Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury is a senior journalist, columnist, author and editor of Blitz, Bangladesh’s largest tabloid weekly newspaper. He was arrested on November 29, 2003, when he was about to leave for Israel to attend a symposium organized by the Hebrew Writers Association. Subsequently, the Bangladesh government brought sedition charges against him, saying he was the spy for Israeli intelligence agency. He was released from prison on April 30, 2005. While no longer incarcerated, the sedition charges still hangs over him, despite appeals from international community, including members of US Congress. Choudhury received PENUSA’s Freedom to Write Award in 2005. This month, he will be given the Moral Courage Award by American Jewish Committee.

The following are excerpts from his “Saying No to Jihad“:

According to the allegations, my crime is: I am a living contradiction to today’s phenomenon in the Muslim world, a Zionist, a defender of Israel and a devout, practicing Muslim living in the second largest Muslim country in the world.

[ . . . ]

Fundamentalists are men who emulate the looks and actions of the Prophet Mohammed. Yet, they give the Prophet and Islam a very bad name, as they perpetuate and even add to the western perception that Islam was won by force or the sword. By this I mean by the sword and not by conversion. Yet these self-righteous and arrogant men claim to be speaking in the name of Allah and act like the Prophet.

They try to squash any positive action of peace by not only squashing but trying to kill all those who oppose them, making their vision that of a totalitarian theocracy that will allow no free exchange of ideas, the development of thinking such as ijtihad or even speech. The golden age of Islam was built on this ebullition of ideas that made it prosper and which gave so much to the world, such as algebra, alchemy; they even kept and preserved philosophy. Under such forces it will lead the Islamic world into the Dark ages which were similar to the European Dark Ages and the Middle Ages instead of the Renaissance and the other periods where discovery, science and even technology was invented.

[ . . . ]

Like most Muslims, I’ve been victimized by a socially supported information flow; one that taught me to look the other way when facts seem to contradict the politically-mandated and politically-correct weltanschauung that we are supposed to adopt. I was taught that much of the world is in essence my enemy, and that Israel and the Jewish people are the embodiment of evil. And I was taught to distrust—even though we all admired—Americans.

And that is the case because the enemies of freedom have wormed their way into most social institutions in the Muslim world—the press, the media, governments, and schools. I have seen this in my own nation—a nation of good people, who seek nothing other than the things all of us want in life. These enemies of freedom seek to control my people by controlling our access to information and our contact with those who offer a different point of view.

[ . . . ]

I salute those brave Muslim brothers and sisters who have the courage to say: “No!” to hate; “No!” to Holocaust-denial; “No!” to jihad; “No!” to the demonization of Israel, the United States, and the Jews. [emphasis in the original]