| RATIONALIST INTERNATIONAL |
Germany: "We have renounced!"
"Central Council of Ex-Muslims" founded
Mina Ahadi
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Mina Ahadi, Iranian-born Human Rights campaigner in Germany, has founded the “Central Council of Ex-Muslims”. Together with 29 other apostates from Muslim countries, many of them women, she wants to give a hand to those, who wish to come out of Islam. The organization is headquartered in Cologne. The name was chosen as a play on the Central Council of Muslims, which is with about 800,000 members the largest Islamic group in Germany. There are currently more than three million people in Germany, who were born in Islamic communities. Many of them are secular-minded, says Mina Ahadi. But they have no voice in the country. Muslim organizations claim to speak in the name of all immigrants from Muslim countries and want to enforce their policies on their personal lives, even if they are not members. And the German authorities accept them. Ahadi wants to give them a voice and to form a counterweight to the Muslim organizations.
In February, the Ex-Muslims launched a courageous campaign with the motto “We have renounced”, publishing photos and personal statements of their members. This brought in more than hundred membership applications within a few days. Meantime, Mina Ahadi had to be put under police protection. She received death threats since she founded the council. Renouncing Islam still carries the death penalty in countries like Saudi-Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Sudan. And even in Europe, there are enough fundamentalists out to kill apostates in the name of Allah. But death threats don’t spoil Ahadi’s optimism. “We want to create a new movement”, she says, “in other European countries too. We hope that soon there will be 10,000 of us representing many more people.”
Mina Ahadi is also the founder of the International Committee against Stoning and the International Committee against Execution. She fled to Europe after her husband, a political activist, was executed in Iran on their marriage anniversary.
Vice-president of the council is the Turkey-born Arzu Toker, writer and former member of the West-German Radio Council. The Central Council of Ex-Muslims is supported by the atheist Giordano-Bruno-Foundation in Germany.