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Calls to Ban Takfir Will Merely Widen Religious Divisions

Tunisia and Morocco are stuck between competing secularist and Islamist conceptions of the true and ideal nation and the role of religion in it.

published by
National
 on January 29, 2014

Source: National

A series of hot-button debates between Islamists and secularists in Tunisia and Morocco are distracting both sides from their countries’ more pressing issues and fuelling already dangerous currents of polarisation.

A key example is the recent discussion about banning or criminalising the practice of takfir – the declaration by one Muslim that another is an apostate, the term for a former adherent who now rejects Islam as a religion.

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This article was originally published in the National.

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