Islam and Apostasy

A Primer and a Tough Tale

The Islamic world is large, and there is considerable variation in its legal systems. To take one end of the spectrum: In tolerant Tunisia, one can leave Islam without any legal repercussions (though severe social consequences endure). But Tunisia is something of an outlier. In fact, almost a dozen Islamic nations, including some of the largest, have laws prescribing death for anyone who chooses to walk away from Islam. Apostasy is generally thought to be a “hudud” crime, one punishable by death, in sharia jurisprudence. Radical clerics claim that this is the punishment handed down by God in the Koran.

Abdulbaqi Saeed Abdo

It is not difficult to see why. Here are some of the relevant passages concerning apostates:

إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ ثُمَّ كَفَرُوا۟ ثُمَّ ءَامَنُوا۟ ثُمَّ كَفَرُوا۟ ثُمَّ ٱزْدَادُوا۟ كُفْرًۭا لَّمْ يَكُنِ ٱللَّهُ لِيَغْفِرَ لَهُمْ وَلَا لِيَهْدِيَهُمْ سَبِيلًۢا ١٣٧

Indeed, those who believed then disbelieved, then believed and again disbelieved—˹only˺ increasing in disbelief—Allah will neither forgive them nor guide them to the ˹Right˺ Way.

وَدُّوا۟ لَوْ تَكْفُرُونَ كَمَا كَفَرُوا۟ فَتَكُونُونَ سَوَآءًۭ ۖ فَلَا تَتَّخِذُوا۟ مِنْهُمْ أَوْلِيَآءَ حَتَّىٰ يُهَاجِرُوا۟ فِى سَبِيلِ ٱللَّهِ ۚ فَإِن تَوَلَّوْا۟ فَخُذُوهُمْ وَٱقْتُلُوهُمْ حَيْثُ وَجَدتُّمُوهُمْ ۖ وَلَا تَتَّخِذُوا۟ مِنْهُمْ وَلِيًّۭا وَلَا نَصِيرًا ٨٩

They wish you would disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so you may all be alike. So do not take them as allies unless they emigrate in the cause of Allah. But if they turn away, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and do not take any of them as allies or helpers

إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ بَعْدَ إِيمَـٰنِهِمْ ثُمَّ ٱزْدَادُوا۟ كُفْرًۭا لَّن تُقْبَلَ تَوْبَتُهُمْ وَأُو۟لَـٰٓئِكَ هُمُ ٱلضَّآلُّونَ ٩٠

Indeed, those who disbelieve after having believed then increase in disbelief, their repentance will never be accepted. It is they who are astray.

And so on. Islamic sacred tradition takes the same approach. Consider this story from the hadith as a case-in-point:

A man embraced Islam and then reverted back to Judaism. Mu'adh bin Jabal came and saw the man with Abu Musa. Mu'adh asked, ‘What is wrong with this (man)?’ Abu Musa replied, ‘He embraced Islam and then reverted back to Judaism’. Mu'adh said, ‘I will not sit down unless you kill him (as it is) the verdict of Allah and His Apostle’.
— Sahih al-Bukhari, 9:89:271

Generalizations are difficult, but the view that springs naturally, and commonly, from verses like these is that the apostate (called murtad—“the one who turns back”) should be given a chance to mend his ways, and, should he refuse it, be executed. It is not the only view; some scholars think that the punishment for leaving Islam, death, is exacted eternally by Allah through damnation, and is not meant to be meted out on Earth. Perhaps the Koran should be interpreted “liberally”; or, perhaps, Mohammad meant what he plainly said. I leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions.

The Real-World Cases

Can it really be the case that Islamic nations in 2024, many of them American allies, actually execute apostates? Sadly, the answer is yes. In Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, the Maldives, Mauritania, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and my native Somalia, apostasy carries the death penalty. Brunei only joined that list in 2015, so it is not as if the practice is disappearing (though it was recently abolished, at least in theory, in parts of the Sudan). In some nations it is up to the local states, including large nations like Nigeria and Malaysia.

In most other Muslim nations, lesser but still severe consequences await renouncers. Above, I mentioned Tunisia. Other moderate Muslim nations don’t do any better. In nominally secular Bangladesh in 2010, a list of secular ex-Muslims was published in various media outlets. No charges could be filed, but 8 of the 83 people named have been killed by vigilantes. So far. “Moderate” Indonesia sent Alexander Aan to prison in 2012 for posting in an atheist Facebook group, because, as his judge put it, he “caused anxiety to the community and tarnished Islam”. Imad Iddine Habib, a Moroccan who publicly criticized Islam, only escaped a seven-year prison sentence by fleeing the country. In Kuwait, apostasy can result in the forfeiture of property and children. Similar family and inheritance laws apply throughout the Middle East.

Peace-loving, genuinely moderate Muslims are not always safer than renouncers. Should they espouse a heretical view, they are targeted by takfiri—those who excommunicate heretical Muslims and hold them accountable. ISIS militants, for example, declared as heretics all Muslims who opposed ISIS’ policy of enslaving Yazidis (a small non-Abrahamic tribal group in northern Iraq). According to one source, a majority of the tens-of-thousands of people ISIS murdered were Muslims they regarded as heretical. It’s something I’ve said before, but it bears repeating: most victims of Islamic extremism today are innocent Muslims.

Many of the men who hold power in the Middle East are extremist true believers. They punish apostasy because they believe in the form of Islam that tells them to. The frothing lunatics leading Iran are the prime example here. But elsewhere, Muslim nations are led by pragmatists—perhaps, in some cases, even by closet secularists. They know how such barbarity is regarded on the world stage, which is why execution for apostasy, while the punishment is ordained in law, is carried out relatively seldom.

Take the case of Saudi Arabia. I do not a have window into the mind of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, but his actions strongly indicate a desire to drag his nation out of the seventh century. To his credit, he stripped the morality police of their privileges. They are not allowed to question, arrest, or punish suspects of immoral behavior, but instead can only report them to the formal security forces. Assuming that I am right in thinking bin Salman does not wish heterodoxy to be punished so brutally, why doesn’t he change his nation’s apostasy laws?

Or consider Egypt. Egyptian law (arguably) does not proscribe apostasy, but certainly finds ways to punish religious dissent, about which I will say more in a moment.

The answer to both questions is internal pressure. According to a 2013 Pew survey, the most recent data available, 86% of Egyptian Muslims believe apostasy should be punished by death. No data on Saudi Arabian views exists to my knowledge, but it is common knowledge that the country is thickly entangled in networks of powerful Wahhabist clerics. The most pragmatic (if unprincipled) course for these leaders is to balance the external pressure from countries like our own with internal pressures.

This plays out in two directions. On one hand, legally-sanctioned executions of apostates are rare. It’s a bad look, and leads to significant Western outcry—sometimes even strong diplomatic pressure. On the other hand, they also find ways of placating their hardliners. That might consist of convicting innocent men and women of other kinds of blasphemy, for example. It’s suspicious how many accused apostates end up convicted of, for example, desecrating the Koran.

But on the other hand, as a recent case demonstrates, countries like Egypt find ways of punishing apostates quietly. The logic is that this satisfies the mob without attracting too much attention from Western journalists. And it works fairly well.

Unless, that is, large numbers of ordinary men and women take notice and call their representatives.

The Case of Abdulbaqi Abdo

The Alliance for Defending Freedom (ADF) recently contacted me regarding the heartrending case of Abdulbaqi Saeed Abdo. Abdo and his children fled from Yemen to Egypt with the help of the United Nations after his conversion to Christianity. (His first wife also converted, but was firebombed by her relatives when they found out.) Abdo broke Yemeni law by converting, but he did not apostatize in Egypt, nor has he broken any other Egyptian laws. It may be the case that apostasy is illegal in Egypt (their Supreme Administrative Court suggests that it is; their constitution suggests the opposite). But it is emphatically not the case that Egyptian law punishes “crimes” committed in other jurisdictions.

And yet.

In 2021, Abdo was detained following his appearance on a Christian TV channel and his involvement with a small Facebook group for Christian converts. According to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, he has been charged not with apostasy but with contempt of Islam, with discrimination against Islam, and with, most absurdly of all, joining a terrorist group! The Middle East has plenty of those, but, as Brother Rachid points out, the tens of millions of Middle Eastern Christians never carry out terrorist attacks. It is not the geographic region, it seems, that causes suicide bombers, but something else.

Abdo has not been found guilty of any of those absurd charges. But he has languished in prison ever since. Abdo has a heart condition which has not been treated. He was put in solitary confinement after it was discovered that he passed scraps of paper with hand-written Bible verses to other inmates. He has been prevented from showering, from changing clothes, from seeing his wife and children. In a recent letter to his family he wrote:

I started today on the 7 of August 2024 a partial strike. And I refuse to take treatment from the person who is responsible for healthcare in the prison. And I requested from him to tell the management in the prison that I am doing so. I am going to increase my strike in stages until I make the strike complete during the coming weeks. And the reason of my strike that they arrested me without any legal justification. They did not convict me for any violation of the law. And they did not set me free during my remand imprisonment which was ended 8 months ago.

The letter ended with “I love you all, Daddy”.

Governments such as the one slowly killing Abdo balance external and internal pressure. Should external pressure increase sufficiently, their risk calculation changes. It is a very good thing, then, that ADF’s campaign is starting to get some traction within the halls of power in Washington.

Republican Chris Smith, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Global Human Rights Subcommittee and Co-Chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, released this statement:

The gross human rights violations and injustice perpetrated by the Egyptian authorities in this case are clear and expose how the laws in Egypt are being abused to punish those with minority views and beliefs. Governments across the world are failing to uphold appropriate legal standards for freedom of religion and speech, allowing rampant criminalization of social media posts and religious practice to go unchecked. Whether in the Middle East, Europe or elsewhere, we must urgently do better to protect basic human rights, and allow each individual to freely hold and express their own beliefs.

It is very gratifying to see a New Jersey congressman challenge Cairo on its actions here. A few weeks ago, that state’s senior senator, a Democrat by the name of Bob Menendez, had to resign following his conviction for taking Egyptian bribes. Unfortunately, you read that correctly: An American senator was in the pocket of a foreign power actively persecuting Christians. They would persecute Jews even more viciously, by the way, if virtually every Jew in Egypt hadn’t been driven from the country decades ago.

Most of the subversion of our society is from within—but by no means all. I hope Menendez’ Coptic Christian chief-of-staff, who has been given his former boss’ seat by New Jersey’s Democrat governor, does better.

My own statement for ADF reads as follows:

That ordinary people can be locked in tiny cells for years simply for expressing beliefs in a private Facebook forum is grotesque. The imprisonment of Yemeni refugee Abdulbaqi Saeed Abdo at the hands of Egyptian authorities is a surreal example of censorial blasphemy policies in action. It’s also illegal. Egyptian officials have violated this father and husband’s human rights and must release him back to his family immediately. 

Whether his Christian faith—what he thinks and prays and says privately—is offensive to extremist Islamists is of precisely zero interest to civilized people anywhere.

The world should take note of what the Egyptian government does. This is the logical conclusion to a trend that empowers authorities to brutalize innocent people for free expression on social media. From China to Pakistan, from Russia to Syria, from the UK to Egypt—free speech must urgently be defended from our age’s resurgent Stalinism.

As an aside: I do not point to the United Kingdom pettily, but because of the real and present danger to free speech posed by the Labour Party and the presence of a well-established Muslim Brotherhood network that works within the Labour party. They recently scrapped the previous government’s proposed free speech laws for universities, seemingly because of Chinese pressure. Konstantin Kisin is fond of pointing out that the British government arrests far more people for social media violations than Russia. While I do not mean to suggest that Britain restricts speech more than Russia—far from it—I do mean to say that civil liberties in the sceptered isle are severely under threat.

I have written about the collapse of free speech in the United Kingdom before, and will do so again. But of more present importance is what can be done for Abdo. Invariably, hunger strikes end in death. If you have a moment, write to your representative. Journalists reading this should share Kelsey Zorzi’s article on the matter. I ask my readers to cause a stir where they can. Let me know in the comments, and don’t hesitate to share any other ideas that you have.

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