Blasphemy and insults to the Prophet: 4 facts

The Quran expected Muslims to hear insults. It tells them that they will hear much that hurts from those given scripture before them and from the polytheists, and that patience and mindfulness of God are a mark of resolve.^[1] When people mock God’s verses, believers are told to leave the gathering until the talk turns to something else.^[2]

The Prophet himself was told to proclaim his message and turn away from the polytheists, with the assurance that God would suffice him against the mockers.^[3] The same scripture forbids Muslims to insult the gods others worship, lest they insult God in ignorance.^[4] The instruction is restraint in both directions.

A group of Jews greeted the Prophet with al-samu alaykum, “death be upon you.” A’isha answered them in kind. The Prophet told her to be calm, since God loves gentleness in every matter, and replied to the men only with “and upon you.”^[5]

A’isha reported that after the Prophet was rejected by Ibn Abd Yalil and walked away in distress, the angel of the mountains offered to crush the people between two mountains. The Prophet declined, saying that he hoped God would bring from their descendants people who would worship God alone.^[6]

The classical schools did treat insulting the Prophet as a grave offence, and critics are right that some jurists prescribed death for it; Mazhar notes a Hanafi report that a Muslim blasphemer is killed without the chance to repent, which he argues is a misreading.^[7] The schools differed. Ibn Abidin, the leading Hanafi jurist of the nineteenth century, collected the positions in his treatise on the ruling for one who insults the Prophet. Malik and Ahmad held that a Jew or Christian who insults the Prophet is killed unless he accepts Islam, and al-Shafi’i held that his covenant ends. Abu Hanifa and al-Thawri held that he is not killed, because the polytheism he already holds is the greater wrong, and that he is disciplined and given a discretionary punishment (ta’zir) instead.^[7]

Ibn Abidin states that the Hanafi texts and commentaries hold that a dhimmi’s covenant is not broken by insulting the Prophet, and records that Ibn al-Humam dissented where the insult is made openly. Later Hanafis disagreed over whether a grave offence could be punished by death as ta’zir at the ruler’s discretion, which shows that the school’s position is a limit on the penalty, with room for argument at its edge.^[7] Arafat Mazhar presents the same school as treating punishment as a matter for the ruler and the court.^[8]

The country most cited in this debate is Pakistan. Its blasphemy provisions are rooted in the Indian Penal Code of 1860, drafted under British rule; section 295-A was added by the British in 1927 to restrain tension between Hindus and Muslims, and passed into Pakistani law at partition.^[9] Section 295-C, which made derogatory remarks about the Prophet punishable by death or life imprisonment, was added in 1986.^[9]

The modern statute is therefore a colonial framework extended by a twentieth-century legislature, and its death sentence leaves no room for the discretionary penalty that is the Hanafi starting point for a non-Muslim in Ibn Abidin’s account.^[7]