Apostasy in Islam: 6 facts about the death penalty debate

The honest place to begin is the law. The mainstream position in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) holds that a Muslim who leaves the faith is to be put to death, and many scholars teach it today. Some hold that the penalty applies whether or not the apostate takes up arms against Muslims.^[1]

The schools differ on details. The jurists discussed whether the apostate is first invited to repent and for how long, whether repentance removes the penalty, and whether a woman is executed. The Hanafi school, for one, did not execute women who left the faith. These are disputes within a settled framework. They show that the classical tradition treated the matter as a legal procedure with conditions, and they also show that the framework itself was widely held.

Any account that denies this will not survive its first encounter with a critic who has read the law books. The fair response begins by granting it, and then asks what the sources behind the ruling actually say.

The ruling rests on the reports of the Prophet’s words. The best known is recorded by al-Bukhari: when the caliph ʿAlī burned a group of heretics, Ibn ʿAbbās objected that the Prophet had forbidden punishment by fire, and said he would instead have applied the Prophet’s words, “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.”^[2] The wording is general, which is why the classical jurists read it as a rule.

A second report, recorded by both al-Bukhari and Muslim, permits taking a Muslim’s life in three cases only, one of them “the deserter of his Din (Islam), abandoning the community”.^[3] The first caliph, Abu Bakr, also fought the tribes that broke away from the community after the Prophet’s death, and the jurists cite those wars as precedent.

The strongest form of the objection is that two authentic reports and the practice of the early caliphs settle the matter. The reply begins with how these texts were read, which the next entries take up. A general sentence in a hadith has to be weighed against the Quran and against the occasions on which the Prophet himself acted.

The Quran speaks of apostasy several times. It warns that one who turns back and “dies while he is a disbeliever” has lost his deeds in this world and the next. It promises that if believers turn back, God will bring another people in their place. It threatens those who disbelieve after belief with God’s wrath, while excusing anyone forced to renounce the faith whose heart remains firm.^[4]

Every one of these passages places the punishment with God, in the hereafter. One even describes people who “believed then disbelieved, then believed, then disbelieved”, which assumes they lived on after turning away.^[5] The Quran also states as a principle that “there shall be no compulsion in [acceptance of] the religion”.^[6]

The objection is that a hadith can supply a penalty the Quran leaves unstated, and that the jurists were entitled to read the verses that way. Many classical scholars did. The point of this entry is narrower. Verse 4:89 speaks of seizing and killing those who turn away, but it sits in a passage about hostile groups, emigration and war, and most commentators read it as about people who joined an enemy at war with the community. No verse names an earthly penalty for a change of belief alone, so the penalty has to stand on the hadith, and that is why the reading of the hadith matters so much.

The report of the three cases joins two things: leaving the faith and abandoning the community (jamāʿah, the body of believers). Mainstream jurists read the two phrases as describing one act. A minority of modern scholars read them as two conditions, and hold that the penalty was never meant for a change of belief alone, only for apostasy that amounted to treason or rebellion against the Muslim polity.^[1][7]

On that reading, the hadith addresses a political crime, closer to treason than to a change of belief. The setting supports the point. The early community was a small state at war, and desertion to the enemy was a military and political act as well as a religious one. The sources also report a Bedouin who asked to be released from his pledge to the Prophet and left Medina when refused; al-Bukhari records the case in the Book of Judgments, and it does not describe any pursuit.

The objection is that the plain meaning of the report is wider than this, and the classical jurists thought so. That is true, and the disagreement is real. The wording itself leaves the question open, which is the claim of this entry.

Ismail al Faruqi’s account of the Islamic state points the same way, though he does not discuss the penalty itself. Religious conviction, he writes, is “an entirely personal affair”, and a citizen “is free to opt for any religion” and for any community within the state; the line he draws falls at leaving the state’s order altogether.^[8]

In 2007 Ali Gomaa, then Grand Mufti of Egypt, wrote that a Muslim can choose a religion other than Islam. Leaving the faith is a grave sin that God will judge on the Day of Judgment, he wrote, and where the case is one of rejecting faith and nothing more, there is no worldly punishment.^[9] He held one of the most senior judicial offices in the Sunni world, and he wrote as a trained jurist, not as an outside critic.

His statement was fiercely criticised by conservative scholars, and he issued a clarification: in it he reaffirmed freedom of belief, while holding that apostasy joined to active subversion of society remains a matter for the courts.^[10] The episode shows both the view and the resistance to it.

A fair reader will notice that one mufti does not overturn a tradition. The entry makes a smaller claim: the position that belief alone is not punished is held by senior scholars inside the mainstream institutions, and it is argued from the same texts as the classical ruling.

In 2013 the Pew Research Center asked Muslims in many countries about sharia. Only those who first said they wanted it as their country’s official law were then asked about executing apostates. Among those supporters, backing for the death penalty ranged from 86 percent in Egypt and 79 percent in Afghanistan to 44 percent in Bangladesh and 18 percent in Indonesia.^[11]

Those figures are often quoted as though they described all Muslims in each country, which overstates them. The question went to a subset of respondents, and the share of the whole population is smaller. Opinion surveys also measure what people say they support in the abstract. They do not record how any court would rule.

They still show substantial support in several countries, and Muslims should face that plainly. The numbers confirm that the classical ruling is a living opinion with a large following. The careful statement is that the support is real, that it varies sharply by country, and that it is far from universal.