Bosnia’s Top Scholar Raps Hungary PM

TEHRAN (IQNA) – Bosnia's top Muslim scholar rapped Hungarian Prime Minister over his "arbitrary and damaging" anti-Islam comments, saying they were uttered out of ignorance.

"Every [kind of] ignorance is damaging, and particularly the one advocated by senior political officials who have social power and the role to publicly influence the opinion of others," Bosnia's Efendi Husein Kavazovic said in a statement cited by Reuters on Wednesday, October 21.

Kavazovic, who leads Europe's largest community of indigenous Muslim Slavs known for their moderation and tolerance of other religions, was commenting on Prime Minister Viktor Orban latest remarks.

As hundreds of thousands of mainly Muslim migrants and refugees poured into the European Union, including Hungary, the right-wing Premier called them a threat to Europe's prosperity, security and "Christian values."

Orban was also quoted as saying that Islam "has never been part of Europe but came into Europe", and that it did not spiritually reflect Europe but rather a different way of life.

Criticizing Orban, Kavazovic said that educated people know that just as Islam had come to Europe from elsewhere, so had Christianity and Judaism.

Orban's assertions were "arbitrary and damaging" and he hoped not to hear similar claims by senior European officials in the future, he added.

Kavazovic added that Orban's comments denied the principle of democracy and betrayed the "spirit of Christianity."

"Democracy is not an original European product," he said.

"It was invented in Greece at the time when Europe did not exist as a cultural concept and when Greek cities were part of the world that as a civilisation gravitated towards the East."

Some 350,000 migrants have made the perilous journey to reach Europe's shores since January this year, according to figures released by the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The IOM said more than 2,600 migrants had drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean in the same period.

According to official figures, Muslims, mostly ethnicTurkish descendants of the Ottoman Empire's reach into Europe, make up more than 12 percent of Bulgaria's 7.8 million population.

Hungary has since sealed its southern borders with a steel fence to keep out migrants trekking north through the Balkans from Greece, and issued new laws rights groups say deny refugees their right to seek protection from war and persecution.

Source: OnIslam.net