5 myths about taqiyya

The Quran’s word is tuqāt, “protection”: “Let not the believers take unbelievers as allies instead of believers, and whoever does that has nothing from God, unless you guard yourselves against them as a precaution.”^[2] The verse allows a believer under threat to protect himself.

The broader rule is in the verse on compulsion: “Whoever disbelieves in God after his belief, except one who is compelled while his heart is secure in faith.”^[3] It concerns life and death. The condition that matters is in the last clause: the heart stays secure in faith, so the concession covers words spoken under force and does not change what the person believes.

The classical commentators, al-Tabari among them, read 3:28 the same way: the precaution is outward and applies to a believer who fears real harm.^[4] The jurists added limits. Duress excuses speech, and it does not excuse harming an innocent person, because the jurists held that nobody may save himself by taking another’s life. A fair critic may ask whether “fear” could be stretched. The answer is that the texts name compulsion, and the jurists tie the licence to danger to life or limb.

The verse above was revealed about Ammar ibn Yasir, who was tortured in Mecca and spoke words of denial to survive. When he came to the Prophet in distress, he was told: “If they return, then do the same.”^[5] His mother Sumayya, who refused, was killed and is counted the first martyr, and both are honoured.

The dispensation is real, and it is a dispensation for the tortured and does not apply to everyday life. Early authorities such as Hasan al-Basri are quoted in Sahih al-Bukhari, in the chapter on compulsion, as saying that this protection remains available until the Day of Resurrection for those under real coercion.^[6]

The scholars also held that steadfastness is the higher course. During the inquisition under the caliph al-Mamun in the ninth century, the jurist Ahmad ibn Hanbal refused to say that the Quran was created and was imprisoned and flogged, and he was honoured for it, while colleagues who yielded under threat were not condemned.^[7] The pattern is a concession for the weak and praise for those who endure.

The same pattern appears among Christians. In the Roman persecutions some Christians obtained certificates of sacrifice to the gods to save their lives, and the church debated how to receive them back, while honouring as martyrs those who refused.^[8] Every community that has faced torture for its faith has had to decide what to say to those who gave way under it. The Islamic answer, a dispensation for the coerced and honour for the steadfast, is a common human answer to that situation.

The Prophet said: “Truthfulness leads to righteousness and righteousness leads to Paradise. A man keeps on telling the truth until he is recorded as truthful. Lying leads to wickedness, and wickedness leads to the Fire.”^[9] The Quran says: “Why do you say what you do not do?”^[10]

The hadith that allows a limited kind of untruth names three cases: in war, in reconciling people, and between spouses to preserve harmony.^[11] The jurists read these narrowly, as speech that is not a direct falsehood, and they apply no further. For the first case, the Prophet is also reported to have said “war is deception”, and critics cite this.^[12] The reports show what deception meant: Kab ibn Malik says the Prophet seldom set out on an expedition without appearing to head in a different direction, which is a stratagem and a feint.^[13]

Misleading an enemy army about a route is a long way from lying to a neighbour. Scholars therefore treat the ban on lying as the rule and the three cases as narrow exceptions, none of which reaches treaties, trade or ordinary dealings.

The Quran’s demands on speech go further than the avoidance of lies. It tells believers to fear God and “speak words of appropriate justice”, to be with the truthful, and to give testimony for God even against themselves, their parents and their relatives.^[14] A believer is told to testify against his own family before he may bend the truth. That is the standard against which any exception has to be measured.

The Quran commands: “Fulfil the covenant of God when you have made it.”^[15] It makes treaty-keeping a duty even toward polytheists who have not failed the Muslims, and it tells them to complete the treaty to its term.^[16] The Prophet said that a hypocrite breaks a promise.^[17] He also kept the terms of the treaty of Hudaybiyya even when they seemed to go against the Muslims, and returned a man, Abu Jandal, who came to him as a refugee.^[18]

The Quran does allow a state to end a treaty when it fears betrayal, but only in the open: “throw back to them (their treaty) on equal terms.”^[19] That means giving notice, which is the reverse of secret deception. The Prophet also warned that whoever kills a person under a treaty of protection will not smell the fragrance of Paradise.^[20]

A principle of taqiyya that allowed treaty-breaking would contradict both the Quran and his practice.

One report shows how far the Prophet carried a promise. Hudhayfa ibn al-Yaman and his father were captured by the Quraysh on their way to join the Muslims before Badr, and released only after promising not to fight with Muhammad. When they reached him and told him, he said: “Go back. We will keep our word to them and seek God’s help against them.”^[21] The promise had been extracted from captives on the eve of a battle the Muslims badly needed to win, and the Prophet still held them to it.

There is nothing hidden about it. The doctrine is stated openly in the standard commentaries on 3:28 and 16:106, and the same commentaries limit it to compulsion.^[22] Critics who treat taqiyya as a secret plan are quoting a rule that sits in plain view in the books.

A fair objection is that a rule can be public and still be abused. That is true of any permission in any law. The test is what the texts license, and they license speech under threat to life. A person who claims more than that has no support from the sources, and the jurists who wrote the rule did not write it for that purpose.

The accusation also has a self-sealing structure that a fair reader should notice. If every Muslim who denies that Islam permits lying is assumed to be practising taqiyya, then nothing a Muslim says can count as evidence against the charge. A claim that no possible evidence could refute is a claim that cannot be tested, and a careful critic would set it aside for that reason. The better test is the one this article has used: what the texts say, and how the scholars applied them.

Muslims living as minorities in Europe, North America and elsewhere are under no threat of the kind the texts describe, so on the jurists’ own terms the dispensation does not apply to them at all. What applies is the ordinary law of speech: tell the truth, keep promises and honour agreements. A Muslim neighbour, colleague or citizen is bound by the same verses quoted above, and the Quran counts breaking them as a sign of hypocrisy.

It is also worth keeping the word apart from taqwā, which sounds similar and means something else: God-consciousness, the quality the Quran asks of every believer.

The two words are easily confused in English writing. A believer who has taqwa is one who guards against displeasing God, and the Quran ties that quality to truthful speech.