Hypocrisy?

As Muslims whine and seethe and complain over the the banning of minarets in Switzerland (not whole mosques, remember, just the entirely unnecessary minarets), the double standards are there for all to see. Islamic law forbids the public practise of non-Muslim religions. The fourteenth-century Islamic legal manual Reliance of the Traveller says the following about non-Muslim communities living under Islamic rule: "...non-Muslim subjects are obliged to comply with Islamic rules that pertain to the safety and indemnity of life, reputation, and property. In addition, they...are forbidden to...ring church bells or display crosses, recite the Torah or Evangel aloud, or make public display of their funerals and feastdays; and are forbidden to build new churches."

Reliance of the Traveller is not just a medieval document. In 1991, it was endorsed by Cairo's Al-Azhar University as conforming "to the practise and faith of the orthodox Sunni community". Al-Azhar, the oldest and most prestiguous educational institution in the Islamic world, is the closest equivalent in Sunni Islam to the Vatican.

Based on this immutable law, Saudi Arabia completely forbids the building of churches and the public display of non-Muslim religions, and bars non-Muslims from even entering Mecca:


The Maldives is currently very close to implementing similar laws. Have any Muslim human rights activists campaigned against this open infringement of religious freedom around the Muslim world? What do you think?

Hypocrisy on their part? It may seem so, but as Hugh Fitzgerald points out today at Jihad Watch, these double standards simply reveal

the complete obliviousness, by almost all Muslims, to the very idea of the Golden Rule: Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You. The apostate Ali Sina has written at length - see here -- convincingly and eloquently about the Golden Rule, a simple code for conduct that is present, Ali Sina notes, in all the major world faiths with one exception - and that one exception is Islam...

Ali Gomaa is not being a hypocrite when he attacks the Swiss for voting against the minaret. He's not even up to the possibility of hypocrisy. It never occurs to him, for it simply has never entered his head that the same rules should apply to Islam as apply to other faiths...

I wouldn't call Ali Gomaa, or Muslims hypocrites. They are far far beyond hypocrisy in their deep beliefs. They simply can't fathom why, in what universe, anyone would expect them, the Muslims, ever to treat the bearers of Untruth, the Ungrateful Infidels, in a way that would not make clear the many legal disabilities under Shari'a that non-Muslims must, by right, endure. Shari'a is the Holy Law of Islam, to which the manmade laws of the Muslim state or states can only aspire to copy exactly in every particular, but must at least try asymptotically to emulate. Under it, non-Muslims deserve to be humiliated, deserve to be degraded, deserve to live in conditions of physical insecurity. How could it not be? For how else can the Truth of Islam, and the superiority of the Muslims, the "best of peoples," otherwise be declared in all its unswerving rightness?