Murder in the Name of Allah — Page 74
CHAPTER 7. PUNISHMENT FOR APOSTASY. In earlier chapters we have given numerous references from the Holy. Quran and the history of Islam to expose the fallacy that Islam prescribes any corporal punishment for those who renounce Islam as their faith. We examined at length the most common arguments presented by the advocates of death for apostasy, namely the report of Ikramah and the incident of zakat in Hazrat Abu Bakr's time. Some other arguments are examined in this chapter. . It is difficult to assess whether the concept of coercion in Islam had its birth on Islamic soil or was the child of the orientalists' imagination and was later on transferred to the lap of Islam. Having examined this in the light of Islamic history, I honestly believe that the idea first took root in the Islamic world itself and that it is wrong of us to blame the orientalists for having initiated it. They picked it up from the Muslims: before the orientalists were even born, the idea seems to have been present in medieval Islamic thought. It originated in the late Umayyad dynasty. Throughout the Abbaside period, the idea continued to flourish and was further strengthened because the Abbaside sovereigns wanted to use force not only against the enemies of Islam but also against their own people. A licence for this was not infrequently sought from Muslim scholars under their influence. The concept has therefore arisen from the conduct and policies of the post-Khilafat-i Rashida' Muslim governments of Baghdad. . Looking on from the outside, Western scholars believed that this was an Islamic teaching, but the fact was that it was not Islamic at all. It was the basis of the behaviour of some Muslim governments. We should remember that the idea had its birth in an age when all over the world the use of force for the spread of influence and ideology was a common feature and no exception was taken to this. . It is clear that the allegation that Islam advocates the use of force for the spread of its ideology does not originate from a study of the sources 74