No compulsion in religion: 6 facts about Quran 2:256

The full verse reads: “There is no compulsion in religion. Right guidance has become distinct from error. So whoever disbelieves in false gods and believes in God has grasped the firmest handhold, which will never break” (2:256).^[1] The verse gives its own reason. Compulsion is unnecessary because the truth has been made plain; what remains is the person’s choice.

The occasion of revelation is recorded in the Sunan of Abu Dawud from Ibn Abbas رضي الله عنه. Among the Ansar of Medina, a woman whose children kept dying would vow that if a child lived she would raise him as a Jew. When the Jewish tribe of Banu al-Nadir was expelled from Medina, some of these children of the Ansar were living among them, and their parents said: “We will not leave our sons.” The verse was then revealed.^[2] Al-Albani graded the report authentic.

The setting matters. The verse did not come to reassure a powerful non-Muslim majority. It came to stop Muslim parents, at a moment when they held the advantage, from forcing their own children out of the religion the children had grown up in. Al-Tabari records a related report about a man of the Ansar named al-Husayn whose two sons had become Christians through traders from Syria; he asked the Prophet whether he might compel them, and the verse was the answer.^[3] In both reports the verse limits the strong, and the people it protects are non-Muslims.

The critic says that the verse was cancelled when the command to fight came. That view has a source. Al-Tabari records reports from al-Suddi and Ibn Zayd that the verse belonged to the period before fighting was commanded and was later abrogated.^[4] A reader who meets those reports in a list of abrogated verses will find the critic’s claim there.

Al-Tabari did not accept them. He records two other readings: that the verse was revealed about the People of the Book and those who follow their religion, who are not to be forced to accept Islam once they accept the protection of the Muslim state; and that it was revealed about the Ansar and their children, as above. He then gives his own judgment: the verse was not abrogated, and it applies to everyone from whom the jizya may be accepted.^[5] Ibn Kathir, three centuries later, opens his comment on the verse with the plain sense: “Do not force anyone to enter the religion of Islam, for it is clear and evident.”^[6]

The case for abrogation also runs into the rule the jurists set for it. Abrogation applies to rulings, not to statements of fact, and 2:256 is framed as a statement: compulsion has no place because guidance is already distinct from error. The fact that this has been made clear does not cease to be true when a later verse permits fighting. The site’s article on abrogation and the Sword Verse sets out the wider debate.

Sell’s sharpest claim is that the verse protects only Jews and Christians, so that Hindus and Buddhists are excluded. He is describing one school of law and presenting it as the whole.

The jurists did disagree about whom the dhimma, the covenant of protection, could cover. Al-Qurtubi, commenting on 9:29, sets out the positions. Al-Shafii held that the jizya is accepted only from the People of the Book, Arab or non-Arab. Al-Awzai held that it is taken “from every worshipper of an idol or of fire, or anyone who denies or rejects”. Malik’s school, al-Qurtubi says, held the same: the jizya is taken “from every kind of polytheism and denial, Arab or non-Arab”, with only the apostate excluded. The Hanafis accepted it from all non-Muslims except the idolaters of Arabia.^[7] On the views of Malik, al-Awzai and Abu Hanifa, then, a Hindu or a Buddhist could live under Muslim rule with his religion protected, and two of the four surviving schools, the Hanafi and the Maliki, held one of those views. The Hanbalis mostly followed al-Shafii, with a narration from Ahmad ibn Hanbal that agrees with Malik.

The one category that every school excluded was the idolaters of Arabia in the Prophet’s time. Al-Qurtubi gives the reason: God laid down no jizya for them. The commentators linked this to the special status of the Arabian heartland and its sanctuary, which the Prophet ordered cleared of active idol worship, and not to a general rule for idolaters elsewhere.

The Magians, the Zoroastrians of Persia and eastern Arabia, are the test case. They had no recognised scripture in Muslim eyes. Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf testified to the caliph Umar that the Prophet took the jizya from the Magians of Hajar, and Umar did the same.^[8] From that precedent the schools extended the dhimma to a religion outside the People of the Book.

The question was not left to theory. The first Muslim army in India, under Muhammad ibn al-Qasim, conquered Sind in 711 to 713. Al-Baladhuri, the ninth-century historian of the conquests, records the ruling that settled the status of the Hindu and Buddhist population. When the people of the city of Brahmanabad asked about their temples, the governor al-Hajjaj replied that, since they had submitted and agreed to pay tax, they were under protection; their temple was to be treated like the churches of the Christians, the synagogues of the Jews and the fire temples of the Magians; and they were to be allowed to worship as they wished.^[9]

The ruling became the pattern for the next thousand years. Under the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals, Hindus were treated in law as protected subjects. The jizya was levied on them at some periods and abolished at others: the Mughal emperor Akbar abolished it in 1564, and Aurangzeb reimposed it in 1679.^[10] Both decisions were contested at the time, and historians argue about their motives. Neither ruler treated Hindus as people outside the protection of the law, which is what Sell’s reading of 2:256 would require.

Christians and Jews were not alone under Muslim rule for long. Zoroastrians in Persia, Hindus and Jains in India, and Buddhists in Central Asia lived as protected communities for centuries. That record does not prove that every ruler was just. It does show that the law Sell described was not the law that most Muslim states applied.

The critic says that the tolerance texts amount to one verse against many. The Quran states the same principle in several other places.

“Had your Lord willed, everyone on earth would have believed, all of them together. Would you then compel people until they become believers?” (10:99). “Say: the truth is from your Lord, so whoever wills, let him believe, and whoever wills, let him disbelieve” (18:29). “So remind, for you are only a reminder; you are not a controller over them” (88:21–22). “You are not one to compel them” (50:45). “To you your religion, and to me mine” (109:6).^[11] These verses come from both Meccan and Medinan surahs, so the principle cannot be dated to a weak period and dismissed.

The Quran also distinguishes between non-Muslims who fight and those who do not: “God does not forbid you from those who do not fight you over religion and do not drive you out of your homes, that you deal kindly and justly with them” (60:8). The war verses that critics set against 2:256 are bounded by this distinction. Verse 2:190, which opens the passage critics quote, says: “Fight in the way of God those who fight you, and do not transgress; God does not love transgressors.”^[12] The Prophet’s own agreements put the principle into practice. The document drawn up at Medina after the Hijra, preserved by Ibn Ishaq in the version of Ibn Hisham, says that the Jews of Banu Awf are a community alongside the believers, and that “to the Jews their religion and to the Muslims their religion”. The same clause is repeated for the other Jewish clans named in the document.^[13] The Christians of Najran, who came to Medina to debate the Prophet and left without accepting Islam, received a covenant that guaranteed their churches and their clergy, and the early historians record that they were allowed to pray in the Prophet’s mosque during their visit.^[14]

A reader who sets these verses alongside 2:256 has a fuller picture than one who reads the fighting verses alone, and the same holds for a reader who quotes only the fighting verses.

Sell’s last claim is that the verse teaches nothing like religious liberty or freedom of thought, and that all it secures is that certain classes escape death by paying a tax. Part of this needs to be conceded, and part of it is wrong.

The part to concede is that the classical schools read 2:256 as protecting a non-Muslim’s right to keep his religion. Most did not read it as protecting a Muslim’s right to leave Islam, and they prescribed a penalty for apostasy on the strength of hadith reports. That is a real limit on freedom of religion as modern law understands it. It is also a subject of active debate among Muslim scholars today, and some senior scholars confine the penalty to apostasy joined with treason or rebellion. The site’s article on apostasy sets out both positions.^[15]

The part that is wrong is the description of the dhimma as a payment to escape death. The covenant guaranteed the protected person his life, property, places of worship and the right to follow his own religious law in matters of family and inheritance. The jizya was graduated by wealth, and women, children, the old, the disabled, the poor and monks were exempt. Umar’s terms for Jerusalem guaranteed its people “their lives, their property, their churches and their crosses”, and said that “they shall not be compelled in their religion”.^[16] Those terms used the language of 2:256 in a treaty with Christians, within a few years of the Prophet’s death.

The jurists also refused to count a forced conversion as binding. Ibn Qudama, the Hanbali jurist, rules that a protected non-Muslim or a visitor under safe conduct who is forced to accept Islam is not given the legal status of a Muslim until he shows that he accepts it willingly, and that if he returns to his former religion he is not to be killed. He gives 2:256 as one of his proofs.^[17]

The verse was not a modern charter of rights, and nobody in the seventh century wrote one. It forbade forcing a person into Islam. The jurists applied that prohibition for more than a thousand years, across far more communities than Jews and Christians alone.