explain to my people the true meaning of apostasy in Islam,” he said. » | Frederick Nzwili | Friday, November 07, 2014
SOMALIA ONLINE: Abdisaid Abdi Ismail, a professor at East Africa University in Bosaso, recieves death threats after writing a controversial book on Islam »
