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News:
On 19th March 2015, the State Legislative Assembly of the State of Kelantan had unanimously approved the amendments to the Kelantan Sharia Criminal Code (II) (1993). This is the second approval by the government of PAS (Islamic Party of Malaysia) of the ‘Hudud Bill' in Kelantan. The next step in realizing the implementation of the bill in Kelantan is for it to be unanimously agreed upon in the Federal Parliament. The tabling of this Hudud Bill has stirred much response from Malaysians of all walks of life. Recently, a video produced by a local radio station criticising the implementation of the Hudud Bill in a condescending way, which went viral over the social media, has raised anger amongst Muslims in Malaysia. Criticism have also been levelled at PAS's intentions by its Pakatan Rakyat (PR) coalition member, DAP, which has always been critical of PAS's intentions of establishing an ‘Islamic State'. Its advisor, Lim Kit Siang iterated that with the Hudud Bill, PAS has lost support from its non-Muslim voting bloc. The first ruling UMNO member to have publicly declared his position on the Hudud Bill is the former de facto law minister, Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz when he boldly said that hudud is unsuitable for Malaysia and those who discuss it are fools. The Hudud Bill is expected to be tabled at the parliament in May 2015.
Comment:
Hudud constitutes only a part of the Sharia Law under the punishment system of Islam (uqubat) which comprises four categories - hudud, qisas/jinayat, ta'zir and mukhalafat. This system must be implemented in its entirety. Besides uqubat, the Islamic system also encompasses, among others, the ruling, economic, social, educational and political systems; all of which must be implemented concurrently, without exception. Focusing only on the implementation of hudud is clearly misleading. It should be understood by PAS and by Muslims in general that the Sharia Law must be implemented comprehensively (kaffah) by the state. Allah (swt) has placed the takalif (responsibility) and amanah (trust) on the leader of a country to implement His Laws in its entirety. Therefore, in truth, the Malaysian government is obliged to implement the laws of Allah comprehensively in every inch of the land under her authority and not relieving herself from the responsibility.
As an Islamic party that adopts democracy as its methodology, PAS has clearly been misguided when it places the Law of Allah under the scrutiny of man. Approving hudud by way of tabling, debating, discussing and voting, as had been carried out by the State Legislative Assembly of Kelantan (or the Federal Parliament for that matter) signifies placing the laws of Allah under the democratic process and subjecting it to the approval of man. This is categorically haram because the authority to make laws is vested only upon Allah (swt) and man is ordered to implement them, not vote to decide on their implementation. Furthermore, by attempting to implement hudud under the democratic system opens up a wide opportunity for non-Muslims, liberalists and secularists to oppose and degrade the law of Allah to the point of ridiculing and insulting the divine instruction.
As Muslims it should be clear to us that the implementation of Sharia Law in its entirety is obligatory and it must be carried out by mechanisms that are in line with the Sharia - not via the deceptive democratic instruments. Its implementation is not open to choice. And its implementation, in line with the spirit of taqwa, will, by Allah's promise, bring about justice and prosperity. It has now been more than 50 years that Malaysia have gained her independence but the government keeps on furnishing countless reasons for not implementing the laws of Allah despite the realization that the desire of Muslims to be re-governed by Sharia is getting stronger and stronger. It should also be clear to Muslims that the only guarantee that Islam will be implemented in its entirety is when it is under the political dominion of the Khilafah "Caliphate", hence, it is about time that Muslims in Malaysia and in all parts of the world to unite and intensify our efforts to re-establish the Khilafah "Caliphate" upon the way of the Prophethood which shall implement not only hudud, but the Sharia in its entirety and bring about justice, peace and prosperity to this temporary abode of man.
Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Dr. Muhammad - Malaysia
The comment of the present Pope Francis in the aftermath of the attacks on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo is a reminder of the deep contradiction between religion and freedom of speech. Pope Francis remarked, in simple layman terms, that if someone were to say something offensive about the Pope's mother then he could expect to receive a punch in the face. Speech, in other words, has serious consequences and cannot be conducted irresponsibly.
Simply avoiding recklessness in the use of free speech is insufficient; the principle itself is fundamentally flawed. Freedom of speech is an irreligious ideal originating from a materialist worldview that has become a key intellectual weapon in the secular West's ideological war on religion. It is necessary for sincere people of religion to abandon secularist intellectual constructs and return to conceptual frameworks that are consistent with true religious belief.
Freedom of speech is presented as if it were a neutral principle, allowing all sides to express their points of view openly, in order that all may judge which is best. But no such principle can ever be truly neutral. In fact, freedom serves the secularist agenda only. People of religion are at a serious disadvantage within a society built on such principles, as is evidenced by the weakening of religion in the West during three centuries of secular rule. Freedom of speech assumes sovereignty for man, not for man's Creator. By accepting freedom of speech, this secular worldview is already locked in before discussion can even begin. If the man of religion engages in discussion on the basis of free speech, then he will be forced to reformulate the rest of his thinking on this secular basis also. If, for example, a Jew, Christian or Muslim attempted to say that their scripture is explicit in forbidding adultery in society, then he will be told that it is not valid for him to call for this as it contradicts the very freedom that he is himself enjoying in stating his case.
Secularists say that freedom of speech is necessary psychologically as suppression of feelings and desires can be harmful for the individual. But preventing harm to the individual cannot justify crassly hurting the feelings of others in some misleading expectation of catharsis. Negative feelings and harmful desires require deep introspection and treatment and not instant expression or gratification. The ideal of free speech fails to evoke the necessary intelligence and wisdom in discourse that is essential to harmonious, civilised society. Tolerance in society is achieved through inculcating respect for each other, and not by insisting on the freedom to voice whatever comes into one's head. In other contexts, secularists will say that one is free only to the extent that one does not impair the freedom of others or bring harm to them. Is hateful speech not harmful? Does ridicule not impair one's freedom? Secularists gleefully caricature what religion holds to be sacred. The true secularist agenda, blatant in their satire, is to undermine religion and not to tolerate it. People of religion, even when they disagree, do not stoop to ridicule the beliefs of others. Islam, for example, clearly warns against slandering others' gods, even if these be pagan idols, and the Islamic world was championed for its legacy of religious tolerance, from Andalusia to India.
Secularists argue that free speech is necessary to protect against oppression. This argument is false. Oppression is possible whenever man is given authority over his fellow man. While freedom, and the egocentric individualism it instils, only reduces empathy for others, the religious disposition softens the hearts of those in authority while inspiring those under them to stand firmly against any form of tyrannical behaviour. There is a long history, in Christianity as well as Islam, of pious believers challenging tyranny. Western secular liberal democracies have proved far more oppressive than the religious states that preceded them. There are more people of African descent in what is becoming known in the United States as its "prison-industrial complex" than there were slaves at the time of America's civil war. Indeed the United States has the highest proportion of prisoners in the world today. The West portrays itself as the land of the free; but it is freedom with a great number of seemingly necessary limitations and exceptions.
The secularists argue that religion leads to militant conflict, and that freedom of speech inculcates an attitude of toleration in all. Military conflict occurs wherever political and institutional processes break down. Western secular liberal democracies, with their capitalist imperial ambitions and their rapacious military-industrial complexes, have inflicted unimaginably higher levels of military terror across the world than all the religious states that preceded them. Islam had never engaged in exploitative colonial behaviour despite ruling from Spain to Indonesia, and although Christians had done so, the real explosion in empire-building occurred after Europe's revolutions not before. It is materialist dogma that fires the passion for maximising worldly material benefit. Religion has always worked to turn man towards loftier aims.
Secularists will say that freedom of speech is of value to the religious also, because it guarantees their right to express their religious views. We don't need the secularists' idea of freedom to guarantee such rights. These rights were expressed perfectly well before the idea of freedom was developed. The existence of multiple schools of thought in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths is evidence of a long history of toleration for dissenting views. In fact, the secularists advocate religious freedom not to promote genuine religious interpretation but to strengthen so-called ‘modernists' in their manipulation of religious truth in order to covertly incorporate the secularist agenda and wage war on religion from within.
Freedom of speech first emerged in European political discourse in the 17th Century CE when atheistic thinkers exploited the wars within Christianity to advance their materialistic agenda. The key breakthrough of these atheists was to furnish their ancient materialist creed with the political doctrine of freedom and democracy. According to these atheists, freedom and democracy follows naturally from materialism: if there is no Creator then man is master of his own destiny and sovereignty resides in him; therefore, man should be given freedom to live his life as he pleases and nations should embrace democracy so that they can devise laws in accordance with their collective will. Furthermore, if the hereafter does not exist, man can abandon self-denying altruism and throw himself into whole-bodied pursuit of worldly pleasure and gain.
This materialist political doctrine presented an apparently insurmountable challenge to Europe's Christian rulers. Their solution was to adopt a compromise between materialism and religion in the name of objective empiricism, under which materialist political doctrine would be accepted but ‘metaphysical' debate about religious beliefs would be sidestepped. They viewed this compromise as necessary in order to protect Christian creed without realising that they were destroying the Christian civilisation built upon this creed. The ideas of freedom and democracy were effectively grafted onto a new secular creed that, while retaining religion, separated it from life. The Christian holds his creed as private, personal belief only while the public domain is swamped by the secular creed and its materialistic political culture. Man is a social being; constant public bombardment by materialist values will relentlessly dominate all else. Genuine ethics, humanity and spirituality become suppressed as man rushes to gorge himself on material worldly benefit alone.
Freedom of speech sets the terms for intellectual discourse within secular society. By adopting the principle of free speech, the West opened the door for the extensive propagation of materialist values within what was previously religious Christian society. Materialist ideologues strongly campaigned for freedom of speech from the outset and used this principle to justify vehement attacks on Christianity as well as other religions. Even today, secularists rejoice in viciously savaging religious values in the name of satire or art. The appallingly disgraceful Charlie Hebdo caricatures are just the latest example of this.
Each society is shaped by a particular set of principles and values that sets the collective terms for the behaviour of its citizens and societal interaction between them. It is not possible for a single society to adopt multiple conflicting value sets, just as it is not possible for a single society to adopt multiple alternate legal constitutions. Freedom of speech provides only a faulty and biased platform for the conduct of discourse within society, and people of religion must move beyond this. Christian thinkers had long championed ‘natural rights' within society since their medieval age, rights presumably adopted from Islam which at that time was the dominant world civilisation, and which had successfully implemented Islam's lofty concepts of ‘huqooq Allah' and ‘huqooq al-ibad'. The concept of well-defined divinely-ordained immutable rights forms a much sounder foundation for intellectual discourse and, indeed, for all other forms of human behaviour and interaction, than the abstract concept of freedom which secularists champion when beneficial but readily furnish with rationally-conceived limitations and exceptions when not.
Only three centuries ago, the entire world was dominated by religion. Religion is on the rise again. The intensified secular propaganda against religion, in the name of free speech, is just one further indication of how keenly the Western secular powers sense the religious resurgence, particularly amongst Muslims, whom they have targeted in a renewed war on Islam. Sincere Muslims are working hard to educate their societies about the evils of secularism and to re-establish the righteous Islamic Khilafah "Caliphate", which will structure society on the basis of immutable divinely-ordained rights, restoring man's dignity and returning society to the harmony and tranquillity that existed before the usurpation of the world by disbelieving Western secularist imperialists. The true Islamic State will re-inherit its position as the leading state in the world and once again manifest the highest model of civilisation for all the peoples of the world to emulate, thus bringing to an end the rule of secularism and the atheistic materialism at its heart.
Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Ibn Nussrah, Pakistan
News:
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - On 22nd March 2015, an Afghan woman who was beaten to death by a mob was buried in Kabul on Sunday, her coffin carried aloft by women's rights activists. Hundreds of people gathered in northern Kabul for the funeral of 27-year-old Farkhunda, who like many Afghans is known by only one name. She was killed late Thursday by a mob of mostly men who beat her, set her body on fire and then threw it into the Kabul River, according to police accounts. Police are still investigating what prompted the mob assault. The head of the Interior Ministry's criminal investigation directorate, Gen. Mohammad Zahir, said no evidence had been found to support those allegations."We have reviewed all the evidence and have been unable to find any single iota of evidence to support claims that she had burned a Quran," Zahir said. "She is completely innocent." He said that 13 people had been arrested in connection with her killing.
Comment:
This incident has sparked worldwide anger against the lynch mob actions of the crowd that burnt this school teacher, who was just about to finish her graduation of Islamic studies, on mere suspicion. This condemnable act happened just few days after two men were set ablaze by an angry mob of Christian protesters in neighboring Pakistan, who were protesting violently against the twin blasts that targeted the Roman Catholic Church and Christ Church during Sunday mass on 15 March 2015. Both acts of violence happened under the rule of secular and liberal Capitalist system, which has professed to protect women rights and human rights by its implementation of the concepts of freedoms, equalities and social justice. However the reality is that this rotten system has not only failed to protect the dignity, honor and life of women but also put her at the disposal of mob justice without any retribution for the crimes of the criminals. Under the judicial systems of both the countries Pakistan and Afghanistan, the criminals are freed if they belong to the elite class and are able to buy their way out of the jail, while the weak and often innocent are punished. The legal system is based on British man-made laws, with procedural complications that delay the court cases to decades. The justice is not only denied but it is costly and mostly results in oppression of the innocent.
The mob culture is replacing the judicial and legal recourse to justice at a fast pace, which is an alarming situation. It usually happens when people have no trust at the judicial system and police and they strongly believe that the criminal will be eventually freed by the police. However this would not have happened if the Islamic judicial system was implemented under the Khilafah "Caliphate", along with all the systems of Islam. We have never heard about a mob inflicting harm to either men or women accused of a crime on the streets of Khilafah "Caliphate" state, under the 1300 years of rule on a wide area of the world. Even in Afghanistan, the rights of women were well guarded until the beginning of 20th century under the Islamic judicial system. On the contrary, now after the US led invasion of Afghanistan the acts of violence against the women have increased many folds. According to a member of Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan," Now the case of violence against women is more than in the time of the Taliban." And Sonali Kolhatka, Co-director of Afghans women's charity, says, "There were 23 rape cases in just 2 months, in north Afghanistan. The attacks of violence against women, both external and within the family, have gone up. Domestic violence has increased."
Under the Islamic system of Khilafah "Caliphate", women were provided all the facilities of free and speedy justice at her doorstep. She was never afraid to complain in the court of Qadhi, as she was always dealt with fairly and justly. Men were afraid to even raise their fingers towards her in a wrongful way, for fear of being punished by the law of Allah (swt). This system was not based on the whims and desires of man-made laws but upon the laws given by Almighty Allah. The Women Rights organizations, who carried the coffin of Afghan woman upon their shoulders, should rather carry the coffin of the rotten Capitalist system and bury it deep underground so that it never comes out again to haunt the women of Afghanistan and the world again; as it is under this current system, the innocent Farkhandah faced this fate.
Allah (swt) says,
((وَمَن لَّمْ يَحْكُم بِمَا أنزَلَ اللّهُ فَأُوْلَئِكَ هُمُ الظَّالِمُونَ))
"And whoever does not rule by that which Allah has revealed, they are the oppressors (Dhaalimun)." [TMQ Al-Ma'ida: 45]
Written for Central Media Office Hizb ut Tahrir by
Ammara Tahir
Member of Central Media Office Hizb ut Tahrir
Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir / Tunisia organized a seminar entitled "What is terrorism? ... Why?" at the Africa Inn Tunis, by Brother Redha bel-Hajj, Head of the Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir / Tunisia.
5 Jumada II 1436 AH corresponding to 25 March 2015
The State of Kelantan, led by Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS) has approved the amendments to the Kelantan Sharia Criminal Code (II) (1993) unanimously at its State Legislative Assembly on 19 March 2015. This is the second time the law known as "Hudud" was approved by the Assembly after it was first tabled in 1993.
On March 6, Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia agreed on the basic principles governing water cooperation, in the wake of the decision taken by Cairo, on 21st February, to return to the Nile Basin Initiative, which Egypt boycotted for over five years.
