Death to the apostates! (sans repentence)

Islam Online is one of the top 1,000 sites on the net according to Alexa. Every Friday I will offer a "taste" of learned commentary from that website for your edification. Today, apostates, or irtidad.

Dr. Yusuf Al-Qaradawi "is a world-renowned scholar and head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) and president of the International Union for Muslim Scholars (IUMS)." He has been involved in the InterFaith Cultural Organization. Dr. Qaradawi says:

The greatest kind of danger that faces Muslims is that which threatens their moral aspect of existence, i.e., their belief. That is why apostasy from Islam is regarded as one of the most dangerous threats to the Muslim community. The ugliest intrigue the enemies of Islam have plotted against Islam has been to try to lure its followers away from it; they have even used force for this purpose.
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The third and most dangerous and cunning kind is the secular invasion, which still plays its role in the Muslim world, sometimes openly, and sometimes in disguise. It seeks to undermine true Islam and approves of the superstitious manifestations that are falsely claimed to belong to Islam.

The duty of the Muslim community -- in order to preserve its identity -- is to combat apostasy in all its forms and wherefrom it comes, giving it no chance to pervade in the Muslim world.
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Muslims are to seriously resist individual apostasy before it seriously intensifies and develops into a collective one.

That is why the Muslim jurists are unanimous that apostates must be punished, yet they differ as to determining the kind of punishment to be inflicted upon them. The majority of them, including the four main schools of jurisprudence (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi`i, and Hanbali) as well as the other four schools of jurisprudence (the four Shiite schools of Az-Zaidiyyah, Al-Ithna-`ashriyyah, Al-Ja`fariyyah, and Az-Zaheriyyah) agree that apostates must be executed.
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For example, Ibn `Abbas quoted the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) as having said, "Whoever changes his religion, then kill him."
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Major apostasy, which the apostate proclaims and openly calls for in speech or writing, is to be, with all the more reason, severely punished by the death penalty, according to the majority of scholars and the apparent meaning of the Prophet's hadiths. Otherwise, An-Nakh`i and Ath-Thawri's view which was built on `Umar's attitude may be followed.

Apostates who call for apostasy from Islam have not only become disbelievers in Islam but have also become enemies of Islam and the Muslim nation. They, by doing so, fall under the category of those who wage war against Almighty Allah and His Messenger and spread mischief in the land.
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The death penalty with regard to apostasy is to be applied only to those who proclaim their apostasy and call for others to do the same. Islam lays down this severe punishment in order to protect its unity and the identity of its community. Every community in this world has basic foundations that are to be kept inviolable, such as identity, loyalty, and allegiance. Accordingly, no community accepts that a member thereof changes its identity or turns his or her loyalty to its enemies. They consider betrayal of one's country a serious crime, and no one has ever called for giving people a right to change their loyalty from a country to another whenever they like.
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Some contemporary writers who are not versed in religious knowledge object to the penalty of proclaimed apostasy being death by saying that this penalty is not mentioned in the Qur'an. It is only mentioned in a hadith ahad (hadith that is narrated by people whose number does not reach that of the mutawatir, which is hadith that is narrated by such a large number of people that they cannot be expected to agree upon a lie, all of them together); and hadiths ahad, according to them, are not taken as evidences for the legal punishments prescribed by Shari`ah.

But this objection is refutable in many aspects as follows. First, according to the scholarly consensus, the authentic Sunnah is a source for applied rulings in Shari`ah. Almighty Allah says, [Say: Obey Allah and obey the Messenger.] (An-Nur 24:54). He also says, [Whoso obeyeth the Messenger obeyeth Allah.] (An-Nisaa' 4:80)

As for the hadiths specifying the death penalty for apostates, they have been proven to be authentic. Besides, they were put into effect by the Companions in the era of the Rightly-Guided Caliphs.

Read the full article.

Have a good weekend!