Naraht wrote in
news:7ae86a34-5ba9-4b6b-b696-d2f53a8fcc5d@x42g2000yqx.googlegroups.com :
> On Aug 31, 6:55 am, heretic wrote:
>> On Aug 22, 12:43 pm, Naraht wrote:
>>
>> > With a POD after WWII, have at least one recognized Nation where a
>> > person can get arrested for converting from Christianity to anything
>> > (Islam, Judaism).
>>
>> > My personal candidates, not sure how realistic they are...
>>
>> > Spain: Juan Carlos II is more conservative than Franco...
>>
>> > Uganda: Lord's Resistance Army wins...
>>
>> > other ideas?
>>
>> Much of the Balkan National Movements were tied tightly enough to the
>> various Millets for this to be very plausable.
>>
>> HTG
>
> So maybe Serbia, Greece or Bulgaria in the 1905-1914 time period?
>
Well, if we are to ignore the requirement of "a POD after World War II,"
we can note that the Russian Empire--even after the 1905 Revolution--
*formally* prohibited conversion from Christianity to Islam without
government permission. There was one loophole, however:
"One of the first concessions wrested from the crown in the modst of the
disastrous war, the edict of religious toleration of April 17, 1905,
seemed further to enhance the power and prestige of the 'East.' Formally
the edict granted the right to convert freely only from one Christian
faith or denomination to another. For Muslims, it was not meant to
introduce any change in the tsarist position. To convert from
Christianity to Islam, a person had to prove that he or she had in fact
always practiced Islam and had been Christian in name only; in other
words, the state guaranteed the right to *be* a Muslim but not to *become*
one, which had already been the case before 1905. Nonetheless the law
sparked an explosion in official conversions from Orthodoxy to Islam in
the Russian Empire. Its wording left open the existing loophole whereby
one could defect by claiming never to have been a Christian, and now the
state was more likely than before to accept such claims. In the less than
four years between the edict and January 1, 1909, aobut 49,000 persons
converted legally; Kazan province alone reported nearly 39,000 converts.
Without question, there were also many unofficial instances of apostasy."
Robert P. Geraci, *Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in
Late Tsarist Russia*, p. 267.
http://books.google.com/books?id=7Yxqf_28nHwC&pg=PA267
(Interestingly, Geraci refers to "some Kazan Tatars' claims that Tolstoy
was considering conversion to Islam after corresponding with them about
his denunciation of and excommunication from the Orthodox Church."
http://books.google.com/books?id=7Yxqf_28nHwC&pg=PA267 An Orthodox
missionary refuted this claim by citing a passage where Tolstoy had
criticized Islam for demanding "blind faith"--though of course Tolstoy
made similar accusations against Orthodoxy. There are actually some who
believe that Tolstoy converted to Islam, but this is not accurate, and
seems to be based on two things: (1) the fact that he did come to regard
Islam as less evil than the Orthodox Church, and (2) taking out of context
the phrase "regard me as a Mohammedan" in one of his letters. What he
wrote was: "Some- liberals and aesthetes- consider me to be mad or weak-
minded like Gogol; others- revolutionaries and radicals- consider me to be
a mystic and a man who talks too much; the officials consider me to be a
malicious revolutionary; the Orthodox consider me to be a devil. I confess
that it is hard for me...And therefore, please, regard me as a kind
Mohammedan, and all will be fine."
http://web.archive.org/web/20050428132709/http://www.islamherald.com/asp/interesting_articles/nonmuslims/tolstoy_regard_me_a_mohammaden.asp
In other words, the phrase was a joke...)
--
David Tenner
dtenner@ameritech.net
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