The man whose less than wholly respectful tweets about Mohammad made King Abdullah cry fled to Malaysia. This baffled me, and with good reason, as they’ve shipped him back to Saudi Arabia…
The two countries do not have a formal extradition treaty but Malaysia has good relations with Saudi Arabia as a fellow Muslim country, says the BBC’s Jennifer Pak, in Kuala Lumpur.
Okay, a nation’s borders are its business but refusing sanctuary to a man who – in lieu of a stink that would make the outcry that followed Yousef Nadarkhani’s prosecution look like a polite cough – is destined to be killed is nauseating.
Then again, it doesn’t come as a surprise. The Malaysian government is proud to declare that it’s “moderate”, not “extremist”, but as noted in Back Towards the… passim its state and civil society are marked by communitarian rhetoric; hostile exclusivism and absurd paranoia. Deviations from the lifestyles and beliefs of the religious majority – effeminacy, say, or apparent sympathy with minority religions – are liable to get you packed off for “re-education”. Elsewhere, more traditional and straightforwardly punitive sentences like caning are enthusiastically upheld.
There are major difference between Malaysia and Saudi Arabia – and they’d seem really big if you lived in either – but the cruel absurdity of Islamic law unites them nonetheless; they’re kindred, at least, in spirit. And, thus, “moderation” remains barely meaningful.
[H/t.]
February 12, 2012 at 10:44 pm
I was just reading this which would seem relevant to your general theme.
February 13, 2012 at 12:12 am
Hirsi Ali’s piece was needlessly crude. (For one thing, the persecution in the countries she writes about has more to do with anyonewho’snotofourfaithophobia than Christianophobia.) But I will say this. The hostility religious minorities face in, say, Indonesia is not comparable in terms of scale to that in, say, Iraq or Egypt. But the nature of those acts of hostility are. And, while the level of tyranny in Saudi Arabia and Malaysia aren’t really comparable in terms of the scale, the nature of that tyranny is.
February 13, 2012 at 12:14 am
It’s a fair point about the violence in Iraq, though. I wonder if any of the Bushies have grasped that their actions helped to incite perhaps the biggest campaign of persecution against members of their faith in ages. I bloody hope so.
March 7, 2012 at 3:51 pm
[...] tried to critique it; to explore it; to make affectionate jokes about it or to just say, well, they don’t accept it. If someone has such a ludicrous conception of harm the idea that they’ll have a [...]