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Articles > Muslim civil rights > Orenburg regional court will rehear the case of the ban of several Islamic books

According to the the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Moscow, on February 26, 2015, at 10 AM local time, Orenburg regional court will rehear the ruling on the ban of several Islamic books.

The list includes "40 Hadiths" of Imam an-Nawawi, biography of Prophet Muhammad by sheikh al-Mubarakfuri and a number of other well-known works of Islamic scholars who have never been accused in radicalism before.

It's worth reminding that Orenburg judge Nuzhdin has previously declared "extremist" 68 books without consulting their authors and publishers who own the rights for these titles. The judgment was passed with egregious defects of proceedings, and there is every reason to believe that the case was not even examined thoroughly: the review of the whole case including the study of 68 heavy books took him less than 15 minutes, after which all of the titles were added to the Federal extremist list.

It is also worthy to note that the authors and publishers were not notified of this ruling, and that they learned about it only two months later, when police started removing the "extremist" titles from public sale. The copyright holders filed appeals to the court's ruling, questioning its legitimacy. Orenburg regional court had to start reviewing the case again since the earlier decision was unlawful. However, there's a good reason to believe that the new decision will not differ from the previous one.

Facts speak for themselves. Despite the fact that the previously confiscated books were destroyed, the court allowed the prosecutor to replace them with their analogs, which formally means that the experts examined different books published by unidentified individuals at an unknown time. The court refused to hear the requested experts, including theologians, instead satisfying the expert candidates requests of the regional prosecutor. One of the four designated experts refused to take part in the expertise; the second one—a professor of Moscow State University, Psy.D.—announced that he doesn't see signs of extremism in the provided literature and holds that "religious literature, due to its characteristic aspects, requires a different approach." The other two experts managed to see evidence of extremism in absolutely all provided books. Taking the results of such an expertise into account, a fair verdict is nearly impossible; the court will probably again rule against the copyright holders. This all leaves us more and more convinced that every book with religious content may be banned these days on some pretext or another.


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