A world-renowned concert pianist was given a suspended jail sentence in Turkey on Monday for insulting religious values on Twitter, Reuters reports.
Fazil Say, also a leading composer, went on trial in October for blasphemy – a crime that can carry an 18-month sentence – for a series of tweets including one citing a thousand-year-old poem.
That message, in April last year, retweeted a verse in which 11th-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam mocks pious hypocrisy. It is in the form of questions to believers: “You say rivers of wine flow in heaven, is heaven a tavern to you? You say two houris await each believer there, is heaven a brothel to you?”
The series of more than half a dozen tweets led prosecutors to accuse the 43-year old pianist of “explicitly insulting religious values.”
An Istanbul court gave him a 10-month prison sentence but suspended it by five years on condition that he does not commit the same crime again in that period.
