Jihad By Court: "Moderate" Jordan Threatens Poet Eslam Samhan With Death

by Valentina Colombo
Hudson New York
June 29, 2009

http://www.legal-project.org/article/391

Excerpt:

Geert Wilders, the Dutch MP and filmmaker, and Eslam Samhan, a 27 year old poet of the Jordan's new generation, probably do not know each other but have a common destiny. Both have been sued in Jordan with blasphemy charges. With a main difference: probably almost everybody in the West knows the former, but unfortunately almost nobody knows the latter.

It all started with the publication of a collection of his poems "Light as a Shadow" in March 2008. "On September 24^th a friend of mine called me," Samhan told us, "and urged me to visit the Amman News website in which a man without any knowledge of either poetry or literature defined my poems as "an obscene insult to God". Besides this, the man asked the Jordanian authorities to ban my book, and asked the religious authorities to judge my behavior. What really shocked me were Jordanian religious people who immediately monopolized one of the most radical programs to announce their fatwa against me, accusing me of being an apostate and an enemy of Islam".

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