Mina Ahadi

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Mina Ahadi, 2007

Mina Ahadi ( listen ? / I ; born May 25, 1956 in Abhar , Iran ) is an Austrian political activist of Iranian origin. Her main focus is the defense of human rights against political Islam . Since 2007 she has been chairwoman of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims, which she co-founded . Audio file / audio sample

Life

Childhood, youth and studies in Iran

Mina Ahadi's parents were from the Azerbaijani ethnic minority in Iran. After the early death of the father, the mother Ahadi and her four siblings raised alone in a village environment. While Ahadi still looked upon the chador- wearing mother as a role model during her childhood , she turned away from Islam in her youth under the influence of her atheistic grandfather and a “colored life without a headscarf” in Tehran .

In 1974, Ahadi began studying medicine at the University of Tabriz , but had to drop out a few weeks later after refusing to wear a headgear. She was involved in the left opposition both against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and , after the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, also against this new regime.

Meanwhile Ahadi had received her medical studies again and was nearing completion, as she in 1980 in a protest against a duty of full-face veil involved and then forcibly expelled was. At the end of 1980 the Iranian secret service VEVAK arrested her then spouse and five guests while searching her apartment; these six people were shortly thereafter for political activities executed .

Escape to the Kurdish region and to Europe

After hiding in Tehran's underground for months, Mina Ahadi managed to escape to the Kurdish region in the west of the country in 1981 . There she spent almost ten years as a partisan with the communist underground organization Komalah . Here she met her second husband, from whom she became pregnant. In 1990 Ahadi fled to Austria and settled in Vienna ; there she gave birth to her daughter, and her husband followed her there a year later.

When Ahadi had a visit from her mother from Iran in Vienna in 1994, she was imprisoned for two weeks after her return and asked about her daughter's whereabouts. The mother betrayed this under pressure, but was able to warn her daughter in good time of the impending persecution. Ahadi and her family fled from Vienna to Cologne in 1995 , where their second daughter was born.

International political activism

In 2000 Ahadi founded the International Committee against Stoning , which developed into an international network of around 200 individual organizations and which, according to press reports, was able to prevent stoning through protests at governments. Due to her fame in Iran and Turkey , Ahadi became, according to media reports, the contact person for many women from those two countries who were in dire straits due to the threat of honor killings .

Ahadi received even greater media attention in 2007 when she founded the Central Council of Ex-Muslims (2007) for apostate people, which she has chaired ever since. Because this establishment represented a taboo , since a renunciation of faith is not provided for in the strictly interpreted Islam and is punishable by the death penalty, Ahadi received massive threats and was henceforth under police protection. In 2008 she was part of the organizational team of the Critical Islam Conference in Cologne .

Ahadi's own data from 2015, according to it has "made speeches for years in almost all German cities against stoning, execution, Burka, misogyny and Islamic terrorism." In her previous exile home entered Austria Ahadi, for example in cooperation with the Freethinkers Organization Austria , as a speaker on. She is also a guest author at the Axis of Good . Since October 2018 she has been an ambassador for the intaktiv eV association , which, according to its own statements, speaks out in favor of "genital integrity".

Positions

Mina Ahadi defines herself as a "left-wing humanist".

Rejection of religions

Asserting a "radical atheist ", Ahadi describes religions as "instruments of oppression" that make people "stupid" and are "misogynist". Accordingly, Ahadi calls for "even more secularism, even more separation between religion and state".

Religious symbols should be banned from public space, including the headscarf . The latter is the symbol that political Islam is "a reactionary, fascist movement". Just as the symbol of National Socialism was the swastika , so in Islam it is the headscarf. Ahadi calls for a ban on headscarves for children and the abolition of religious instruction "regardless of denomination" and is against the liberation of Muslim girls from coeducational physical education for religious reasons and against religious circumcision .

The "human rights and women's rights-oriented values" represented by Ahadi are by no means in the "Christian-Occidental", but rather in the " humanistic " tradition. These values ​​were "bitterly fought for" against the resistance of the Christian churches and must now be defended against Islamic associations. Because Islamic organizations that want to enforce Islamic traditions in Germany, "prepare the ground for something like the Sharia police".

Assignment of blame against the West

As a self-confessed " leftist and communist" who praises communism as "the right, creative answer to the problems of humanity for a better life", Ahadi sees the emergence of Islamic terrorism "closely linked to the capitalist system". Western governments wanted to prevent countries from connecting to the Soviet Union and "relied on political Islam to secure their own power". Ahadi expressly applies this accusation to her home country; there the West "helped a monster with the overthrow of the Shah that has now come to Europe".

Islamist endeavors are supported by Western governments up to the present "at the expense of emancipatory movements". As an example of this, she sees the international course for the formation of a government in Afghanistan , in which all modern and secular political forces have been excluded and civil rights have been replaced by religious-ethnic law.

Criticism of German politics

Mina Ahadi accuses German politicians of supporting " reactionary Islamic organizations". She criticizes state attempts to involve supporters of political Islam in efforts to counter radicalization in Germany and criticizes corresponding cooperation by the federal government. The state-run German Islam Conference is "a tool with which the Muslim associations want to gradually introduce Sharia law on the soil of the Federal Republic".

In some cases, Ahadi was effectively heard with such criticism: Shortly after she wrote an open letter to the Federal Family Ministry in July 2017, it distanced itself from its previous support for a workshop with the Turkish community in Germany ; Minister Katarina Barley promised a response to Ahadi's letter.

According to Ahadi, left parties and left organizations are also to blame for the growing influence of the Alternative for Germany party, insofar as they see Islam as an ally in the fight against imperialism and play it down.

A law passed by the Bundestag to legitimize foreskin circumcision criticizes Ahadi as "a shame for the achievements of modern society, the self-determination of the individual and our responsibility towards all children worldwide." With this "abuse of religious freedom" the right to physical integrity was violated, German politics had given in to pressure from religious groups and was thus "an accomplice in human rights violations".

Differentiation from right-wing populism

Mina Ahadi resolutely defends herself against the appropriation by right-wing populism . She rejects cooperation with Alternative für Deutschland on the grounds that this party represents a similar authoritarian, homophobic and sexist position as the ultra-conservative Islamic associations. With "its traditionally patriarchal family image , its aversion to progressive sex education and its backward attitude towards human rights and science", the party is as fundamentally oriented as the Islamists.

With similar justification, Ahadi defends himself against attempts at instrumentalization by the blog Politically Incorrect , which she accuses of dividing the world into "good and bad" like the Islamists without regard to the individual. The blog's alleged criticism of Islam is a cloak under which racism and cynical fantasies of isolation are concealed.

criticism

Allegations within the German-Iranian exile opposition

According to the unanimous representation of national newspapers, Mina Ahadi is extremely controversial in the German-Iranian exile opposition. The reason for this is her behavior during a conference organized by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in April 2000 in Berlin, which wanted to open a discussion between liberal clergy and left oppositionists. With a group of radical Iranian exiles, Ahadi kept out of the audience for so long by chanting slogans such as "Death of the Islamic Republic!" disturbed until the event had to be canceled.

According to press reports, the Iranian secret service present at the conference filmed the disruptive action of Ahadi's group and disseminated the images to the public on Iranian state television . Ahadi had thus provided the regime with evidence of the supposedly revolutionary intention of the Berlin event, which was decisive for the arrest of all opposition Iranian participants at this conference after their return to Iran. All those arrested were sentenced to several years ' imprisonment, including the publicist Akbar Ganji , who was released after six years in prison after a hunger strike in 2006.

Allegations of generalizations against Islam

Despite her own clear positioning in the left-wing camp, Ahadi is occasionally pushed into the vicinity of right-wing populism and racism by left-wing circles . The daily criticized that since the founding of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims, Ahadi has not missed an opportunity to "rant about Islam" and work with " resentment towards the faith".

The philosopher Michael Schmidt-Salomon considers these allegations to be unfounded and, in response to attacks by Frankfurt left circles, stated that Ahadi had "done more for refugees from Islamic countries than all of Frankfurt's anti-fascists put together." However, Schmidt-Salomon, as spokesman for the board of the secular Giordano Bruno Foundation , also distances himself from generalizing theses of Ahadi, such as the one that Islam cannot be reformed; In contrast to Ahadi, the foundation does not rule out "that there are humanistic interpretations of Islam that could prevail under socially favorable circumstances".

Honors

Mina Ahadi was awarded the £ 5,000 Irwin Prize for Secularist of the Year by the British National Secular Society in October 2007 .

literature

  • Mina Ahadi with Sina Vogt: I have sworn off . Heyne Verlag , Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-453-15288-5 (autobiography)
  • Annika Joeres : portrait. Atheist in protective vest. Mina Ahadi, 52, an Iranian ex-Muslim, is fighting against the headscarf and religious constriction in Cologne. FR v. May 31, 2008.

See also

Web links

Wikiquote: Mina Ahadi  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "From Communists and Racists - Confusion in PI News" , Die Zeit .
  2. ↑ a b Sina Vogt: “Partisan against Lynchjustiz” , the daily newspaper , March 14, 2006.
  3. ↑ Chairman of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims - "From my point of view, all religions are misogynistic" . In: Deutschlandfunk . ( deutschlandfunk.de [accessed on November 10, 2017]).
  4. ↑ tagesspiegel.de of February 28, 2007 ( memento of March 10, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) I wore a headscarf for two days , accessed on February 21, 2013.
  5. ↑ The Council of Unbelievers: Ex-Muslims against the Islamization of the West - Report - Tagesspiegel Mobil. Retrieved November 11, 2017 .
  6. ^ I have forsaken (2008), p. 181ff. "My life as a partisan".
  7. ↑ Andreas Kunz spoke to Mina Ahadi: «First came men with beards - then with Kalashnikovs» . In: Tages-Anzeiger . ISSN  1422-9994 ( tagesanzeiger.ch [accessed on February 11, 2019]).
  8. ↑ SINA A. VOGT: Partisan against Lynch Justice . In: The daily newspaper: taz . March 14, 2006, ISSN  0931-9085 , p. 3 ( taz.de [accessed June 13, 2020]).
  9. ↑ SINA A. VOGT: Partisan against Lynch Justice . In: The daily newspaper: taz . March 14, 2006, ISSN  0931-9085 , p. 3 ( taz.de [accessed on November 13, 2017]).
  10. ↑ "Muslims forsake" , taz , February 13, 2007.
  11. ^ The European : Mina Ahadi, human rights activist , accessed February 18, 2013.
  12. ^ A b Daniel Bax: Chairwoman of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims: The Faith Warrior . In: The daily newspaper: taz . May 29, 2008, ISSN  0931-9085 ( taz.de [accessed November 13, 2017]).
  13. ↑ a b Central Council of Ex-Muslims: Open letter from Mina Ahadi to Sahra Wagenknecht, board member of the party “Die Linke” - Central Council of Ex-Muslims. Retrieved November 9, 2017 .
  14. ↑ freidenker published 2/2014 . ( hpd.de [accessed on November 9, 2017]).
  15. ^ Short profile and contributions by Mina Ahadi on the axis of the good .
  16. ↑ https://intaktiv.de/intaktiv-botschafter/#mina-ahadi-vorsitzende-des-zentralrats-der-ex-muslime
  17. ↑ https://hpd.de/artikel/neue-botschafter-fuer-genitale-selbstbestaltung-mina-ahadi-und-ann-marlene-henning-16033
  18. ↑ Interview with Mina Ahadi: Islamization? No thanks! AfD? No thanks! ( achgut.com [accessed December 16, 2018]).
  19. ^ A b Daniel Bax: Chairwoman of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims: The Faith Warrior . In: The daily newspaper: taz . May 29, 2008, ISSN  0931-9085 ( taz.de [accessed November 9, 2017]).
  20. ↑ Ex-Muslims celebrate atheist day. Retrieved April 18, 2019 .
  21. ↑ Annika Joeres in the Frankfurter Rundschau on May 31, 2008.
  22. ↑ Torsten Thissen: "Religion makes you stupid". In: welt.de . February 23, 2008, accessed November 20, 2015 .
  23. ↑ Chairman of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims - "From my point of view, all religions are misogynistic" . In: Deutschlandfunk . ( deutschlandfunk.de [accessed on November 9, 2017]).
  24. ↑ Islam and Germany - an ex-Muslim answers a reader. Retrieved November 9, 2017 .
  25. ↑ Mina Ahadi: "I accuse!" February 2, 2012, accessed November 8, 2017 .
  26. ↑ Mina Ahadi in Kehl against too much tolerance towards Islam. Retrieved December 16, 2018 .
  27. ^ Collaboration: Sina Vogt: Religion: Why I have renounced Islam . In: THE WORLD . February 24, 2008 ( welt.de [accessed November 9, 2017]).
  28. ↑ Central Council of Ex-Muslims: Fight against the circumcision of children - Speech by Mina Ahadi - Central Council of Ex-Muslims. Retrieved November 9, 2017 .
  29. ↑ Five questions for ... Mina Ahadi, chairman of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims . In: Westdeutsche Zeitung . September 10, 2014 ( wz.de [accessed November 9, 2017]).
  30. ↑ “Religions are misogynistic” | engels - culture. Movie theater. Wuppertal. Retrieved November 10, 2017 .
  31. ↑ Open letter from Mina Ahadi to Sahra Wagenknecht . ( hpd.de [accessed on November 14, 2017]).
  32. ↑ Central Council of Ex-Muslims: "We have to defend secularism!" - Central Council of Ex-Muslims. Retrieved November 9, 2017 .
  33. ^ Ex-Muslims: Abolish the Islam Conference. March 12, 2013, accessed November 8, 2017 .
  34. ↑ Florian Chefai: Family Ministry speaks out against workshop of Islamist organizations ". July 28, 2017, accessed on August 12, 2017 .
  35. ↑ Petra Adick: Interview with Mina Ahadi . In: TheEuropean . June 27, 2016 ( theeuropean.de [accessed November 9, 2017]).
  36. ^ Demonstration against genital mutilation in Cologne . ( hpd.de [accessed on November 9, 2017]).
  37. ↑ Mina Ahadi: Open letter: Islam critic rejects invitation from AfD. May 21, 2016. Retrieved August 12, 2017 .
  38. ↑ Mina Ahadi: Open letter: "Stop using me for your right-wing agitation!" August 1, 2017. Retrieved August 12, 2017 .
  39. ^ Mariam Lau : Sharia or grace? Die Zeit , November 18, 2010.
  40. ↑ Left- wing youth describes Iranian religious critic as a racist . ( hpd.de [accessed on November 12, 2017]).
  41. ↑ Women's rights and Islam? - (Not) a contradiction | The love of freedom. Retrieved November 12, 2017 .
  42. ^ CAK: Discussion about circumcisions: Abuse of the foreskin . In: The daily newspaper: taz . July 18, 2012, ISSN  0931-9085 ( taz.de [accessed November 12, 2017]).
  43. ^ Extra sheet: Interview with Mina Ahadi. Retrieved November 12, 2017 .
  44. ↑ Self-determination instead of peer pressure . ( hpd.de [accessed on November 12, 2017]).
  45. ↑ Secularist of the Year 2007. Humanist Press Service , October 22, 2007, accessed October 16, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Ahadi, Mina
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Iranian political activist
DATE OF BIRTH May 25, 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH Abhar , Iran