Apostasy (irtidad) is the abandonment of Islam by either a declared desertion of Islam in favor of another religion or a clandestine rejection of Islam that is often combined with secretly practicing another religion. From the earliest time of Muslim law in the seventh century, Muslim jurists agreed that apostasy from Islam bears the death penalty. During the early period, jurists also developed institutions to circumvent this harsh punishment; these institutions set the standard for what counts as apostasy from Islam so high that before the eleventh century, practically no judgment of apostasy could have been passed. This changed during the eleventh century, when jurists lowered the criteria that prevented the death penalty from being executed. During the following centuries, judges could interpret the law in various ways, setting either high or low criteria for apostasy 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 the hypocrites (al-munafiqun). 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 Qur’an 49:14, a group of Bedouins is described as Muslims but not believers. This led to heated 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 meanings of Muslim and Mu’min is one of the subjects that led to the First Civil War (656-662). One party, the Kharijs, claimed that committing a capital sin (kabira) constitutes unbelief (kufr). A group of radical Kharijis felt justified to kill grave sinners as unbelievers and thus legitimized the killing of the second caliph, ‘Uthman (644-656). At about the same time, Muslims agreed on the death penalty for apostasy from Islam; this judgment is based on the authority of a report (hadith) ofthe Prophet that said, ‘‘whoever changes his religion has his head cut off.’’ After the Kharijis lost the First
Civil War, the various groups of their enemies, who dominated the early development of Muslim law, were terrified by the prospect of Muslims killing each other over accusations of apostasy and worked to abate the harsh punishment the Prophetical hadith provides.
Muslim jurists agreed that actions other than the explicit rejection of belief in Islam could not constitute apostasy. In other words, committing 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 been invited three times to repent and return to Islam. The legal institution of the invitation to repent (istitaba) is mentioned neither in the Qur’an nor in the Prophetical hadith; in early Muslim law, it nevertheless became a necessary condition for convicting an apostate. It safeguarded the ability of an accused apostate to have a chance to return to Islam, fully avert punishment, and be reinstated in all rights as a Muslim. Subsequently, only those Muslim apostates could be punished who openly declared their breaking away from Islam and who maintained their rejection in the face of capital punishment.
Most early jurists understood that the general application of the invitation to repent 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 fit well into a situation during the eighth and ninth centuries, when conversion to Islam happened collectively and often only nominally. Malik ibn Anas (715-795), the founder of the Maliki school of law, ruled differently, saying that zanadiqa should not be given the right to repent and could thus be killed straightaway. Zana-diqa here means clandestine apostates, but later jurists interpreted the term more widely. This ruling meant that the Maliki school of jurisprudence was, in practice, less tolerant toward heterodox Muslim views than the others, and it allowed Maliki jurists to apply the death penalty to accused apostates who had never explicitly broken with Islam. In these cases, heterodox views were regarded as evidence of clandestine apostasy.
During the eleventh 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 middle of the eleventh century, scholars from all schools argued that, in the case of the political agents of the
Isma‘ili counter-Caliphate, no invitation to repent should be granted, and the agents could be killed as apostates. This view was shared by the influential Shafi‘i jurist al-Ghazali (1058-1111), who wrote systematically about the criteria of apostasy. Whoever held the views that the world was not created at one point in time, that God is not omniscient, or that the resurrection in the afterlife does not extend to the body was, according to al-Ghazali, an apostate and could be killed.
Frank Griffel
See also Hadith; Heresy and Heretics; Fatimids; Ibn Hanbal; Kharijs; Malikism; Schools of Jurisprudence
World History
