At least 97 students of the Bashirabad girls’ high school in the northern province of Takhar were poisoned on Saturday, officials said.Why do Musliims do this?
Seven schoolgirls are in critical condition while the rest were discharged from hospital after treatment, Public Health Director Habibullah Rostaqi told Pajhwok Afghan News.
Education Director Abdul Wahab Zafari said most of the 8th grade and 10th grade students were victims to Saturday’s poisoning.
What substance there is to Tariq Ramadan is, in fact, quite sinister. Many of his statements seem studiedly ambiguous. He admits the possibility that “a Muslim is allowed to live in a non-Islamic country” only so long as “he is able to protect his identity and practice his religion” — a caveat that has already become a source of unrest in France and elsewhere. Referring to Islamic law’s death sentence for apostates, Ramadan argues that it doesn’t apply to “one who would leave the faith for personal conviction without trying to betray Islam and Muslims thereafter, in any way.” He adds: “The necessary attitude is therefore a minimal respect for the faith that one leaves and a sensitivity by those that continue to practice it.”
Ramadan doesn’t explain what form this “minimal respect” must take, and since he leaves the death penalty in place for those who do dare to “betray Islam and Muslims” thereafter, one may legitimately wonder just how compatible his self-proclaimed moderate vision of Islam really is with European and American secularism.
It must be remembered that Ramadan is the grandson of Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ramadan says that “there are some things of my grandfather’s with which I agree and others with which I don’t agree.” However, he never has specified anything al-Banna said with which he disagrees.
In fact, several years ago Ramadan contributed a Foreword to a new edition of al-Banna’s Risalat al-Ma’thurat, a collection of key texts from the Qur’an and Hadith. Ramadan describes the book as “the core of spiritual education for all members of the Muslim Brotherhood.” He writes glowingly of his grandfather, lauding al-Banna for the “quality of his faith and the intensity of his relationship with God. Anyone who had ever been in contact with him perceived and experienced this.” He describes al-Banna’s teachings as “simple and luminous.”
He gives no hint in this Foreword or anywhere else that he actually rejects any of al-Banna’s thought – and yet al-Banna was a belligerent Islamic supremacist who wrote: “In [Muslim] Tradition,” al-Banna writes, “there is a clear indication of the obligation to fight the People of the Book [that is, Jews and Christians], and of the fact that Allah doubles the reward of those who fight them. Jihad is not against polytheists alone, but against all who do not embrace Islam.”