A SCOTS writer has been threatened with beheading by extremists after he claimed fasting between dawn and sunset during the month of Ramadan is not a requirement in the Quran, the Sunday Herald can reveal.
Paigham Mustafa and his family have been offered protection by police after several fundamentalists branded him a “Kafir”, which means disbeliever, and issued death threats.
Mustafa claims to be living under a fatwa issued in 2001 by 15 imams in Glasgow after he published a series of articles questioning mosque teachings. The married father of three later published his book The Quran: God’s Message to Mankind, his interpretation of the central religious text of Islam.
Last week, a letter written by Mustafa questioning the practice of fasting during Ramadan was published and subsequently posted on Facebook.
In a series of threatening messages under the post, one critic said: “Shut up or else you will get your head chopped off … shut up or else you will be beheaded … shut up you Kafir dog … you will get beheaded … we will kill you kafir.”
A separate message sent privately by another critic said: “Quran says kill people like you. You deserve to be killed. We will kill you.”
Another post by a third critic warned: “Don’t talk about Islam you Kafir. Remove this post Kafir. Or else you will get killed like Rashad Khalifa.”
Khalifa was an Egyptian American who was stabbed to death in 1990 by an Islamic fundamentalist at a mosque where he worked in Tucson, Arizona. Like Mustafa, Khalifa wrote a book about the Quran and his analysis and his subsequent claim to be a prophet led to the 11th Majlis al-Fuqaha’ (Council of Religious Scholars) to brand Khalifa a Kafir in 1989. He was killed less than a year later.
Mustafa fears he will be targeted by fundamentalists in the UK and compared himself to Asad Shah, who was stabbed to death in a religiously-motivated murder in Glasgow in 2016. Shah’s killer, Tanveer Ahmed, said Shah had “disrespected the messenger of Islam, and Muhammad”….
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