Human rights abuses happen in many countries, but never to the proportion and the magnitude of what is happening in Iran and other Islamic countries. In the last few years, and with no little thanks to the Islamic Revolution of Iran, I noticed that the major human right abuses are perpetrated in the name of religion. I became concerned for the plight of my people in Iran and her neighboring countries and decided to investigate the cause. I asked myself whether all this is because the gentle and peaceful message of Islam is misunderstood and whether there is a way to revive the pure Islam and save my country. It was in this quest that I realized, to my chagrin, that the human right abuses are not deviations from the true Islam but they ARE teachings of Islam. 

I realized that in Islam, Man has no rights! All the rights are reserved for Allah. Man has only duties. Among his duties, he has to pray five times a day, believe in the religion of Allah and submit his will, thoughts and intelligence to him. Any independence from Allah, even at the level of thought is punishable by beating, imprisonment and death. 

All the Islamic countries have signed the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; despite that gross violations of human rights happen in almost all of them. The reason is – the laws of Quran and Sharia take precedence over the human rights whenever they are in conflict. 

You are in violation of the laws of Quran and Sharia if you apostatize. Apostasy is the biggest sin that Allah cannot forgive. If you decide to turn your back to Islam, you must be killed. The prophet himself killed those who rejected him after they had accepted him and there are many verses in Quran from which the Islamic governments can get their guidelines in killing the apostates. (Q.  2:39,,  3:90-91, 4:89 , 9:66)  

If you apostatize your marriage with your wife is annulled and your relationship with her is adulterous, which means not only you should be killed for heresy, your wife also should be stoned to death for adultery.  

If you are a woman you cannot marry a non-Muslim, or both of you could face death.  

If you belong to a religious minority; a Christian or a Jew, you may live but not before paying a penalty tax. This tax that is called Jizyah could be as high as half of your income. This was the amount that the Prophet exacted from the Jews of the Kheibar after he raided that town and killed many of their able men, taking as sex-slaves and maids their young and pretty women.  

Torture in Islamic countries is common but it is also inspired by what the Prophet did. Muhammad is reported to have employed torture to force his victims reveal the information that he needed.  

The oldest biography of Muhammad called the “Sirat Rasulallah On page 515,  tells of  Muhammad’s conquest of Kheibar. He ambushed this city without any provocation, and. “Kinana al-Rabi, who had the custody of the treasure of Banu Nadir, was brought to the apostle who asked him about it. He denied that he knew where it was. A Jew came (Tabari says “was brought”), to the apostle and said that he had seen Kinana going round a certain ruin every morning early. When the apostle said to Kinana, “Do you know that if we find you have it I shall kill you?” He said, “Yes”. The apostle gave orders that the ruin was to be excavated and some of the treasure was found. When he asked him about the rest he refused to produce it, so the apostle gave orders to al-Zubayr Al-Awwam, “Torture him until you extract what he has.” So he kindled a fire with flint and steel on his chest until he was nearly dead. Then the apostle delivered him to Muhammad b. Maslama and he struck off his head, in revenge for his brother Mahmud.” 

One wonders why the same angle Gabriel who told the Prophet about the plot of the Banu Nadir against his life, a plot that no one heard of except the Prophet, thus giving him the excuse to exterminate that tribe and confiscate all their property, did not come to tell him where the treasure was hidden, forcing the impeccable and compassionate  mercy of God amongst men to commit such horrendous act with another human being? 

Muhammad himself raped the captured women in his raids. Rayhana and Safiya from the Jewish tribes of Banu Quraiza and Banu Nadir were the shares of the Prophet and were allotted to him before other Muslim warriors could get their share of their sex slaves.

Assassinations is the preferred Method of the Islamic regime of Iran. Hundreds of dissidents, whether inside of Iran or outside, have been eliminated in this way. Not surprisingly it was Muhammad who set the example. More than a dozen of people were assassinated by the followers of Muhammad and at his behest. One of them was a centenarian man called Abu Afak whose crime was to mock the Prophet in a poem. Another one was Asma Bint Marwan who composed a lyric cursing the Arabs for letting Muhammad get away with his crimes. The Prophet asked: “Who will get me rid of her”?. “Umayr b. Adiy al-Khatmi who was with him heard him, and that very night he went to her house and killed her. In the morning he came to the apostle and told him what he had done and he [Muhammad] said, “You have helped God and His apostle, O Umayr!” When he asked if he would have to bear any evil consequences the apostle said, “Two goats won’t butt their heads about her”.

Asma was the mother of 5 small children. When her assassin came to take her life, she was asleep and her suckling baby next to her.  

Every torture, every cruelty, every inhumanity perpetrated by Muslims in authority is inspired by the words and the deeds of the Prophet and can be found in Quran and hadith, the two sources of guidance for over a billion Muslims worldwide. 

This is a long subject and one could write a book about it. Human rights violations cannot stop while Islam dominates the minds and the hearts of these people. The violence perpetrated by the Muslims is not limited to the Islamic countries. Although the Muslims are the primary victims of this cult, the West is not immune to Islamic terrorism. With the growth of the Muslim population in European and American countries, the inhabitants of these two continents could expect to see more terrorisms, World Trade Center style, and more loss of innocent lives. 

The United States, Canada and all the European countries expend millions and millions of dollars to counter terrorism. But the sad reality is that Islamic terrorism is not the problem but the symptom of the problem. It is Islam that rears terrorists. You fight one terrorist group, ten more emerge from beneath the rock. “Fundamentalism is the poisonous branch of the poisonous tree of Islam” says Taslima Nasrin, the Bangali doctor who’s death is now decreed by the Muslim Ulama, “as long as the tree is standing these poisonous branches will keep shooting out”.  To eliminate Islamic terrorism we have no option but to eliminate Islam. 

Despite the anger and the threats of violence by the Muslim fundamentalists, Islam is a very vulnerable religion. The majority of Muslims are not aware of the inhumane teachings of Islam. The best part of them will leave Islam once they learn the bitter truth about it. 

This is why I have dedicated my energy and life and have embarked on the self imposed mission to introduce the real Islam to the world, stop this insanity, bring common sense, call for unity of human kind, promote equality of the genders and advance reason and commonsense. 

I have created the Rational Thinking site that is taking many hours of my life every day. I feel that I am responsible for those women who are murdered by their relatives in the barbaric and inexplicable ritual of honor killings, while their killers walk with impunity and even admired by the fanatic populace. I am responsible for the lost lives of the little children that are sold as slaves in Sudan by Muslim slave merchants, who find the justification of their actions in the words and the examples of the Prophet of Islam. I am responsible for the inhumane treatment of the women in the hands of their husbands because Muhammad told men to beat their wives in order to make them obedient (Q. 4: 34). I am responsible for the lives of those who are executed because they have changed their religion and became Baha’is, Christians or Ahmadis. I am responsible for the thousands of Indonesian Christians who are taken by Muslim Mujaheds and under the threat of decapitation are forced to convert and men and women undergo the inhumane ritual of genital mutilation as the sign of their initiation in there imposed religion. I am responsible for hundreds of lives of the intellectuals who have died in recent years in typical Islamic chain executions from which the Japanese Italian and Norwegian translators of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses did not escape. And the Japanese interpreter was killed. I am responsible for the bombings in America, Europe and Israel by Muslim fanatics. I am responsible for the lost lives and the dismemberment of innocent bystanders that are killed in human bomb explosions in Israel, for the victims and the victimizers alike who are also victims of their stupidity and bigoted mindset. I am responsible…. Nay indeed we are all responsible to stop this insanity before millions of people lose their lives in a most unthinkable act of religious frenzy called Jihad.  

In a world that has become so technologically advanced that even the poorest nations that cannot feed themselves boast having sophisticated nuclear and biological weapons, small misunderstandings can cause catastrophic results. Religion is, as it has always been, the biggest source of misunderstanding. For religion, people are ready to die and destroy everything else. Only a religious person would believe that he would go to paradise if he kills another person. Only a religious person has no regards for the lives he willingly destroys because their faith is not right.  “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” –Pascal  

It is this burning desire to save my fellow human being from the torments of a false doctrine that has made me dedicate my life in writing about the fallacies of Islam and exposing this most great obstacle in the road of human freedom. 

My plan is to write a report/book linking all the human right abuses taking place in the name of Islam, whether in those countries that Muslims are in majority or where they are in minority to the Quran, and the Sunnah (recoded deeds) of the Prophet.   

I realize that the conventional wisdom demands staying away from the founders of the religions and concentrate on the abusing followers. But I have a more maverick view than other freedom fighters and human rights activists. I am of the opinion that most human right abuses in Islamic countries are rooted in the antiquated and impractical belief of Islam and once Islam is weakened and is no more supported by the majority of educated Muslims, the ignorant masses will lose their stamina and Islam will be relegated as the belief of a bunch of old uneducated people easing its barbarity and loosening its fangs.  

I understand that in this day and age it is politically incorrect to criticize the beliefs of someone else. But I do not agree with that! In my school of thought, PEOPLE are sacred beliefs are not. Beliefs must be scrutinized, analyzed, questioned, probed and if found wanting discarded. But people must be respected; their lives protected, their liberty guaranteed, their rights uphold and their freedom of thought and expression ensured.  

One could write a book taking the examples of the human right abuses in the Islamic world and trace each and every one of them back to the Prophet himself. It was what he said and what he did that is inspiring the Muslim fundamentalists to destroy the statute of Buddha in Bamyan, to cut the fingers and hands of petty thieves, to lapidate women, to flagellate the intellectuals, to murder the apostates, to rape the women as the Pakistani Muslim soldiers did in its 1971 war with the Bangladeshi women and to enslave humans and sell them as they are doing in Sudan and even in Saudi Arabia as sex slaves.

I am convinced that to view the problem of violation of human rights in Islamic countries under any other light than what was mentioned in this article is missing the point and not addressing the real issue. Any time and recourse dedicated to expose this despotic president or that criminal Mullah is a waste of time. The problem is in the teachings of Quran and in the examples that its author set for Muslims to emulate. People must learn the truth, then no Mullah would be able to beguile them and no dictator can use religion as the pretext to rouse them in violence.  

Ali Sina

April 2001