European "ex-Muslims" demand right to leave Islam

THE HAGUE, Sep 11 (Reuters) A 22-year-old Dutch-Iranian will launch a campaign today for Muslims to have the right to renounce their faith and find support from peers, a view which has made him the victim of three physical attacks.

Although similar initiatives have started elsewhere in Europe, Ehsan Jami's group has stirred intense interest in the Netherlands, which has one million Muslims, and has reignited the country's highly-emotive Islam debate.

''We have an enormous problem with apostasy in Islam. We see a lot of problems where people want to leave Islam but they can't,'' Jami told Reuters in an interview, while body guards stood watch at the door.

''There are five sharia schools in Islam which say if you leave Islam you must be killed,'' he said. Apostasy is punishable by death or imprisonment in some Muslim countries and deplored throughout the Islamic world.

His ''Committee for Ex-Muslims'' wants imams and Muslims to recognise fellow Muslims' right to leave their faith, and to respect freedom of religion.

Jami's blunt criticism of Islam, which he likens to fascism and Nazism, has offended many Dutch Muslims, and earned comparisons to the rhetoric of Dutch anti-immigration politician Geert Wilders, whose party holds 9 of 150 seats in parliament.

''People think I am a radical. They think I hate Muslims, but ... it is the ideology which is the problem and not the people themselves.'' News of an attack on Jami in August by suspected Islamists caused outcry in the country, where a filmmaker critical of Islam was murdered in an Amsterdam street three years ago and where several high-profile lawmakers are guarded after death threats.

It also put issues of Islam, tolerance and integration uppermost in peoples' minds after a period of unprecedented social tension in the Netherlands looked to have eased.

Yesterday a separate group of ''Ex-Muslims'' said they disagreed with Jami's methods and he had only succeeded in polarising communities.

''We defend the right to be able to walk away from any religion, including Islam. But they are using that right as a cover to categorically insult Muslims and to stigmatise them as 'violent' and 'terrorists''', said former Muslim Behnam Taebi in a statement.

Prominent Dutch imams have also taken issue with Jami's reading of the Koran and invited him to hold talks.

Jami will launch his campaign alongside representatives of other European ex-Muslim groups. Similar committees have been formed this year in Britain, Germany and Sweden.

The murder in November 2004 of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim militant and the work of former Dutch lawmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali, had made the Dutch particularly alert among Europeans to the dangers of intolerance in Islam, he said.

REUTERS SBC BST1707