Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (36 page)

Of course, Muslims can—and, according to the Qur’an, should—preach the faith and encourage fellow Muslims to be more pious. The Qur’an indeed praises those who “believe and do good, and enjoin on each other truth, and enjoin on each other patience.”
²⁶
But enjoining the truth is one thing and imposing it is another. The latter is useless, counterproductive, and tyrannical.

Religious virtue, in other words, should be sought under the umbrella of freedom. It should not be the job of Muslims to forcefully prevent people from sin—with methods such as banning alcohol, closing down bars, or enforcing a particular dress code. Their job should be to invite people to refrain from sin and then let them make their own decisions.

One could even argue that the means to commit sin should be available, so that the world will remain an Abode of Trial, where people are tested by God. In a country where alcohol is forbidden, for example, there is no chance for Muslims to prove they are observant by freely choosing to abstain from it. A particular verse in the Qur’an may be illuminating in this regard. This verse specifies that Muslims should not hunt any animal during the time of pilgrimage. Then it says, “God will test you with game animals which come within the reach of your hands and spears, so that God will know those who fear Him in the unseen.”
²⁷
One can infer that the existence of the means to sin, “within the reach of your hands,” is the very medium in which the fear of God will be tested—and proved.

Replacing the fear of God with the fear of state or community would only be an obstacle to heartfelt piety. Everyone should have freedom from both the state and the society, in other words, to have genuine religiosity.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Freedom from Islam

If your Lord had pleased, surely all those who are on the earth would have believed, all of them; will you then force men till they become believers?

—Qur’an 10:99, Shakir translation

I
N MARCH 2006
, a modest Afghan citizen named Abdul Rahman made global headlines with an unpleasant story. The poor man was on the verge of execution for the “crime” of converting from Islam to Christianity. His prosecutors, who called him a “microbe,” were pretty straightforward in their indictment: “He should be cut off and removed from the rest of Muslim society, and should be killed.”
¹
The court, which did not hesitate to agree, gave Abdul Rahman three days to rethink and recant. If he still insisted on apostasy, he would be sentenced to a public hanging.

Miraculously, Abdul Rahman survived. Under heavy pressure from foreign governments, the court returned his case to prosecutors, citing “investigative gaps.” Meanwhile, he was released from prison and escaped to Italy, where he was granted asylum.

This infamous story, however, was just the tip of an iceberg. As noted in a 2008 report by a Christian human-rights organization, “apostates from Islam to another religion suffer a host of serious abuses from their families, communities and nations.”
²
These renegade Muslims may well face the death penalty in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Sudan, and other forms of oppression in many other Muslim societies.
³

The reason for this systemic violation of religious freedom is, unfortunately, religious. Most classical schools of the Shariah consider apostasy from Islam a crime punishable by death. A Hadith attributed to the Prophet Muhammad is quite clear on this: “If somebody [among Muslims] discards his religion, kill him.”
⁴
The implication is that Islam is a religion with free entry but no free exit.

For this reason, some Muslim countries have had difficulty accepting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. Among its provisions is the “freedom to change [one’s] religion or belief.” Spokesmen for Saudi Arabia, in particular, have consistently opposed this clause, noting that it “might be interpreted as giving missionaries and proselytizers a free rein.”
⁵

As an alternative to this “free rein,” the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), of which all Muslim-majority states are members, adopted in 1990 a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. It denounced efforts “to exploit [one’s] poverty or ignorance in order to convert him to another religion, or to atheism.” Deserting Islam was not welcome nor was calling for its desertion.

The disparity between the UDHR and the “Islamic” version still exists, and this thorny issue of apostasy is the biggest obstacle to resolution. It even has led some conservative Muslims to condemn the UDHR as evil. Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, for example, denounced it as “mumbo jumbo by disciples of Satan.” He explained his reasoning explicitly: “When we want to find out what is right and what is wrong, we do not go to the United Nations, we go to the Holy Qur’an.”
⁶

I have to admit that, as a Muslim, I can understand why the grand ayatollah put the Word of God above a declaration of men. I just don’t understand why he dismissed the possibility that there might be no contradiction between the two.

R
EVISITING
A
POSTASY

Yes, there might be no contradiction between the modern idea of religious freedom and the Qur’an, for the latter includes nothing that penalizes apostasy. It threatens apostates and other unbelievers with divine punishment in the hereafter, to be sure, but it decrees no earthly retribution.

Quite the contrary, in fact. There are Qur’anic verses that seem to suggest that rejecting Islam is a matter of free choice. “The truth is from your Lord,” a verse reads, “so let him who please believe, and let him who please disbelieve.”
⁷
Another verse speaks about “those who believe then disbelieve, again believe and again disbelieve, then increase in disbelief,” implying that there were people who could go back and forth between Islam and disbelief during the time of revelation.
⁸

One of the interesting figures who stressed the leniency of the Qur’an on this matter was Stratford Canning, the longtime British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the mid-nineteenth century. While trying to persuade the Ottoman statesmen to annul the Shariah laws on apostasy, Canning referred to the Muslim scripture. “We have researched this matter,” he said to Sultan Abdülmecid. “There is no clear Qur’anic basis for execution.”
⁹

However, as we have seen in previous chapters, the Qur’an defined only a small part of the mainstream Islamic tradition. And the earthly punishment for apostasy came as part of the post-Qur’anic literature, namely the Hadiths.
¹⁰

Some scholars think that this late invention was born out of the political needs of the early Muslim community. Right after the Prophet’s death, when Abu Bakr became the first caliph, the first problem he faced was the rebellion (
ridda
) of a few Arab tribes who had formerly sworn allegiance to Medina. In fact, the rebel tribes had not renounced their loyalty to Islam; they just declared that with the death of the Prophet, their commitment to Medina as a city had ceased. In particular, they were no longer willing to pay
zakat
, which they had been paying to Muhammad’s envoys to finance military campaigns and to be distributed to the needy.
¹¹

Different opinions surfaced in the face of this rebellion, and some, including Umar, who would soon become the second caliph, thought that the rebellion should be tolerated. Abu Bakr, however, insisted on imposing
zakat
on the rebellious tribes and then launched military campaigns to subdue them.
¹²
The later jurists who interpreted these events understood
ridda
not just as a political rebellion against the state but also as a rebellion against Islam as a religion. It was this interpretation that “transferred the punishment for apostasy from the hereafter to this world.”
¹³

The concept also proved to be politically useful, as despotic caliphs of the Umayyad and later the Abbasid dynasties could get rid of their critics simply by accusing them of apostasy. The Hadiths that order the killing of apostates were probably put into circulation at this time, more than a century after the Prophet’s death. They were, in other words, “apocryphal” narratives made up later to justify what the political authority had been doing.
¹⁴

On the other hand, there were other Hadiths suggesting that the Prophet in fact did not consider apostasy to be a crime. One of them is a narrative about a Muslim named Husayn, whose two sons were converted to Christianity by Byzantine merchants who had come to Medina to sell their goods. Following their conversion, the two sons left for Syria with the merchants. When this happened, their father asked the Prophet to pursue them and bring them back, apparently in order to make them embrace Islam again. On this occasion, the tradition holds, the famous Qur’anic verse, “There is no compulsion in religion,” was revealed. Consequently, the Prophet did not send anyone to pursue the two converts.
¹⁵

Because of these complexities in the Hadith literature, and the total lack of any Qur’anic earthly punishment for apostasy, Muslim scholars have disputed the mainstream view on this matter for centuries. In the eighth century, Ibrahim al-Nakhai, a prominent jurist, and Sufyan al-Thawri, a Hadith expert, wrote that the apostate should be reinvited into Islam but should never be condemned to death.
¹⁶
The noted Hanafi jurist Shams al-Din al-Sarakhsi also disregarded any temporal punishment for apostasy.
¹⁷
The death penalty, these scholars noted, deprives the apostate of the right to reconsider his decision, which can happen at any moment during his lifetime.
¹⁸
The Prophet, the same commentators pointed out, had never ordered anyone put to death for apostasy alone.
¹⁹

Even Ibn Taymiyyah, the thirteenth-century scholar regarded as strict and militant on many other issues, argued that the Hadith stating, “Whoever changes his religion, kill him,” was meant to address high treason against the political community—i.e., joining forces with a deadly enemy—and not apostasy as such.
²⁰

In the nineteenth century, as noted in previous chapters, the Ottoman Empire made it uncomplicated for its citizens to abandon Islam and accept another religion. Modernist thinkers such as Rashid Rida openly argued that the death penalty for apostasy should be abandoned.
²¹
Two months before his death in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, a liberal cleric who fell out with the regime for his defense of human rights, argued in a BBC interview that an apostasy based on conviction was different from “desertion of Islam out of malice and enmity toward the Muslim community”—and that the former deserved no punishment.
²²

The list of Muslim scholars, clerics, and thinkers who challenge the classical notion of apostasy can go on and on.
²³
Yet the problem remains. Apostates from Islam, or unorthodox Muslims who apostatize from orthodox interpretations, still face the death penalty in some countries, vilification in others. Despite the Qur’anic injunction, “There is no compulsion in religion,” a great deal of compulsion still occurs.

It is crucial to recognize that the earthly punishment for apostasy is not Qur’anic but post-Qur’anic. The latter reflects a historical context in which one’s religious affiliation also determined his political allegiance. No wonder other civilizations of the time, such as the Sassanids and the Byzantines, also punished apostasy with death.
²⁴
The early Muslims merely adopted the norms of their time.

Now, of course, we live in a very different world with very different norms. Religious affiliation and political allegiance are regarded as totally separate. Insisting on keeping a medieval notion of apostasy is pointless. It is also damaging, for it leads to the persecution of innocent people (such as the Afghan convert Abdul Rahman) as well as the portrayal of Islam as a tyrannical religion.

Here Muslims also need to think how they would respond if, say, Christians ordered death sentences for their apostates who chose to accept Islam. What would they think, for example, if someone like Yusuf Islam—formerly Cat Stevens, who became a Muslim in 1977—had been put on trial in a British court and given three days to recant before being executed?