Yusuf Al-Qaradawi Quotes
The punishment for new thought or expressing a different opinion is death
Islam had been the center of intellectual thought in the world, until the clerics had decided that innovation itself was a sin and one that called for the death penalty. Although most non-Muslim religions went through stages of death for religious dissent. However, the Koran deals with every part of society. There is no separation of church and state. All knowledge is in the Koran the fundamentalist believes and anyone who expresses a new idea is not only wrong and a heretic, but is dangerous and must be executed. It is therefore not very surprising that the Islamic contributions to science, medicine, and the arts has been so small. The Islamic fundamentalists are opposed by Muslim modernists who try to change the Islamic culture but they are on the minority. Most religions have gone through bad earlier periods where dissent was heresy and warranted death. Fundamentalist Islam is the only one which bans original thought of any kinds even it does not contradict established doctrine.
Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, Qatar Moslem Cleric & Scholar, Spiritual Advisor to the Muslim Brotherhood, Roz Al-Yusouf (Egypt), September 17, 2004
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Islamic modernists like Serageldin are many among the educated Muslims but their views are often drowned out by the violence and extremist statements of the fundamentalists.
In 2005 an Egyptian writer, Usama Anwar Ukasha, criticized one of the Prophet’s companion’s role for causing dissention and divisiveness in Islamic history. Some called for his legal punishment for slandering a holy figure (see {588714}) and a law case was brought to force him to divorce his wife—so that she would not be “contaminated by his heretical thoughts. Al-Bana argued for freedom of thought and speech on such subjects. His view was particularly important since he was the brother of Hassan Al-Bana, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, a powerful fundamentalist organization. Note that Al-Bana’s call for intellectual freedom does not go so far as to say that it should be legal to criticize The Prophet Muhammad and it illustrates how far even modern Islam has to go to meet reasonable standards of freedom of thought and speech.
This became a critically important quotation a half century after it was made. Judge Hand articulated the majority Western and Judeo-Christian value proposition between dissent and heresy. However, for the majority of the Islamic world, the reverse represents the majority value that is held. There is a minority in the West that agrees that avoidance of heresy is paramount and a minority of the Muslim world that agrees that the protection of dissent is the more important value, but the two civilizations were at odds in the 20th and 21st centuries. However, Islam is about 600 years younger than Christianity. 600 years ago, the Christian world agreed with the Muslim society and prevention of heresy was the more important value. The Reformation and the enlightenment followed by the world example of America produced a transformation and this may occur in the majority of the Islamic world in time.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi is an Egyptian Islamic scholar based in Doha, Qatar, and chairman of the International Union of Muslim Scholars. His influences include Hassan al-Banna, Abul A'la Maududi and Naeem Siddiqui. He is best known for his programme al-Sharīʿa wa al-Ḥayāh ("Sharia and Life"), broadcast on Al Jazeera, which has an estimated audience of 40–60 million worldwide. He is also known for IslamOnline, a website he helped to found in 1997 and for which he serves as chief religious scholar.
