Baha’is in Egypt - continued public calumny
Rose el-Yousef, one of Egypt’s leading newspapers, has a story about the report commissioned by the country’s Supreme Administrative Court about Egypt’s Baha’is.
As Bilo comments in his blog:
It is not surprising that this clearly biased and one-sided report repeats the exact same illogical and unjustified statements and conclusions that have been circulating among the Egyptian fundamentalist establishment for many years.
In brief, it concluded that since the Baha’i Faith is not recognized in Egypt as a “divine religion,” therefore its followers in that land have no rights whatsoever and that they simply do not exist! Consequently, they concluded that Egypt’s Constitutional guarantees of freedom of belief and religion do not apply to the Baha’is. That Egypt is not bound to its commitment as a cosignatory to the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and that the Baha’is, in Egypt, should not be under its protection–since, as far as they are concerned, Egypt should have no obligations towards them! That the Baha’i are apostates (whether or not they descended from an Islamic background). That they are a threat to the “general [public] order” of the State, and that all their marriages are null and void…. That “methods must be defined that would insure that Baha’is are identified, confronted and singled out so that they could be watched carefully, isolated and monitored in order to protect the rest of the population as well as Islam from their danger, influence and their teachings.”
It’s well worth reading Bilo’s blog if you want to understand the human rights abuses that are being meted out to the followers of the Baha’i Faith in one of the world’s major Islamic countries.
The travesty of this report is that it identifies the Baha’is as a threat to the nation, isolates them in a corner, deprives them from every right to citizenship, strips them from all their civil rights, calls for their elimination and expulsion, declares their children as illegitimate and their men and women as cohabiting out-of-wedlock….
Technorati Tags: Egypt, Baha’i, human rights, Islam
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6 comments
I saw you comments in Baha’i Faith in Egypt. It’a a quite sad what is happening there.
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so insane… let us hope that the Supreme Court of Egypt will denounce these spurious claims and rule in favour of upholding the human rights of the Baha’is - indeed, of all of Egypt’s religious minorities.
I wouldn’t hope for much *sigh*. This is the government that can lock up and torture Muslim scholars like Khaled Abou El Fadl, let alone non-Muslims
Umm Yasmin, I’m afraid you are right. Once human rights abuse becomes endemic or if a country has no human rights culture then the safety of anyone seen as being against the government is at risk.
This is why people should be standing up for the universal human right of freedom of religion or belief - or, as Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has it, freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
Its as fundamental to being fully human as the right to life, liberty and security of the person.
Interestingly, there is also a movement for a “Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities”. I think the marriage of both is necessary.
I agree that human rights and human responsibilities go hand in hand. Surely this is the teaching of all the great faiths. The Baha’i sacred writings and commentary are very clear that society has rights that must be in balance with the rights of the individual. All over the world now, we can see that individualism is running rampant over the rights of the human race - and that means injustice is being committed on a massive scale.
I believe this is part of the breakdown of what, as a Baha’i, I think of as the old world order. We live in an age of transition from humanity’s collective childhood to humanity’s collective adulthood. It’s a kind of rambunctious adolescence that we’re in.
Having said this, it can be argued that responsibilities are implicit in rights. So my right to life is meaningless unless you have the responsibility not to kill me. Your right to freedom of conscience, thought and religion presupposes my responsibility to establish conditions in which you can meaningfully exercise your freedom of religion or belief.
And beyond these negative responsibilities, it can be persuasively argued that human rights and the development of a human rights culture is more about the promotion of human flourishing and human dignity than it is about allowing people selfishly to claim “rights” that undermine the dignity and flourishing of others.
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