Apostasy : An Overview - The Maranatha Community

IRAN
who include the Islam Defenders Front (FPI), which claimed responsibility for the closures. FPI is better known for smashing
nightclubs and discotheques and any other places it judges to be dens of iniquity. 48
• There remain serious concerns about human rights in Iran. One particular and growing concern is the punishment of children,
including juvenile offenders being sentenced to death or lashing, and of sentences, including hanging of children, being carried
out in public. Restrictions on freedom of expression appear to have tightened. While three religious minorities are recognised
by the constitution – Christians, Jewish and Zoroastrians – they remain vulnerable in a society governed by the laws and values
of Islam. The Baha’í religion is not officially recognised, so members of the Baha’í community enjoy no constitutional freedoms.
They face frequent persecution; two of their sacred sites were demolished in 2004 and they still face considerable problems
gaining access to education. Under Iranian law, conversion from Islam to any other religion is a crime and may in theory be
punished by death. 49
• Members of religious minorities – including Sunni Muslims, Baha’ís, Jews, and Christians – reported imprisonment, harassment,
intimidation, and discrimination based on their religious beliefs. All religious minorities continued to suffer varying degrees of
officially sanctioned discrimination, particularly in the areas of employment, education, and housing. The Government vigilantly
enforces its prohibition on proselytizing activities by evangelical Christians by closing evangelical churches and arresting
converts. In September 2004, security officials arrested 85 leaders of the Assemblies of God Church. 50
• Azam Kamguian, an atheist human rights activist from Iran, gave the following presentation at the UN Commission on Human
Rights: “I talk as an apostate, an atheist who left Islam and religion altogether at the age of 15. Though I left Islam, I had to live
Islam. In my youth and young adulthood in Iran, I lived through thousands of days when political Islam shed blood. Since 1979,
a hundred thousand men, women and children have been executed in the name of Allah. I have lived through years of
assassination of infidels, apostates and opponents of the Islamic republic inside and outside Iran. Years of suppression of
women and brutal treatment of those women who resisted the misery of mandatory Hijab and the rule of sexual apartheid. I,
along with thousands of non-believers and political prisoners, was tortured by order of the representative of Allah and Sharia;
tortured, while the verses of the Koran about non-believers were played in the torture chambers. Non-believers – atheists
under Islam – do not have “the right to life”. They are to be killed. According to Islamic culture, sins are divided into great sins
and little sins. Among the seventeen great sins, unbelief is the greatest, more heinous than murder, theft, adultery and so on. A
free discussion of Islam is extremely dangerous not only in countries under Islamic rule but also in the west. Most keep their
feelings to themselves. Those Muslims who disown or even criticize their faith publicly are likely to be accused of apostasy, a
crime punishable by death under Islamic law – a penalty enforced by a number of Islamic states, including Iran, Saudi Arabia,
and Sudan.
In a feeble attempt to disguise the Islamic attitude to apostasy, apologists often quote the Koranic verse: “There shall be no
compulsion in religion”. For a Muslim wishing to leave Islam this is simply not true. In Yemen it’s punishable by death as it is in
Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan under the Taliban, and other Islamic states.
In countries ruled by Islamic law and where political Islam holds sway, writers, thinkers, philosophers, activists, and artists are
frequently denied freedom of expression. Islamic regimes are notorious for the violent suppression of free thought. Often, as a
government allies itself closely with Islam, any critics of the government will be accused of blasphemy or apostasy. In Islam,
there exists a horror of putting the Koran to critical scrutiny. Ordinary people do not dare to question the Koran. The result is
tyranny, thought police, and stagnation, no intellectual and moral progress. In Iran the price for criticising Islam is death in its
most horrendous way.” 51
• In the last 16 years, three Iranian church leaders have been charged with apostasy. All were convicted and sentenced to death.
Pastor Hussein Soodman was hanged in 1989. Deacon Maher had a noose round his neck when he signalled his willingness to
recant and was released after signing a paper to that effect in 1992. Pastor Mehdi Dibaj was condemned to death in December
1993. He was released three weeks later after a strong international outcry, only to be found murdered six months later. 52
• Hamid Pourmand, a lay leader in an Iranian church and former army colonel, has been cleared of charges of apostasy and
proselytising in May 2005. Had he been found guilty, Pourmand would have faced the death penalty. He became a Christian
prior to the 1979 Iranian revolution, after which time conversion became illegal. He was arrested along with 85 other church
leaders at the annual meeting of the Assemblies of God (AOG) Church in Iran in September 2004. He was the only person not
to be released shortly after being detained. He was formally charged with apostasy and proselytising Muslims in early April
2005. He was brought before a Sharia court in Teheran on several occasions but was eventually acquitted. 53
• Dhabihullah Mahrami, a Baha’i aged about 50, was detained in Yazd, central Iran, facing charges of apostasy, which can carry
the death penalty. Amnesty International considers him to be a prisoner of conscience, ie, one held solely on account of his
religious beliefs. In early 1996 he was convicted of apostasy by a Revolutionary Court, the state confiscated all of Mr.
Mahrami’s property, and he was sentenced to death. Following an appeal to the Supreme Court the death sentence was
overturned. After an appeal was filed by his attorney, Mahrami was granted a temporary stay of execution, but his death
sentence was reaffirmed a year later. In December 1999, his sentence was commuted to life in prison. 54
• In 1998, Ruhollah Rowhani, a 52-year-old medical supply salesman and father of four, was executed for converting a woman to
the Baha’i religion, even though the woman insisted she had always been a Baha’i. Muslims who convert to this faith are
singled out for especially severe punishment as “apostates,” a capital offence. Many have been imprisoned for long periods,
and Amnesty International reports that more than 200 Iranian Baha’is have been executed since the 1979 Iranian revolution. 55
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