Ali Sina (activist) - Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Matt57 (talk | contribs) at 02:50, 1 December 2006 (Protection has been requested for this page now. Keep vandalizing this page, Mak82hyd). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 02:50, 1 December 2006 by Matt57 (talk | contribs) (Protection has been requested for this page now. Keep vandalizing this page, Mak82hyd)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Misplaced Pages's deletion policy .
Please share your thoughts on the matter at this article's entry on the Articles for deletion page.
Feel free to edit the article, but the article must not be blanked, and this notice must not be removed, until the discussion is closed. For more information, particularly on merging or moving the article during the discussion, read the guide to deletion.

Steps to list an article for deletion: {{subst:afd}} • Preloaded debate OR {{subst:afd2|pg=Ali Sina (activist)|cat=|text=}} • {{subst:afd3|pg=Ali Sina (activist)}} log

This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources.
Find sources: "Ali Sina" activist – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (November 2006) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Ali Sina is the pseudonym of the founder of Faith Freedom International, a secularist website dedicated to persuading Muslims to leave Islam, according to his site. He is an ex-Muslim and is a Canadian writer of Iranian descent . His writings on Islam have been included in Ibn Warraq's book Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out.

Ali Sina started writing on Islam in the year 2000 on a website called Rational Thinking . In those days, Rational Thinking was one of the few websites on the Internet critical of Islam. After a year, Sina formed a new website called Faith Freedom International which is kept updated. Today, it attracts many people who are critical of Islam and their writings are frequently published on the various sections of the website.

Traffic ranking for Sina's website , faithfreedom.org, has fluctuated since its inception in June 2001. According to the online source Alexa, in early 2003 faithfreedom.org was in the top ten thousand sites on the Internet. Currently it is in the top thirty thousand. It saw a significant spike in site traffic during February 2006. This occurred at the onset of the cartoon riots stemming from the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, but has since returned to average levels.

Views and observations

Sina considers himself a freethinker and a secular humanist. His main arguments are that Islam is an intolerant religion that does not respect human rights and is a danger to peace. He is strongly critical of its founder Muhammad and accuses him of being:

a terrorist

Commenting on alleged hate groups that target Muslims, Sina elaborates on the difference between the religion of Islam and the people who practice this religion in his mission statement:

Islam is absolute darkness and hence vulnerable to the light of the truth. However, it is not vulnerable to hate. Islam feeds on hate and no one can overpower Islam by hating the Muslims. All doctrines of hate need enemies to survive. The feeling of being victimized is essential to promote hate. Therefore those antagonistic groups who promote hate of Muslims are actually helping Islam. Efforts such as ours who love our people and truly want to help them integrate in the rest of the world and emancipate from their backwardness will bear fruit while hate that fundamentalists of other religions foment against Muslims will be counterproductive.

Sina believes that in order to eradicate Islam, people need to reveal the truth about it by quoting the Quran and the Hadith, which contain stories about the life of Muhammad such as his marriage to Aisha, his ordering the assassination of critics, his marrying a woman, Safiyah and many other examples which Sina extracts from the Islamic sources such as the Hadiths of Bukhari, Muslim, and Tabari.

Sina believes that in order to eradicate Islam, people need to reveal the truth about it by quoting the Quran and the Hadith, which contain stories about the life of Muhammad such as his marriage to Aisha who traditionally has been reported as being nine years old, his ordering the assassination of critics such as the poet Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf and Abu Afak, his marrying a woman, Safiyah on the night his followers had murdered her husband and many other members of her tribe, as well as her father and brother not long before then, and many other examples which Sina extracts from the Islamic sources such as the Hadiths of Bukhari, Muslim, and Tabari. Once revealed, these acts, Sina instructs, should be questioned under "...the light of reason." Sina has cautioned that the challenge to Islam is most safely done anonymously on the Internet where it is impossible for extremists to target those with anti-Islam sentiments. He predicts the Internet is the innovation which will cause millions of good people who are nominally Muslim to leave it upon accepting his view of Islam's origins. Ali Sina believes that one day many will leave Islam and it will collapse as communism did.

Sina believes that Islam should be singled out from other religions, because unlike all other religions, he believes that it is a "cult of hate." He also argues that, since he regards Islam as opposed to the Golden Rule, it therefore is an illegitimate religion..

He believes that Muslims around the world suffer from a collective narcissistic personality disorder . They do so, he alleges, because Muhammad suffered from this disorder, and since they view Muhammad as the ideal person and strive to emulate him, they are inclined to take on this same disorder, and those who are disinclined to do so get pressured to conform or at least not speak out. According to Sina, the collective narcissism causes Muslims to have a victim mentality and feel perpetually oppressed. This sense of oppression leads to anger and lashing out in various forms, including terrorism.

Ali Sina's Challenge

Sina has challenged on his website that he will remove the website if all his allegations against Muhammad are proven wrong. He will remove individual allegations against Muhammad as they are proven wrong. Ali has promised a prize of $50,000 to "...anyone who can disprove my charges and prove Islam is a true religion in an objective (not subjective) way.". He invites any refutation of the charges to be posted to his forum and he publishes the resulting debates to allow people to judge the success or failure of the challenge.

Debates

Since issuing his challenge in 2001, Sina has held numerous debates with both Muslim scholars and non-scholars. Prominent scholars among those who debated with Sina include Abu Saleh, Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi, Dr. Alireza Assar, Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, Yamin Zakaria and Edip Yuksel. Arguably the most prominent of the scholars with whom Sina exchanged a letter with was the Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, the former deputy of Ayatollah Khomeini who later became a dissident and critic of the Islamic Republic. Ali also posted a letter in his website claiming to be sent to Dr. Zakir Naik inviting him for an open debate. After being challenged by many Muslims to debate with him, several requests sent by Muslims and non Muslims to Zakir Naik's website were ignored. Ali then wrote to Zakir Naik himself but in reply, the administration of his website wrote back saying that Zakir was busy and did not have time to debate. Ali said that it was clear from his correspondence that Dr. Naik is evading the discussion since he is not responding to the debate request.

Several months prior to the establishment of Faith Freedom International, in January, 2001, Sina had a discussion via email with Reza Cyrus Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah of Iran regarding a potential regime in Iran that could replace the current one. Sina argued it should be a democratic republic, while Pahlavi advocated constitutional monarchy.

Books

Understanding Islam and the Muslim mind

This would be Sina's first book which is yet to be released. It contains a preface by Ibn Warraq and is endorsed by several anti-Islam authors, including Robert Spencer and Serge Trifkovic.

Faithfreedom.org banned in some Muslim countries

During Ali's recent debate with Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, a respected Islamic Scholar in Pakistan, his website faithfreedom.org was banned by Pakistan's ISPs . The website has also been banned in Saudi Arabia.

Apostasy from Islam

During an unpublished interview with the Sunday Times (UK) reporter Abul Taher, Sina explained the experiences that led him to leave Islam.. In a detailed testimony on his website, Ali gives more details of his reasons for leaving Islam .

Death Threats and Fatwas issued against Ali Sina

According to Sina's website, Syed Yousaf Bin, the chief patron of the Ulema Board, in Hyderabad has issued a fatwa against him, where he decreed, "if anybody kills Dr. Ali Sina, he will be rewarded with Rs.1,000,000 (Indian rupees one million)”.

Haseeb-ul-hasan Siddiqui, a leading cleric of the Muslim organization, the Sunni Ulema Board has also warned Ali and others behind faithfreedom.org of the consequences that they would have to face if they don’t close the website. He is reported to have said "According to Islam, the criticisers of Islam should be stoned to death."

Safdar Nagori who was the secretary-general of the extremist Islamic outfit SIMI (Students Islamic Movement of India) until the organization was proscribed under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002 has been reported to have said, "Dr. Ali Sina would be killed within a month, irrespective of wherever his hideout is."

Ali also receives mail from Muslims , which occasionally include death threats . Besides Ali, many other prominent critics of Islam have received death threats from Muslims, such as Craig Winn.

Threatened with Lawsuit

In July 2005, Ali claimed that he received a letter from a Muslim in the UK in which he was threatened with a lawsuit. He communicated with the person who made the threat and asked them to proceed with the lawsuit saying that that would help him prove his claims about Islam in a court of law. The person did not proceed with the lawsuit and Ali has published the communication on his website.

Views on other faiths

Ali Sina has also commented on other faiths. He believes that Christians borrowed much of practices, myth and symbols from pagans e.g. mithraism.

He believes Moses and Jesus are fictitious personages (myths) and that the Bible is false. He believes Muslims, Christians and Jews follow a false doctrine .

Although he claims with certainty that a person called Jesus existed and lot of what is attributed to him is true, he believes that much of Christianity is a fairytale and is for the feeble minded e.g. “The stories of virgin birth, walking on water, converting water to wine or resurrection and ascension”. He believes that early believers added these stories to spice up the religion and make it look attractive for simple minded, illiterate and unsophisticated people. He states that once you strip Christianity of these fairytales and superstitions and separate the actions of church, Christianity is a good teaching. He says that putting aside these fairytales and separating fact from fiction, the essence of Christianity is not bad, and teaches love and forgiveness. He describes Jesus as a young eccentric man who was angry at the stupidity of the people and lashed out at them but despite his human flaw, what he taught was not evil and that he was a rabbi. Ali Sina has compared himself to Jesus saying, "He called himself the son of God, the way I call myself the son of Universe".

Ali Sina believes that unlike Islam, other religions have something to offer, saying that "most other religions, like Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Bahaism, etc. are mixed bags of good and bad. You can compare them to ore. There is lots of dirt but in the midst of that dirt, there are gems and precious metals" .

The reason why Ali primarily focuses on Islam may be because he is a former Muslim. Also he believes that Christianity and Judaism have been critically studied already by other scholars and that unlike Islam, they represent no threat to the peace and security of the world.

Criticism

There are some people who disagree with his views and way of engaging in debate. Some of the problems often voiced are:

Pseudonymity: Ali Sina has been criticised for not disclosing his real identity and for not debating with any Islamic scholar in public in front of a live audience.

Yamin Zakaria who has debated with Ali sina, describes him as:

A rabid anti-Islamic zealot who considers Muslims to be animals even though he was born into a Muslim family! Advocates the indiscriminate killing of Muslims by the US forces even using nuclear weapons. an outspoken advocate of US terrorism around the world. Despite being a Gentile he is outspoken supporter of the ethnic cleansing process in Palestine. He holds no restraint when it comes to using derogatory and abusive language to describe Islam, Prophet Muhammad PBUH and the Muslims under the banner of a freethinker. His hate-filled website is full of superficial and reactionary anti-Islamic outbursts. His stated aim is take people out of Islam and yet the most conspicuous omission in his website is an elaboration of the alternative to Islam.

References

External links

Online sources

www.FaithFreedom.org - Ali Sina's website
Collection of Essays by Ali Sina
FrontpageMag.com Symposium: Gender Apartheid and Islam
Asia Times SPENGLER on Sina
Hugh Fitzgerald on Ibn Warraq and Ali Sina
List of debates with Ali Sina

Articles critical of Ali Sina

Faithfreedom.com, is a site created to refute Sina's writings (note it is typosquatted on the .com Top Level Domain (TLD).
thetruereligion.org an article criticising Sina.
Responses to FFI - A collection of articles responding to Ali Sina and FFI.
Bassam Zawadi Rebuttals - Rebuttals to Ali Sina's Articles.
ExamineTheTruth.com - Nadir's Rebuttals to Ali Sina and collection of other debates.
Exposing Ali Sina's extreme hate and foul mouth - article written by Umar examining Ali Sina's accusations and character.
www.icssa.org: The true face of Ali Sina
Answering-christianity.com: Ali Sina rebuttals - More than a dozen responses to Ali Sina's articles.
http://icssa.org/yameendebate.html --Yamin zakaria and Ali sina Debate.
http://www.examinethetruth.com/ahmed_response2.htm-- Rebuttals to Ali sina

Categories: