ِح ْي ِم
َّر
ِن ال
ْح ٰم
َّر
بِ ْس ِم للاِ ال
Introduction
The Shari’ah consists of some laws that remain the same regardless of changing circumstances and others that change with them. Most of the Shari’ah is up to individual Muslims to follow in their own lives. Some are for judges to implement in courts. Finally, the third set of laws is for the ruler or political authority to implement based on the best interests of society. The Shari’ah ruling on Muslims who decide to leave Islam belongs to this third group. Implemented in the past to protect the integrity of the Muslim community, today this important goal can best be reached by Muslim governments using their right to set punishments for apostasy aside.
One of the most common accusations leveled against Islam involves the freedom of religion. The problem, according to critics: Islam doesn’t have any.
This criticism might strike some as odd since it has been well established that both the religion of Islam and Islamic civilization have shown a level
of that would make modern Americans blush. So what
are these critics talking about? What they are referring to is not the issue of tolerating those who follow other religions. They are talking about the traditional Islamic punishment for Muslims who leave their own religion.
Known as
or
in Arabic, this is usually translated as
Like the issues of stoning and hand chopping, apostasy in Islam can only be understood if one is willing to look beyond provocative headlines and delve into the nature of how jurisprudence developed in the pre-modern world and in Islam in particular. As with these harsh punishments (see Yaqeen’s
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publication on the punishments here), modern confusion over
apostasy in Islam has less to do with some basic flaw in Islam’s scriptures and
more to do with a major development in human history, namely the greatly diminished role of religion in the law and governance of modern societies.
Though we’ll refer to ridda as apostasy for the sake of convenience, as in so many cases, the heart of the matter lies in the simple act of translation. In the time of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and the early Muslim community, the
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Arabic noun and the verb for engaging in it were understood not as
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meaning a personal choice of changing one’s religion but as the
political secession from the Muslim community.
Interestingly, this dimension of apostasy as betraying and opposing one’s
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community, missing in the of the English word ‘apostasy,’ is
actually recovered in sociological studies of apostasy. Many studies looking at those who leave religious groups as well as communities defined by secular ideologies show that what distinguishes apostates from those who simply leave is that apostates become active opponents of their previous identity, more renegades than mere dissenters.
1
Along the same lines, the problem with ridda in Islam was not that a person was exercising their freedom of conscience and choosing to no longer follow the religion. The problem was when such a decision became a public act with political implications.
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