Apostasy (Briefly)

The book review continues:

WALLACE TOM Jr. (2015) Refuting Islam, The Christian Patriots Guide to Exposing the Evils of Islam, Bellingham, Fundamental Publishers.

Chapter 14: Islam Imprisons Its Adherents

Mr. Wallace comments on Islam and apostasy. (109). The author cites of Reliance of the Traveller which is a classic manual of Islamic law. See photos below.

For a different perspective within academia...

Jonathan Brown

 According to

Dr. Jonathan A. C. Brown is a Director of Research at Yaqeen Institute, and an Associate Professor and Chair of Islamic Civilization at Georgetown University. He is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and the Law, and the author of several books including Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy.

Cited

The way that the early Muslim community seems to have understood apostasy differs strikingly from the decisive rulings of the later schools of law. This is most clear in the rulings of the Prophet ﷺ himself. There is no reliable evidence that the Prophet ﷺ ever executed anyone for apostasy, as was observed by the famous scholar of Cordoba, Ibn al-Ṭallāʿ (d. 1103).[30] When one of the Companions, ʿUbaydallāh bin Jaḥsh left Islam and became Christian while the Muslims were seeking refuge in Ethiopia, the Prophet ﷺ did not order him punished.[31] The Treaty of Ḥudaybiyya, which the Prophet ﷺ concluded with the Quraysh, stated that if anyone decided to leave the Muslim community in Medina no harm would befall them. There was no mention of a punishment for apostasy. In fact, when a man who had come to the Prophet ﷺ just the day before to pledge his loyalty to Islam wanted to be released from his oath, the Prophet ﷺ let him go.[32] Imam al-Shāfiʿī himself notes how, during the Prophet ﷺ’s time in Medina, “Some people believed and then apostatized. Then they again took on the outer trappings of faith. But the Messenger of God did not kill them.”[33] 

This is equally clear in the conduct of the early caliphs. When six men from the Bakr bin Wā’il tribe apostatized during a campaign in southern Iran, the leaders of the army had them killed. When the caliph Umar was informed of this, he upbraided the commanders. Had he been making the decision, the caliph explained, he would have offered the men “a way back in from the door they took out,” or he would have put them in prison.[34] When the pious Umayyad caliph ʿUmar bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (d. 720) was told that a group of recent converts to Islam in northern Iraq had apostatized, he allowed them to revert to their previous status as a protected non-Muslim minority.[35] 

Even the worst examples of patience and tolerance in the early Islamic period, the Kharijite extremists, seem to have been at least partially misunderstood by later scholars on the apostasy issue. Their policy of killing any other Muslims whom they saw as having committed grave sins is usually explained by them having concluded that these people were apostates (their supposed reasoning: if sinners really believed in God, would they commit sins?). But according to an early Kharijite source, the Kharijites seem to have done so more because they viewed their opponents as having egregiously defied God’s law than because they were seen as apostates pure and simple.[36] After the Muslim armies conquered the city of Bukhara in 673-4 CE, its inhabitants kept converting to Islam and then returning to their previous faith of Zoroastrianism as soon as the Arab armies left town. The army had to keep returning to reestablish discipline. At no point was anyone killed for this.[37] 

He further adds:

Of course, some people were executed for apostasy in the early Islamic period. Yet, in instances where details are provided, what stands out is their public nature. The apostasy occurs not in private but comes with a very public announcement by the person in question. This is exemplified in the famous story of the caliph Ali (ra) reportedly executing a man named al-Mustawrad al-ʿIjlī for converting to Christianity. Although reports of this event overall are unreliable according to most Muslim scholars, what seems to have condemned al-Mustawrad was not converting but rather rubbing this in Ali’s face publicly.[38] 

And also:

Reconsidering Apostasy in the Modern Period 

The tremendous changes in how the role of religion is viewed in societies strongly influenced by nationalism and Western secularism have led some Muslim scholars to investigate the Shariah heritage on apostasy. The notion that the crime of apostasy in Islam was more a matter of protecting a state and social order than of policing individual beliefs was articulated in the 1940s by the South Asian Muslim activist intellectual Abul Ala Mawdudi (d. 1979). Modern scholars such as the Egyptians Maḥmūd Shaltūt (Shaykh al-Azhar, d. 1964) and Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī, as well as the late Iraqi-American scholar Ṭāhā Jābir al-ʿAlwānī (d. 2016), have reconsidered how apostasy should be viewed in contexts in which religious identity is not a state matter.[42] They have concluded that what was criminal about apostasy was its public dimension and the threat it posed to a public order built on confessional identity. It is this public element, they argue, not the question of a person’s private decision to follow their conscience in changing their religion, that Islamic law should focus on. 

Far from being hidden or unrealized in Islamic legal history, it was precisely this aspect of apostasy-as-public-threat that explained why Muslim jurists and states had so little interest in people’s private religious choices. It also explains why centuries of Muslim jurists all affirmed a ruling that seems to clash so clearly with the Qur’an’s repeated statements on the freedom of religious choice. The Qur’an warns those who abandon Islam after embracing it that their good deeds will mean nothing in this life or the next (Qur’an 2:217). It mentions no worldly punishment. Even “those who believe, then disbelieve and then (again) believe, then disbelieve, and then increase in disbelief” are not given any earthly punishment by the Qur’an. Instead, God warns only that He “will never pardon them, nor will He guide them unto a way” (Qur’an 4:137). The Qur’anic verse that strikes the most stridently dissonant note with the death penalty for apostasy is the declaration that, “There is no compulsion in religion. Wisdom has been clearly distinguished from falsehood” (Qur’an 2:256).

He appears to conclude that:

In the Shariah, the aim of punishing apostasy from Islam is to protect the communal faith and social order of a Muslim state. If punishing apostasy severely is driving Muslims away from their religion, then this policy is undermining its own purpose. It’s not clear what ‘order under heaven’ maintaining harsh punishments for apostasy would be upholding in our troubled world.
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In contrast, Mr. Wallace reasons that 'The only reason Islam exists today is because Muslims are threatened to death if they leave their faith'. (111). This seems an extreme viewpoint. I would reason that like with any significant culturally-based religion, Islam exists largely because in certain societies, both where Muslims are a majority and minority, there is a shared Islamic worldview.

Based on the writings of Dr. Brown, I would deduce that he reasons that historically that much of the executions due to apostasy have taken place to protect (in my words) the Islamic religion-state and religion-culture union that has been discussed in website entries within this book review.

So, apostasy would typically lead to death if it is deemed by this religion-state leadership as threatening its own existence and the overall Islamic culture, as opposed to execution typically occurring via apostasy from an individual (s) that was Muslim and then renounced his/her religious faith and philosophy.

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