The high profile event of the Pope baptising a Muslim convert to Catholicism has drawn some strong reactions.
The local Italian Muslim leadership voiced their protests and asked why not just have a low profile local parish baptism. They feel that such a media saturated event is a deliberate provocation.
The convert himself, an outspoken critic of Islam argues that while one can convert from Christianity to Islam without fear of negative consequences from the Christian community the same does not seem to be true for those who convert from Islam to Christianity. He felt that the Catholic church should be moAll the schools of Islamic law treat apostasy (ie; leaving Islam) as a serious crime which requires the death penalty to be applied.
As an outsider to Islam I find the apostasy law rather extreme. Is there someone out there who can explain to me why this is so important? I am just trying to understand, that's all.
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Life in Kuwait from the perspective of an expat who loves the people of this country and the amazing scrapes we get into.
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- revq8
- I am a minister at St Paul's church in Ahmadi. St Paul's church was built in 1956 by the Kuwait Oil Company in order to meet the spiritual needs of the expatriate oil workers. In grateful response to this generosity we wish to continue the tradition of interfaith harmony and mutual acceptance. As a Christian I cherish our faith and take seriously our Lord's commands to love God and love our neighbours.
1 comment:
Apostates, within the framework of understanding as drawn up by the Quran, are those that have refused the message of God (Allah) as revealed in the Quran, and therefore, by derivation, have refused God outright.
The Quran teaches it's readers that it is the third, final and complete chapter of God's previous revelations, the Torah and the Bible. It is the 'corrected' and 'final draft' of these previous books whose carriers-along the years-have translated them multiple times, (Aramaic->Greek->Latin->English->Arabic, etc) which has obviously-and rightly-changed it's core meanings.
As a cause of this, and to ensure that no further changes occur, it was revealed to an illiterate person (The Prophet Mohammed, PBUH), who regurgitated it phonetically in his own rich and linguistically complex language. This was to ensure that future generations of Arabs-who all speak the classical as well as their own dialects (which are still essentially Arabic)-do not change the phonetic-and therefore-the linguistic and (ultimately) the meaning of the revealed words.
This is to ensure that God's words remain to be true to his meanings.
Now, as you may well know, converting from any other religion to Islam requires the candidate to attest that 'There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His Messenger'. This simple testament,when uttered, affirms that the speaker has accepted the fact the Allah has revealed to Mohammed His true words, and they remain to be the only true words, over and above all others. Furthermore, the candidate also affirms that the prophet Mohammed is the only messenger (Rasool) of Allah, derivatively affirming that all others who came before him are prophets (Anbiya, sing: nabiy). The stark difference here is that Mohammed was a messenger who has relayed a message from the Creator, and the essence of this message is that it has completed and finalized all other versions of the message's orator.
For a muslim/muslim convert to leave this beleif means that he/she has refused this philosophy, and therefore, by definition, refused the message and the messenger, which is tantamount to blasphemy, which is the ONLY thing in Islam that is unforgivable.
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