December 06-2013
A Russian court has banned a standard translation of the Qoran into Russian and ordered all copies seized and burned.
Russia’s senior Islamic clerics warned that unrest could erupt in Muslim communities if the decision is not overturned.
The ruling was handed down in September by a court in Novorossiysk, a city in southern Russia. It banned the widely used text under a Russian anti-extremism law that rights activists say has been abused by local officials to persecute groups frowned upon by the dominant Russian Orthodox Church.
The court found that some passages promoted the spilling of blood—as do some passages in the Bible.
Rights campaigners said the decision, which will apply nationwide unless overturned on appeal, comes dangerously close to banning the Qoran itself.
Russia’s Council of Muftis sounded the alarm in an open letter Friday to President Vladimir Putin, who has frequently called for unity among the leading faiths and warned that ethnic tension could tear Russia apart.
“Russian Muslims are very strongly indignant over such an outrageous decision,” Rushan Abbyasov, the deputy head of the council, which has close ties with the Kremlin, told Reuters.
If the ruling is acted on, the cleric warned: “There will be unrest,… not only in Russia but all over the world. We are talking about the destruction of the Qoran.”
In the letter to Putin, the council drew a parallel with violence in the Middle East over the actions of an American pastor, Terry Jones, who threatened to burn the Qoran on September 11, 2010.
“We recall how the burning of just a few copies of the Holy Qoran by a crazy American pastor elicited a firm protest not just from Russian Muslims but from our entire society, in solidarity with the stormy and long-lasting anger of the global Muslim community and all people of goodwill,” it said.
A lawyer representing the text’s author, Azeri theologian Elmir Kuliyev, said he will appeal the ruling, which calls for the text to be banned and copies of it “destroyed.”
“This is pure idiocy. Some local prosecutor sent this material to a local court and they together decided to ban a holy book,” lawyer Murat Musayev, who has one month to appeal the ruling, told Reuters.
“On the one hand there is freedom of religion in Russia, on the other they are banning fundamental religious texts.”
Experts say the more than decade-old translation by Kuliyev is a respected scholarly work, one of four translations of the Qoran into Russian.
Akhmed Yarlikapov, an expert on Islam with the Russian Academy of Sciences, said, “This is a very high quality translation. The banning of Kuliyev’s translation is utterly unprofessional. You could ban the Bible just as easily because it also has passages that talk about the spilling of blood.”
Putin has championed the dominant Russian Orthodox Church as a moral compass but has also called for a multicultural Russian identity and emphasized the need to avoid religious strife in a country with a Muslim minority estimated at 15 percent.
Since Russia’s anti-extremism law was passed in 2002, with the purpose of curbing potential militant threats, more than 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 not been controversial. But critics say too many innocuous works have been added, threatening the rights of minority groups. Analysts say the abuse stems from vague wording in the law and procedures that empower local officials in a flawed justice system.
Once a court anywhere in Russia judges a text extremist, it is automatically added to the nationwide blacklist.
