Report: Syrian Rebels Executed a 14-Year-Old Boy For Insulting Islam

When a 14-year-old boy from the Syrian city of Aleppo named Mohammad Qatta was asked to bring one of his customers some coffee, he reportedly refused, saying, “Even if [Prophet] Mohammed comes back to life, I won’t.”
According to a story reported by two grassroots Syrian opposition groups, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Aleppo Media Center, Qatta’s words got him killed. A group of Islamist rebels, driving by in a black car, reportedly heard the exchange. They stopped the car, grabbed the boy and took him away.
Qatta, in refusing to serve a customer coffee – it’s not clear why – had used a phrase that the Islamist rebels took as an insult toward the Prophet Mohammed, the most important figure in Islam. That offhand comment, made by a boy, was apparently enough for these rebels to warrant a grisly execution and public warning.

The rebels, according to ABC News’ reconstruction of the Syrian groups’ reports, appear to have whipped Qatta. When they brought him back to where they’d taken him, his head was wrapped by a shirt.
The rebels waited for a crowd to gather; Qatta’s parents were among them. Speaking in classical Arabic, they announced that Qatta had committed blasphemy and that anyone else who dared insult the Prophet Mohammed would share his fate. Then, the shirt still wrapped around the boy’s head, the rebels shot him in the mouth and neck.
As Islamist groups continue to take territory in the Syrian civil war, more Syrians are coming under the control of armed extremists who enforce an austere and sometimes violent version of sharia law. The Washington Post’s Liz Sly has reported on other such punishments in Aleppo, where the al-Qaeda-allied group Jabhat al-Nusra is thought to lead the newly established sharia enforcement authority.
Such incidents are a sign of the rise of extremism within a rebel movement that began, over two years ago, largely unified behind the goals of ousting President Bashar al-Assad and establishing democracy.



The influx of avowed jihadists and extremists is bad news for Syrians, and not just because those under rebel rule have to worry about sharing Qatta’s fate if they are perceived as insufficiently pious. The growth of these groups seems bound to exacerbate tensions between rebel factions, easing Assad’s military path to victory, and scaring off the Western powers that might otherwise be persuaded to lend the rebels greater support. Lots of people in and outside of Syria could get behind the idea of ousting a cruel and unpopular dictator and replacing him with something more democratic. But few things are more universally loathed than an al-Qaeda-allied group that executes children.

DOJ Regards Criticism of Islam, Obama as Criminal?

U.S. attorney who vowed to punish anti-Muslim rhetoric also prosecuted 'birther'

The U.S. attorney who warned last week that “inflammatory speech” against Islam could violate civil-rights laws was the prosecutor who brought firearms charges against a Navy veteran who challenged the validity of President Obama’s birth certificate.
William Killian, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, made the warning in a slide presentation June 4 in Manchester, Tenn.
The Navy veteran, Darren Huff, came on the federal government’s radar in 2010 when he and another Navy veteran living in Tennessee, Walt Fitzpatrick, filed civil actions in court charging President Obama with treason. The veterans claimed Obama assumed the presidency while refusing to prove he was born in Hawaii by presenting to the American public a 1961 original long-form Hawaii birth certificate that could be independently authenticated by court-recognized document experts.
According to the Department of Justice website, Huff, on April 20, 2010, traveled from his home in Dallas, Ga., to Madisonville, Tenn., upset at the refusal of the grand jury in Monroe County, Tenn., to indict Obama for treason. He allegedly carried with him a .45 caliber handgun and an AK-47 with ammunition for both weapons and subsequently was arrested.
“Huff told people that day that he had 300-400 rounds of ammunition with the AK-47,” the DOJ website said. “During a traffic stop by a Tennessee State Trooper on his way to Madisonville, Huff stated, ‘I’ve got my .45 because ain’t no government official gonna go peacefully.’”
Huff was sentenced in U.S. District court to serve four years in prison following a criminal conviction for transporting firearms across state lines with the intent to cause a civil disorder. He currently has currently some 22 months of his prison sentence.
Sharon Rondeau, editor of The Post and Email, who has reported on the case since 2010, contends Huff was framed.
“Huff was stopped by the Tennessee state police trooper for allegedly running a stop sign on his way to Madisonville on April 20, 2010, and was allowed to continue on his way after locking his legally-owned firearms in his truck toolbox,” Rondeau argued in an email to WND.
“Huff arrived in Madisonville unarmed and had lunch at a restaurant, then returned home uneventfully. No one was arrested or named as having carried a gun into town that day. Surprisingly, he was arrested ten days later on two federal firearms charges. There has been no police footage showing that Huff was doing anything wrong. There were no plots or accomplices. It was all fabricated by the government.”
In a statement on the DOJ website, Killian explained the rationale for Huff’s conviction:

This sentence will send a strong message to those who attempt to take the law into their own hands. Under our federal Constitution and statutes Mr. Huff and others like him can talk or write about their anti-government views. They cannot arm themselves and make threats to arrest public officials and take over government buildings. The core of our democratic system is to allow peaceful protest, but prohibit armed threats to those who serve our government.

In a separate legal case, Fitzpatrick was convicted in a local court of tampering with government evidence by stealing a grand jury member list in December 2011. He was given a suspended sentence of 240 hours community service.
Rondeau asserts the charges against Fitzpatrick also were fabricated.
“Walt has five sworn and 12 total statements from eyewitnesses in Madisonville that day who said that no one was carrying guns, in direct contradiction to the FBI agent’s affidavit,” she said.
Subsequent to being convicted and sentenced, Fitzpatrick was notified he suffered a two-thirds cut in his Navy pension which his military representative claimed resulted from the IRS garnishing his checks, even though he never received an IRS request to pay back taxes.
Obots attack
Radical Obama supporters known by their critics as “Obots,” or “Obama Robots,” bragged that some of their colleagues had worked behind the scene to inflame the Huff case. The operatives fed to law enforcement authorities concerns that Fitzgerald and Huff were not patriotic veterans concerned about the Constitution, but right-wing radicals who aimed to incite armed rebellion or acts of violence against the government.
In June 2011, WND reported that William L. Bryan, posting under the username “PJ Foggy,” had created the pro-Obama website Fogbow.com. On the site, various Obots bragged that they promoted Obama birth certificate documents known to be fraudulent.
They also boasted they were responsible for having some 100 armed law enforcement officers, including FBI and DHS agents along with state and local police, present in Madisonville, Tenn., on April 20, 2010, prepared to imagine Fitzgerald and Huff were arriving to implement an armed insurrection.

P.J. Foggy posted on the Fogbow.com website a self-introduction in which he claimed, “We’re the ones who got more than 100 cops ready for Cdr. Walt Fitzpatrick, when he showed up on April 20 with a group of armed men who thought they’d take over the Monroe County courthouse.

Rondeau said Huff “was framed by an FBI agent’s affidavit which was based only on hearsay evidence emanating from unnamed Monroe County officials; by members of The Fogbow, who called in false threats to the Madisonville mayor that Huff had planned to ‘take over the courthouse’ on April 20, 2010; and a massive deployment of FBI, local police, sheriffs’ departments, TBI, a SWAT team and snipers present on April 20.”
She claimed a story was created “to justify Huff’s arrest and prosecution ten days after he uneventfully returned to his home following the hearing for Fitzpatrick.”
“Contrary to local and national media reports, no one was seen carrying a gun in Madisonville that day, and no one was approached by law enforcement or arrested,” she said. “While the FBI affidavit claimed that at least ‘a dozen’ people were carrying guns that day, none of them has ever been identified.”

‘Right-wing extremism’
The Obama administration has minimized the threat of Islamic terrorism while elevating the threat potential from “right-wing extremism.”
As WND reported in April 2009, a DHS intelligence and analysis assessment classified “right-wing extremists” as a terrorist threat, identifying as especially dangerous military veterans who have fought in foreign wars and are “disgruntled” about the country’s direction.
Also of concern was alternative media that provide “interpretations of events and issues that differ radically from those presented in mass media outlets.”
The the Wall Street Journal reported at that time that the FBI had launched together with the Department of Defense “Operation Vigilant Eagle,” targeting white supremacists and “militia/sovereign-citizen extremist groups.”
Last month, WND reported Marine veteran Brandon Raub, 27, was arrested by a swarm of FBI and Secret Service agents and forcibly detained in a psychiatric ward for comments he had posted on Facebook that expressed dissatisfaction with the U.S. government.

The FBI, the Department of Defense and the DHS did not respond to WND requests asking whether or not Operation Vigilant Eagle was currently in progress.

It's Extremist Muslims, Not Islamic Extremism

The former British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a pointing remark in his article in the Daily Mail when he wrote, "There is a problem within Islam - from the adherents of an ideology which is a strain within Islam." Mr Blair missed the mark about where the problem lies. It's not a problem within Islam per se; it's a problem with a particular mindset that a very few Muslims fall into, which results in a very potently dangerous effect.
Rich Nielsen of Harvard University recently published a study in which he found that the main factors driving radicalism were not poverty or ideology of teachers. Rather, it was the poor quality of academic and educational networks. Based on his research, Nielsen found clerics with the best academic networks had a 2-3 percent chance of becoming self-styled jihadists, as opposed to a 50 percent chance for those who were badly networked. This is an interesting finding given that under a traditional Islamic education paradigm, students study the same texts with different teachers in order to get different perspectives. Interestingly, they're also warned against the blind following of a single scholar.
Many Hadiths (sayings of Prophet Muhammad) have been transmitted in which Muslims are warned against extremism in religion. In one highly significant Hadith, Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said, "Towards the latter times a people will come who have little knowledge; are deficient in intellect; will speak quoting the best of people; have thick beards; wearing shortened garments; have shaved heads; have good speech but foul actions; claiming to act upon the Book of God but have no relation to it; they recite the Quran but it doesn't pass their throats; and they exit from Islam as an arrow exits from its bow." In another Hadith Prophet Muhammad told his companions that in relation to these people each companion will "belittle his prayer to their prayer, and his fasting to their fasting". Prophet Muhammad said about such a people that they will be ones who will engage in senseless killing of innocents in the name of religion, and so they will need to be sought after and fought.
A Muslim sage once said, "The self is insidious and it inclines towards extremism in righteousness or in wickedness." The current state of Muslims-gone-extreme is a version of Islam being perverted that the Prophet of Islam directly warned against. The ability to quote verses from the Quran isolated from the context of passages and without providing the contextual background for which those verses came about has always been recognised by Muslims to be a clumsy handling of Scripture. This is a problem that plagues not only modern day Kharijites in the form of extremist Muslims; it's also one that extremist critics of Islam such as Sam Harris have fallen for.
It says nothing about the Quran, good or bad, to take isolated verses as Harris does and present them as proof for one's case against Islam. But it speaks volumes about the mindset of the individual who engages in such selective reading. What it indicates is not a problem that's necessarily within the Islamic teachings. Polls and statistics done over the years have constantly shown that the overwhelming majority of Muslims don't adhere to, and in fact condemn, extremist ideologies. In fact, Gallup polls conducted in 2011 revealed that Muslim Americans were more likely than any other faith group to reject attacks on civilians. What extremist Muslims and extremist critics of Islam have in common is not the Scripture. Rather, they share the same mentality and approach to Scripture, and all they differ in is on which fundamentalist side of the coin they fall.
The answer is not going to come from trying to eradicate teachings such as Jihad as Tarek Fatah, the founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, constantly calls for. Jihad, which in this context refers to the conduct during military operations, is grossly misrepresented and misunderstood by both Muslim extremists claiming to be engaged in it and anti-Islam extremists calling for its elimination from Islam. Lesley Hazleton, the award-winning British-American writer, gave a TEDx talk in October 2010 outlining what seemed like her dedication of more time to the Quran than extremists on both sides of the Islamic divide. In her talk she didn't give an interpretation, but simply the context of several verses in the Quran that are being used by extremists. The context alone exposed the dishonesty of extremists' handling of these verses.
Like other traditions, Islam is not a simpleton religion. Change will come from properly educating Muslims about what something like Jihad actually is about, the different forms of it, how it's engaged, who's allowed to call for a military aspect of it, and when it becomes an anarchist criminal activity as it most certainly has nowadays.
By Mohamed Ghilan
Mohamed Ghilan is a neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, Canada, and a student of Islamic Jurisprudence. 

The Unlikely Activist

Jemima Khan may live the grand life of an English aristocrat, but behind the famous boyfriends and the important hair is a serious political journalist and a budding documentary film producer. Her latest project? Taking on WikiLeaks.
The address is unremarkable and the street unexciting, but to slip past the nondescript front gate is to enter an alternative universe, a leafy enclave of secluded houses smack in the center of southwest London. This is where Jemima Khan lives, in a house with soaring ceilings that used to be a factory for old-style taxi carriages.
It was a shock to find this little slice of privilege within a shout of the bustling, thrusting Chelsea soccer stadium; it was a different sort of shock to meet Khan, who presents her own misleading facade. Wearing skinny jeans and a large letter-sweater-style cardigan, she was all long slender legs, glossy flowing hair, radiant English skin and articulate charm. She offered tea, apologized for the state of her dog-distressed cushions, took off her boots, curled up on the sofa next to Brian — the dog in question — and tossed out a barrage of questions meant to disarm and deflect.
She prefers to be interviewer rather than interviewee, she said apologetically, particularly in light of how mean-spirited the British papers can be about someone with her background, and how they can twist words into different meanings. “I haven’t done any interviews for quite a while,” Khan said. “I am naturally quite an open person, and I always end up saying too much.”
But she has made an exception in the service of “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks,” a film about the online antisecrecy group and its founder, Julian Assange, that was directed by Alex Gibney (“Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer“) and of which Khan is an executive producer. Khan has been involved with Assange’s case since he was arrested in December 2010, and she helped post bail for him, but the movie examines him and his work with a cool dispassion.

As she talks about her own work, Khan realizes there is a bit of a perception problem, a slight disconnect — her charmed upbringing and potentially frivolous existence at odds with, as becomes increasingly clear, the serious-minded, hyper-busy reality of her working life.
The tabloids persist in calling her “socialite Jemima Khan,” as if that were an official title, like “doctor,” and Khan, 39, has indeed appeared often in the party-photos sections of glossy magazines and Web sites. Her father was the late financier Sir Jimmy Goldsmith; her mother is Lady Annabel Goldsmith, a legendarily charming hostess whose first husband, Mark Birley, named Annabel’s nightclub after her. The two had 10 children between them; Jimmy Goldsmith was an inveterate keeper of mistresses (in fact, Annabel was his mistress before she became his wife) who fathered children with four different women. Life around the dinner table was complicated, noisy and filled with vociferous debate about the issues of the day.
Khan was a serious student, “which is why I don’t understand why my children have to be coerced and virtually waterboarded into doing their revision,” she said, laughing, using the British expression for “studying.” But at 19 she dropped out of college to marry the Pakistani playboy/cricket star-turned-politician Imran Khan, who exuded charm and exoticism. It was a bit of a shock for everyone.
“A born-again Muslim twice my age who lived in Lahore and wanted to be in Pakistani politics isn’t any father’s idea of a perfect son-in-law for their teenage daughter,” Khan said wryly. “But they both married against their parents’ wishes and eloped,” she added, of her parents, “so they weren’t exactly in a position to intervene.”
Marry she did. She moved with her new husband to Pakistan, learned Urdu, had two sons and threw herself into political and social causes, becoming a public figure in her own right, her every outfit and utterance dissected and obsessed over. The couple divorced after nine years, growing apart but remaining good friends, whereupon Khan returned to London and embarked on a passionate romance with the actor Hugh Grant. (She remains good friends with him, too, as well as with the literary agent Luke Janklow, another recent ex, she said, adding that she is happily single now.)
Along the way, Khan somehow pulled off the neat trick of reinventing herself from Hello! magazine stalwart to serious person consumed by serious issues. She went back to school, finished her undergraduate degree and then studied modern trends in Islam at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Now she is associate editor of the political magazine New Statesman, for which she writes fluent and incisive political profiles, and is Vanity Fair’s European editor at large. She has also written an article about polygamy for New Statesman and presented a BBC radio program on the subject in Britain. In her spare time, if that is the right way to describe it, she finished a screenplay about a young, hapless-in-love British woman whose exasperated mother turns to her Pakistani neighbors to help organize an arranged marriage for her.
That is her first foray away from nonfiction. “I am completely aware that it is a massive cliché to be working on my screenplay, but at least it was commissioned,” Khan said cheerfully. “It could be crap, but I am going to get it done.”

“We Steal Secrets,” which was released last month, examines the complicated case of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. It also examines in fascinating detail the equally complicated and possibly more interesting, because it is so shocking, case of Bradley Manning, the troubled, sexually confused Army intelligence analyst whose leaking of secret American diplomatic and policy documents to WikiLeaks led to his arrest three years ago. (He is currently awaiting trial.) As for Assange, the movie dissects all his contradictions, examining him as hero and villain, as an advocate of openness and transparency who is also a deeply secretive, possibly paranoid control freak — an ultimately unknowable person.

Khan’s connection to the movie came because she was an admirer from afar of WikiLeaks and, for a time, a high-profile supporter of Assange’s in Britain. “There was a lot of stuff coming out about Pakistan, which confirmed suspicions I had about the sort of double-dealing of the government,” she said of the WikiLeaks material. And more simply, “I don’t like lies,” she explained. “WikiLeaks exposed the most dangerous lies of all, which are those that are told to us by elected governments.”
She was drawn into Assange’s odd, charismatic orbit after the British authorities placed him in solitary confinement while he fought extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted on charges of sexually assaulting two former WikiLeaks volunteers. Along with other sympathizers, Khan helped post his bail, which ran to the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But then several things happened. Working with Gibney on his WikiLeaks documentary, Khan served as his liaison to Assange and was sucked further and further into the morass of Assange’s suspicious, conspiracy-theory-suffused mind. Assange at first seemed amenable to an interview on camera, but became increasingly, maddeningly obstructive, finally heaping so many conditions and demands that negotiations over the terms completely broke down.
Then Assange suddenly jumped bail — Khan and the other supporters lost their money — and dramatically sought political asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy, around the corner from Harrods, where he has remained, confined to a small studio, since last June.
He has never responded to Khan’s e-mails asking him to explain his legal situation, she says, and she said her agreement to help post bail was never meant to allow him to avoid facing the charges in Sweden, but merely to get him out of prison while he prepared a legal case and continued his WikiLeaks work. She has not spoken to him since June of last year.
Khan recently wrote an elegant article for New Statesmen about her evolving feelings — admiration turned to disillusionment — toward Assange. While claiming to support the notion of a just society “based upon truth,” she wrote, WikiLeaks has in fact “been guilty of the same obfuscation and misinformation as those it sought to expose, while its supporters are expected to follow, unquestioningly, in blinkered, cultish devotion.”
Assange’s supporters have denounced “We Steal Secrets,” saying that its examination of the sex charges against Assange amounts to irrelevant sensationalism. On the contrary, Khan said, Gibney actually unearthed a great many details about Assange’s past that he ended up not putting in the movie. “Alex is an ethical, scrupulous person, and I think he decided that it was not relevant to the story, and the Swedish case absolutely was,” she said. Meanwhile, Khan is starting work with Gibney on another documentary, about drone warfare.
So please do not say she is a socialite. “There are plenty of things that you can call me, even if they are not flattering, but socialite, I think, is incorrect,” she said. Nor should anyone assume that growing up with money has somehow made her feel entitled. On the contrary, Khan said, as the interview wound down, it has cemented her hunger for doing something meaningful. “I know people in similar situations who haven’t really worked or who have sort of squandered their money,” she said. “The result is, I suspect, just massively low self-esteem and an unfulfilled life.”
She led the way to the door, through the courtyard, and back to that nondescript gate, discussing why there was a huge hole in the ceiling of her entryway. (It has to do with a shared plumbing connection with a nearby house, and the unwise tendency in that house, apparently, to flush baby wipes down the toilet.) The next day, she sent an e-mail clarifying her position. “I didn’t mean to suggest that I am not very lucky,” Khan wrote. “I just meant that it’s easy to become indolent, entitled and to lose a sense of purpose if you don’t have to work.” She finished: “In my experience, being busy and working hard is the key to sanity/happiness.”

Jemima Khan Takes !

The high way to Aspinall and Goldsmith Eco Gala 

Jemima Khan and Ecclestone sisters Petra and Tamara were among the guests at the Ormeley Dinner, hosted by Damian Aspinall, Trudie Styler and MP Zac Goldsmith.

Prince Charles kept his engagement to speak at the environmental charity gala at Bridgewater House despite his father being admitted to hospital.
The event, in its third year, raises funds for three charities: the Aspinall Foundation, The Ecology Trust and The Rainforest Fund.
Mr Aspinall said he hoped “four or five million pounds” would be raised this year.
Tamara, 28, said Petra, 24, is helping with preparations for her wedding to Jay Rutland in France next week, adding: “I’m sure it will rival my sister’s.”

Islam isn't the Problem

In response to the continuing pedophilia epidemic which has rocked the Catholic Church around the world for decades, let us imagine that there was a high-profile former prime minister of a prominent country who went on-the-record to state that this pedophilia epidemic somehow shows the world that there was an inherent “problem within Christianity.”
How do you think that most Christians around the world would react to this kind of blanket statement about their religion?
I think it would be pretty fair to say that over 99.9 percent of the world’s Christian community would be quite offended that a former prime minister of a major world power would have the audacity to blame their entire religion for the acts of a minuscule minority of people who may happen to share that same faith.
But this is exactly what happened recently with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and statements that he made about the religion of Islam.

According to The Washington Post, it was reported that former British prime minister Tony Blair recently wrote in the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper about what he said was “a problem within Islam” that must be faced in the aftermath of the gruesome public slaying in London of a British soldier named Lee Rigby by men reportedly claimed to be “avenging” the deaths of Muslims.
By Arsalan [All Rights Reserved]

Islam, Alcohol and Turkey’s Founding Fathers

Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s president, was reported to be wavering over implementation of a controversial law restricting alcohol use, a measure seen by some as the kind of assault on personal freedom that has spurred a week of anti-government protests.
Turkey’s Hurriyet news site reported that he had told a delegation of tradespeople, who expressed concerns about the commercial impact of the law, that he would examine whether the restrictions contradicted the country’s Constitution.
The Turkish Parliament passed legislation on May 24 to ban advertising of alcohol and outlaw sales of alcoholic drinks between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., except in tourist zones. Alcohol sales near mosques and schools were also prohibited.
The government said the measures were aimed at protecting young people from the evils of alcohol, but secularist critics said they were part of a creeping Islamization on the part of the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mr. Erdogan, the target of a wave of unrest against what is seen as his high-handed governing style, once advised Turks that they should eat grapes instead of drinking wine.
My colleague Andrew Finkel, a veteran observer of Turkish life, has suggested that alcohol consumption is scarcely a pressing issue in a country where less than one in five of the population drinks.
“Given such low levels of consumption, the government’s haste in passing anti-alcohol measures makes little sense,” he wrote at the Latitude blog.
The alcohol law nevertheless has its defenders, including Ceylan Ozbudak, a Turkish television presenter who said drinking was responsible for a majority of traffic accidents and a range of violent crimes in Turkey.
“Is the new regulation of sales of alcoholic drinks really about banning alcohol in Turkey for religious reasons?” she asked in an article for Al Arabiya, “Or is this just another excuse for the opposition to steal the public eye, and attack Erdogan?”
She said the measures were far from being an outright ban and were less strict than restrictions on alcohol consumption, not only in the Muslim world, but also in parts of Europe and the United States.
The controversy over the alcohol law might be viewed as another expression of the tensions between religion and secularism in the Turkish Republic. If so, it is nothing new.
A search of the New York Times archive turns up a gem from 1924 in which Louis Rich reported the decision of the Turkish government to end a one-year experiment in prohibition.
He wrote that the founders of the newly established Republic had originally imposed an alcohol ban in response to a booze epidemic caused by a flood of inferior American liquor in the years after World War I.
“Another factor tending toward intemperance,” he wrote, “was the large number of prescriptions issued to Mohammedans by Greek physicians for dietary purposes. Intoxication became so noticeable that the leaders of Turkey became alarmed.”
He noted, however, that prohibition not only deprived the government of a rich source of revenue but also was at odds with the secularism of the founding fathers. Their decision to repeal the ban reflected the belief that the state had no business to enforce an article of religious faith.

In a sentence that might resonate today among Turkey’s protesters, he wrote, “The Turks must be taught that religious and legal duties are not one and the same thing, that the former are entirely a matter of conscience and that the Government is not obligated to enforce them.”
By urdgan Khan [All Rights Reserved]