Monday, April 03, 2006

Churches to be destroyed in the Arabian Peninsula

The Saudi fatwa reads as follows:
"The Permanent Council for Scholarly Research and Religious Legal Judgment has studied the queries some individuals brought before the Chief Mufti… concerning the topic of the construction of houses of worship for unbelievers in the Arabian Peninsula, such as the construction of churches for Christians and houses of worship for Jews and for other unbelievers and [the question of] the owners of companies or organizations allotting a fixed place for their unbelieving workers to perform the rites of unbelief.



...They agreed that it is obligatory to destroy any church or other heretical house of worship that was built after [the advent of] Islam, and it is forbidden to oppose the ruler in the matter of its destruction, and he must be obeyed.


...Therefore, religion necessitates the prohibition of unbelief, and this requires the prohibition of worshiping Allah in any way other than that of the Islamic shari'a. Included in this is the prohibition against building houses of worship according to the abrogated religious laws, Jewish or Christian or anything else, since these houses of worship - whether they be churches or other houses of worship - are considered heretical houses of worship, because the worship that is practiced in them is in violation of the Islamic shari'a, which abrogates all religious law that came before it...


..."Thus the 'ulama agreed that it is forbidden to build heretical houses of worship - such as Christian churches - in a Muslim country, and that it is forbidden for there to be two directions of prayer coexisting in a Muslim country, and that there should be no symbol of unbelief, neither churches nor anything else. They agreed that it is obligatory to destroy any church or other heretical house of worship that was built after [the advent of] Islam, and it is forbidden to oppose the ruler in the matter of its destruction, and he must be obeyed.
"The 'ulama agreed that building heretical houses of worship, such as churches, in the Arabian Peninsula is the most weighty of sins and the worst of crimes, because there are reliable and explicit sayings of the Prophet [hadith] that prohibit the existence of two religions in the Arabian peninsula [i.e. another religion in addition to Islam], among them the Prophet's words that were related by [Imam] Malik and others and were recorded in the Sahihayn [the two most authoritative collections of hadith for Sunni Muslims compiled by Al-Bukhari and by Muslim]: 'There shall not be two religions together in the Arabian Peninsula.'

link: Tebayn

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