Spiegel Online, February 2007
An Iranian human rights activist living in Germany has formed a "Central Council of ex-Muslims in Germany" with 40 others and has received anonymous death threats after declaring she wants to help people to leave the religion if they so desire.
Iranian-born Mina Ahadi, 50, said she set up the group to highlight the difficulties of renouncing the Islamic faith which she believes to be misogynist. She wants the group to form a counterweight to Muslim organisations that she says don't adequately represent Germany's secular-minded Muslim immigrants ...
Ahadi: I haven't been a Muslim for 30 years. I'm also critical of Islam in Germany and of the way the German government deals with the issue of Islam. Many Muslim organisations like the Central Council of Muslims in Germany (ZMD) or Milli Görüs engage in politics or interfere in people's everyday lives. They were invited to the conference on Islam (hosted by the government in Berlin last year). But their aims are hostile to women and to people in general."
SPIEGEL: Why?
Ahadi: They want to force women to wear the headscarf. They promote a climate in which girls aren't allowed to have boyfriends or go to discos and in which homosexuality is demonized. I know Islam and for me it means death and pain ...
SPIEGEL: Won't your campaign just harden the battle lines?
Ahadi: I don't think it's possible to modernize Islam. We want to form a counterweight to the Muslim organisations. The fact that we're doing this under police protection shows how necessary our initiative is.
From M & C ...
The ex-Muslims in Berlin contest the right of faith-centred groups to speak on behalf of an estimated 3 million to 3.5 million people of Islamic origin in Germany's 82-million-strong population.
They unveiled a poster with the slogan, 'We've Given It Up,' showing the faces of many former Muslims who no longer believe. The 'coming-out' flies in the face of Islam, which does not make any provision for formally departing from membership in the faith.
... he hoped the Council would set an example worldwide.
Arzu Toker, deputy chairwoman, used a news conference to announce her separation from Islam: 'I herewith resign from Islam. That's it.'
Toker, a journalist who was born in 1952 in Turkey's eastern Anatolia region, is radical in her criticism of Islam. She does not accept its Sharia system of rules at all, saying they contradict both human rights and the values of the German constitution.
She added that Islam was anti-woman.
'It humiliates women and turns them into servants of the men,' she said, adding the Islam was anti-man as well.
'It reduces men to breeding animals controlled by their urges,' said Toker. She quoted the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: 'He said, God is dead. One can live fine by taking one's own responsibility.'
She said she did not distinguish between Islam and fundamentalism.
'Islam is inherently radical,' she said.
Ahadi described her life to reporters and said, 'Political Islam has afflicted my life.' Born in Iran in 1956, her support for human rights had rapidly put her in opposition to the Islamic Revolution. She refused to wear a headscarf and was expelled from university.
Later her husband was executed. She had lived in Germany since 1996.
'I know all about political Islam,' she said. 'It ends up with us being stoned to death, even here in Germany.' ...
More: Spiegel Online, Sugiero, M & C
