Historically and increasingly today, this view has been challenged by other Islamic scholars, who see it as having no warrant in their understanding of their faith. An interesting critique of the dominant Islamic perspective on the question of apostasy is provided by the Indian scholar Asad Subhani, head of the Faculty of Islamic Studies in the College of Education , Zanzibar. In his recently published book, ‘Apostasy in Islam’, he argues that the death sentence for apostasy from Islam that involves a genuine change of faith is a gross violation of the Quranic commandment that ‘there is no compulsion in religion’. According to the Quran, he writes, God has given human beings the choice of doing good or evil, of believing in Islam or rejecting it. This is God’s way of testing human beings. Nowhere in the Qur’an, Subhani notes, is the death penalty for apostasy mentioned. The Quran refers to apostasy in some ten verses, but the punishment for it is clearly suggested as being reserved for the afterlife, not in this world itself. Hence, Subhani argues, killing apostates simply because of their change of faith goes against the Quran. Forcing apostates to recant and declare themselves as Muslims if they want to escape capital punishment when they do not actually believe in Islam is nothing short of hypocrisy, which the Qur’an considers a heinous sin.
Not finding support for their position in the Qur’an, advocates of the death punishment for apostasy draw on the corpus of Hadith, traditions attributed to the Prophet. Subhani mentions a number of such traditions in which the Prophet is said to have ordered the killing of apostates. Subhani regards only some of these as genuine, but argues that even these need to be viewed carefully in their historical context. Further, he argues that they must also be understood in the light of the Qur’anic dictum ‘There is no compulsion in religion’.
Subhani claims that many of the Hadith reports that lay down death for apostates relate specifically to those Muslims who abandon Islam and actively engage in treason or what Subhani calls ‘conspiracies’ against the Islam and the ‘Islamic state’. These reports, he argues, do not apply to other apostates, who are free to choose any religion they want. This explains, Subhani points out, why, according to one Hadith report, the Prophet did not punish a certain Bedouin who had renounced Islam. Likewise, when the caliph Umar bin Abdul Aziz learnt of some Muslims who had abandoned Islam he ordered his governor, Maimun bin Mahran, to release them. Following in this tradition, Subhani tells us, a number of leading Islamic scholars from earliest times down to our own, have opposed the death penalty for ‘non-aggressive’ apostates, although these voices have been and continue to be in a minority.
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