RUSSIA BANS HOLY QUR’AN TRANSLATION
Moscow, 16 Dzulqa’ida 1434/22 September 2013 (MINA) – One year after a controversial ban on classic Hadith collections and books on the Seerah (biography) of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), a Russian court has ordered the destruction of an interpretive translation of Qur’an, inviting a storm of fury from Russian Muslims.
“Russian Muslims are very strongly indignant over such an outrageous decision,” Rushan Abbyasov, the deputy head of the Russian Council of Muftis, which has close ties with the Kremlin.
If the ruling is acted on, the scholar warned: “There will be unrest … not only in Russia but all over the world, we are talking about the destruction of the Qur’an.”
According to OnIslam.net report quoted by Mi’raj News Agency (MINA), since Russia’s anti-extremism law was passed in 2002, with the purpose of curbing potential militant threats, over 2,000 publications have been placed on a blacklist posted on the Justice Ministry’s website.
In the letter to Putin, the council drew a parallel with violence in the Middle East and Afghanistan over the actions of an American pastor, Terry Jones, who threatened to burn the Koran on Sept. 11, 2010.
Experts stressed that the more than decade-old translation by Kuliyev is a respected scholarly work, one of four translations of the Qur’an into Russian.
“This is one step away from banning the Koran,” said Akhmed Yarlikapov, an expert on Islam with the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“This is a very high quality translation,” he said.
“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.”
“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, said.
“On the one hand there is freedom of religion in Russia, on the other they are banning fundamental religious texts.”
A similar ban in June 2012 included the ban of 65 Islamic books which were deemed extremist literature by the court. The list of these books includes such famous titles like Riyadh as-Salihin and Forty Hadiths of Imam an-Nawawi, Prophetic Seerah of Ibn Hisham and al-Mubarakfury, Fortress of the Muslim by al-Qahtani, Criterion of Action of Imam al-Ghazali, and History of Prophets from Adam to Muhammad.
“The way that the extremism law works is this kind of unstoppable mechanism that allows very junior courts to ban what they like,” said Geraldine Fagan, an expert and author of a book on Russian religious policy.
The Russian Federation is home to some 23 million Muslims in the north of the Caucasus and southern republics of Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan.
Islam is Russia’s second-largest religion representing roughly 15 percent of its 145 million predominantly Orthodox population.(T/P05/E1)
Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)
