Islam and blasphemy
[3] Examples include denying that the Quran was divinely revealed,[3] the Prophethood of one of the Islamic prophets,[4] insulting an angel, or maintaining God had a son.
In Islamic literature, blasphemy is of many types, and there are many different words for it: sabb (insult) and shatm (abuse, vilification), takdhib or tajdif (denial), iftira (concoction), la`n or la'ana (curse) and ta`n (accuse, defame).
[18] The only punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is that they should be murdered, or crucified, or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides, or they should be imprisoned.
Based on this early jurists postulated that sabb al-Nabi (abuse of the Prophet) was a crime "so heinous that repentance was disallowed and summary execution was required".
[54] In one country where strict laws on blaspheme were introduced in the 1980s, Pakistan, over 1300 people have been accused of blasphemy from 1987 to 2014, (mostly non-Muslim religious minorities), mostly for allegedly desecrating the Quran.
[63][64][65] Notwithstanding, controversies raised in the non-Muslim world, especially over depictions of Muhammad, questioning issues relating to the religious offense to minorities in secular countries.
[69] He was assassinated on 9 June 1992 by members of Islamist group al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya after being accused of blasphemy by a committee of clerics (ulama) at Al-Azhar University.
[71] In September 2007, Bangladeshi cartoonist Arifur Rahman depicted in the daily Prothom Alo a boy holding a cat conversing with an elderly man.
In November 2007, British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, who taught middle-class Muslim and Christian children in Sudan,[72] was convicted of insulting Islam by allowing her class of six-year-olds to name a teddy bear "Muhammad".
Various petitions, including one that received 400,000 signatures, were organized to protest Noreen's imprisonment, and Pope Benedict XVI publicly called for the charges against her to be dismissed.
Christian minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti and Muslim politician Salmaan Taseer were both assassinated for advocating on her behalf and opposing the blasphemy laws.
[83] Governor Salmaan Taseer and Pakistan's Minority Affairs Minister Shahbaz Bhatti both publicly supported Noreen, with the latter saying, "I will go to every knock for justice on her behalf and I will take all steps for her protection.
[85] Minority Affairs Minister Shahbaz Bhatti said that he was first threatened with death in June 2010 when he was told that he would be beheaded if he attempted to change the blasphemy laws.
[103] Ahmad Al Shamri from the town of Hafar al-Batin, Saudi Arabia, was arrested on charges of atheism and blasphemy after allegedly use social media to state that he renounced Islam and the Prophet Mohammed, he was sentenced to death in February 2015.
[105][106] In 2017 in Indonesia, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama during his tenure as the governor of Jakarta, made a controversial speech while introducing a government project at Thousand Islands in which he referenced a verse from the Quran.
In December 1999, the German news magazine Der Spiegel printed on the same page pictures of "moral apostles" Muhammad, Jesus, Confucius, and Immanuel Kant.
"[116] In September 2005, in the tense aftermath of the assassination of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh, killed for his views on Islam, Danish news service Ritzau published an article discussing the difficulty encountered by the writer Kåre Bluitgen to find an illustrator to work on his children's book The Qur'an and the life of the Prophet Muhammad (Danish:Koranen og profeten Muhammeds liv).
[119][120] Reviewing the experiment, Danish scholar Peter Hervik wrote that it disproved the idea that self-censorship was a serious problem in Denmark, because the overwhelming majority of cartoonists had either responded positively or refused for contractual or philosophical reasons.
"Those who have won are dictatorships in the Middle East, in Saudi Arabia, where they cut criminals' hands and give women no rights," Juste told The Associated Press.
"[125] Commenting the cartoon that initiated the diplomatic crisis, American scholar John Woods expressed worries about Westergaard-like association of the Prophet with terrorism, that was beyond satire and offensive to a vast majority of Muslims.
"[121] In Sweden, an online caricature competition was announced in support of Jyllands-Posten, but foreign minister Laila Freivalds pressured the provider to shut the page down (in 2006, her involvement was revealed to the public and she had to resign).
They intended to show Muhammad handing a salmon helmet to Family Guy character Peter Griffin ("Cartoon Wars Part II").
After they faced Internet death threats, Comedy Central modified their version of the episode, obscuring all images and bleeping all references to Muhammad.
The list included Kurt Westergaard, Lars Vilks, Carsten Juste, Flemming Rose, Charb and Molly Norris, and others whom AQAP accused of insulting Islam.
[144][145][146][147][148][149] On 7 January 2015, two masked gunmen opened fire on Charlie Hebdo's staff and police officers as vengeance for its continued caricatures of Muhammad,[150] killing 12 people, including Charb, and wounding 11 others.
[171] The post-mortem report revealed that he was stabbed 15 times on the upper part of body from jaws to chest, two deep cut marks on the neck points to attempt to slit his throat and shot once.
[179] What was perceived as denigrating of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad resulted in demonstrations and violent protests against the video to break out on 11 September in Egypt and spread to other Arab and Muslim nations and to some western countries.
[180][181][182] Fatwas calling for the harm of the video's participants have been issued and Pakistani government minister Bashir Ahmad Bilour offered a bounty for the killing of Nakoula, the producer.
Apostasy, that is, the act of abandoning Islam, or finding faults or expressing doubts about Allah (ta'til) and Qur'an, rejection of Muhammed or any of his teachings, or leaving the Muslim community to become an atheist is a form of blasphemy.
Improper dress, drawing offensive cartoons, tearing or burning holy literature of Islam, creating or using music or painting or video or novels to mock or criticize Muhammad are some examples of blasphemous acts.
