Apostasy is the abandonment of Islam either by a declared desertion in favor of another religion or by a clandestine rejection of Islam often combined with the secret practice of another religion. From the earliest period of Islamic law in the seventh century, Muslim jurists agreed that apostasy bears the death penalty. During the early period, however, jurists also developed legal institutions to circumvent this harsh punishment. These institutions set the standard for what counts as apostasy from Islam so high that before the 11th century practically no judgment of apostasy could be passed. This changed during the 11th century, when jurists lowered the criteria that prevented the death penalty from being applied. In the following centuries, judges could interpret the law in various ways, setting either high or low criteria for punishing apostates from Islam.
The Qur’an does not mention the case of explicit rejection of Islam after conversion. However, it does address the assumed clandestine apostasy of a group of people at Medina called al-munāfiqūn (the hypocrites). No worldly penalty is ordained for them so long as they refrain from rebellion, but harsh punishments are proclaimed for them in the afterlife. In the Qur’an (49:14), a group of Bedouins is described as Muslims but not believers. This led to lively discussions of the criteria for being a Muslim, understood in terms of legal membership in the Islamic community, versus being a believer (mu’min), understood as someone deserving otherworldly salvation.
The dispute about the meaning of “Muslim” and of “mu’min” is one of the subjects that led to the First Islamic Civil War (656–61). One party, the Kharijis, claimed that committing a capital sin (kabīra) reveals unbelief (kufr). A group of radical Kharijis felt justified in killing grave sinners as unbelievers and thus legitimated the killing of the third caliph, ‘Uthman b. ‘Affan (r. 644–56). At about the same time, Muslims agreed that the penalty for apostasy from Islam should be death. This judgment is based on the authority of a hadith of the Prophet that states, “Whoever changes his religion is to have his head cut off.” After the Kharijis lost the civil war, the various groups of their enemies, who dominated the early development of Islamic law, were terrified by the prospect of Muslims killing each other over accusations of apostasy and worked to abate the harsh punishment prescribed in the hadith.
Early Muslim jurists agreed that actions other than the explicit rejection of belief in Islam could not constitute apostasy. To commit a sin could not be an act of apostasy. Apostasy was regarded as the declared rejection of Islam and could only be sufficiently established after a person accused of apostasy had rejected three offers to repent and return to Islam. The legal institution of the “invitation to repent” (istitāba) is mentioned neither in the Qur’an nor in the hadith. In early Islamic law, it nevertheless became a necessary condition for convicting an apostate. It safeguarded that an accused apostate had a chance to return to Islam, to fully avert punishment, and to be reinstated in all rights as a Muslim. Subsequently, only those Muslim apostates who openly declared their abandonment of Islam and who maintained their rejection in the face of capital punishment could be punished.
Most early jurists understood that the general application of istitāba effectively ruled out any penalty for apostasy. They allowed persons accused of apostasy to declare their return to Islam even when it was understood to be nominal. This became the accepted position in the early Hanafi and Shafi‘i schools of law. Their views fitted well into a situation during the eighth and ninth centuries when conversion to Islam happened collectively and often only nominally. Malik b. Anas (d. 795), the founder of the Maliki school of law, ruled differently, saying that zanādiqa (which could be translated as “heretics”) should not be given the right to repent and could thus be killed straightaway. What he meant by zanādiqa here is not entirely clear. Later Maliki jurists understood it to mean clandestine apostates—in other words, people who broke away from Islam but still paid lip service to it in order to avoid punishment. Some Maliki jurists went still further and applied this judgment even in cases when the apostasy was only implied—for example, when a person expressed opinions that were deemed contrary to Islam. This ruling meant that the Maliki school of jurisprudence was, in practice, less tolerant of heterodox Muslim views than others. It allowed Maliki jurists to apply the death penalty against accused apostates who had never explicitly abandoned Islam. In some cases, heterodox views were regarded as evidence of clandestine apostasy.
During the 11th century, the consensus of the Hanafi and Shafi‘i jurists regarding the general application of the “invitation to repent” broke down. Hanbali jurists had already argued that some points of religious doctrine were so central to the Muslim creed that a violation should be regarded as apostasy from Islam and punished by death. During the mid-11th century, scholars from all schools argued that in the case of the political agents of the Isma‘ili-Shi‘i countercaliphate, no “invitation to repent” should be granted and the agents could be killed as apostates even if they repented. This view was shared by the influential Shafi‘i jurist Ghazali (d. 1111), who wrote systematically about the criteria of apostasy and developed the judgment of apostasy into a legal tool that could be used to pass capital punishment on Muslims who held views that violated central elements of the Muslim creed.
After the 11th century, Muslim jurists had a choice between applying either the tolerant rules of the early Islamic period aimed at preventing the application of the judgment of apostasy or the rules established by Ghazali and others that allowed the application of the judgment even in cases where the apostasy was not openly declared. While the Hanafi school, for instance, generally maintained the early, tolerant principles, the other three schools of Sunni law were open to the stricter application.
In the modern period, Muslim fundamentalist thinkers like Mawdudi justified the death penalty for apostasy from Islam. Mawdudi compared it to the punishment of high treason in, for instance, the British legal system. The judgment of apostasy played an important role in the attempts of radical fundamentalist groups such as the Egyptian al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya to legitimate violence against the state and its representatives. In the recent past, there have also been cases in which fundamentalist Muslims applied the judgment of apostasy in its stricter interpretation against secular or liberal thinkers in Islam.
See also excommunication; Faraj, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Salam (1954–82); al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya; Ghazali (ca. 1058–1111); hadith; Mawdudi, Abu al-A‘la (1903–79)
Further Reading
Frank Griffel, “Toleration and Exclusion: al-Shāfi‘ī and al-Ghazālī on the Treatment of Apostates,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 64, no. 3 (2001); Sherman A. Jackson, On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam: Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s Fayṣal al-Tafriqa bayna al-Islām wa al-zandaqa, 2002; Abu al-A‘la Mawdudi, Punishment of the Apostate According to Islamic Law, translated by Syed Silas Husain and Ernest Hahn, 1994; Rudolph Peters and Gert J. J. de Vries, “Apostasy in Islam,” Die Welt des Islams 17, no. 1 (1976).
FRANK GRIFFEL