Free Republic

Afghan Man Prosecuted for Converting 24 minutes ago An Afghan man who allegedly converted from Islam to Christianity is being prosecuted in a Kabul court and could be sentenced to death, a judge said Sunday. The defendant, Abdul Rahman, was arrested last month after his family went to the police and accused him of becoming a Christian, Judge Ansarullah Mawlavezada told Associated Press in an interview. Such a conversion would violate the country's Islamic laws. Rahman, who is believed to be 41, was charged with rejecting Islam when his trial started last week, the judge said. During the hearing, the...

An amazing and courageous Arab woman has gotten little attention here in the United States, even though she is now an American. But Dr. Wafa Sultan got plenty of attention in the Middle East when she appeared on Al Jazeera a few weeks ago. Dr. Sultan did the unthinkable: She appeared on Arab television and condemned Islam. She was there to “debate” not one, but two Islamic scholars. One was an Egyptian professor of religious studies identified as Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli and the other was an unidentified Algerian cleric. They were so furious that both men quickly labeled her a...

The Islamic Faith Community, an umbrella organisation of 27 radical Muslim organisations in Denmark, is lodging a complaint against the state of Denmark with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva (by the way, take a look at the Office’s logo which ressembles the Arabic script for Allah). The reason for the complaint is last Wednesday’s refusal of the Danish director of public prosecutions to press criminal charges against Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that published 12 Muhammad cartoons in September 2005 (see them here, halfway down the page). The Islamic Faith Community says...

WASHINGTON: The Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan were destroyed by the Taliban with the help of Pakistani and Saudi engineers. According to an account published here on Saturday, a local Afghan told the makers of a Swiss documentary on the giant statues which had stood there, carved in the side of a mountain for hundreds of years, had been destroyed by engineers from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The dynamiting of the statues took place in March 2001. Swiss documentary filmmaker Christian Frei, who has made several documentaries that have won praise at various international film festivals, shot ‘The Giant Buddhas’ in...