Russian Orthodox Church Defends Muslim Book
“Ancient sacred texts belong to the times when no one would dare to question the supremacy of religious norms for an individual and the society,” Russian Orthodox Church spokesman, Vsevolod Chaplin, said in an interview with Interfax on Thursday, September 10.
The churchman was speaking about “Plea to God: Its meaning and place in Islam,” book that was ruled “extremist” on August 12 by a court in the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in Russia’s far East.
According to the ruling, the book contains fragments that discriminate against other religions.
The book, which explains chapters of the Quran, was solely judged on an analysis of the text conducted by Interior Ministry experts, not by experts on religion
Calling for banning probing ancient sacred writings, Chaplin said: “Perhaps we should come up with a kind of moratorium on declaring texts that were created 300-500 years ago and earlier extremist.”
He added that “Quran as well as the Torah and the Bible carry a whole lot of statements that may be regarded as quite radical by today’s standards.”
The move to ban a book in the Islamic literature is not the first in Russia.
Since Russia's anti-extremism law was passed in 2002, with the purpose of curbing potential militant threats, over 2,000 publications have been placed on a blacklist posted on the Justice Ministry's website.
The inclusion of some texts, such as the Russian edition of the diaries of Nazi Germany's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf", has won praise from human rights campaigners.
But critics say too many innocuous works have been added, threatening the rights of minority groups.
Once a court anywhere in Russia judges a text extremist, it is automatically added to the nationwide blacklist.
In September 2013, a Russian court ordered the destruction of an interpretive translation of Quran, inviting a storm of fury from Russian Muslims.
A similar ban in June 2012 included the ban of 65 Islamic books which were deemed extremist literature by the court.
“Horrible”
Condemning the ban of the Muslim book as “extremist”, a prominent Orthodox theologian said that the ruling is “horrible”.
“What verses were picked? They just say that there is one God and that you should only pray to Him. What is extremist about it?” theologian Andrey Kuraev told LifeNews.
“The same messages can be found in the Bible – that’s what the Christians and the Jews preach. Every religion says that their way of worshiping God is the right one,” he added.
Despite opposing the ruling, Chaplin said that criticism by Muslims against the prosecutor and judge who made the ruling is far “too harsh”.
The differences between secularism and religion will always be there, and giving prerogatives to one over another will most certainly lead to “an even more escalated conflict,” he concluded.
On his part, the head of Russia’s Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, appealed against the ruling, urging the court to overturn the ban.
“I will hold them accountable, since there’s nothing more important in my life than the Qur'an,” Kadyrov said.
The Russian Federation is home to some 23 million Muslims in the north of the Caucasus and southern republics of Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan.
Islam is Russia's second-largest religion representing roughly 15 percent of its 145 million predominantly Orthodox population.
Source: OnIslam.net
