THE GUARDIAN: I enjoyed a rare privilege last Friday, October 10 (which was world day against the death penalty), attending a gathering of brave and principled people to whom the death penalty might be applied in a number of countries around the world because of their beliefs or lack of them. This was the conference organised the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain to discuss apostasy – the "crime" of which all members of the Council are guilty – and associated questions about the place of religion and free thought in civil society.
The members of the Council of Ex-Muslims are people who, having thought things through for themselves, have put aside the religion they were made to accept as children – a common enough feature of the adult attainment of reason among many – but in this case the religion is Islam, which regards apostasy as punishable by death.
I wonder how many reading these words have sat in a gathering of people not a few of whom have received death threats because they think for themselves, and who have chosen a path not only personally dangerous but full of difficulty in relation to their families and communities – and who have done so because of reflectively chosen principle. It is a striking experience. In our relatively peaceful and tolerant western dispensations, disagreements of principle are rarely matters of murder; which is why some people find themselves incapable of grasping what last Friday's gathering signified.
The symbolic import of the conference was great; the substance of the discussions was absorbing and important. It was about the nature of apostasy, the freedom to choose whether or not to have a religion, and to criticise religion whether or not one subscribes to it; the question whether there should be one and the same law for all or whether Britain's Muslim minority should be allowed to apply sharia law to itself; and the question of faith schools, religious education and creationist doctrine. The themes all related to the place of the individual in civil society, and whether religious doctrine should be allowed to impose itself on those unwilling to be governed by it or – as with children – powerless to resist it.
The conference was opened by the head of the Iranian Secular Society, Fariborz Pooya, and addressed by the extraordinary and courageous Maryam Namazie, spokesperson of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, who subjected Islamism – political Islam – to scrutiny, arguing that it serves as an agency of Islamic states with serious implications for the lives, rights and freedoms of individuals, many of whom have left their countries of origin precisely to escape the repressive political and social climates there – countries with "moral police" and the death penalty for, among others, gay people, lovers who engage in extra-marital sex and people who reject religious orthodoxy.
A source of frustration for many is that they are lumped into "the Muslim community" whose self-elected spokespeople are more representative of the Islamic states that many in their "Muslim community" have fled: which is why the Council of Ex-Muslims makes a point of calling itself this, to reinforce the point that not everyone who was born into a Muslim community has to be permanently forced into homogenised membership of it. Another reason is to encourage the many closet "apostates" in that community that there is life and succour outside it. Free to Think for Themselves >>> AC Grayling | October 16. 2008
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