By
Some Remarks Concerning Jonathan AC Brown's Recent Article on Apostasy
Note: You would have to read Dr. Brown’s article https://yaqeeninstitute.org/en/jonathan-brown/apostasy/ in full before reading this.
Dr. Brown starts off his article by saying:
“Finally, a third set of laws is for the ruler or political authority to implement based on the best interests of society. The Shariah ruling on Muslims who decide to leave Islam belongs to this third group.”
As we will see, Dr. Brown did not present any actual direct and explicit proof to support this stance.
Dr. Brown said:
“Implemented in the past to protect the integrity of the Muslim community, today this important goal can best be reached by Muslim governments using their right to set punishments for apostasy aside.”
In the entire article of his, Dr. Brown presents no actual proof for this. He just presumes that his readers would accept this as a given. While the truth of the matter is that there is no reason for us to believe why apostasy laws today (if they were implemented in a proper Islamic state) wouldn’t serve the same benefits they did in the past. This point was simply not addressed.
Dr. Brown said:
“Along the same lines, the problem with ridda in Islam was not that a person was exercising their freedom of conscience and choosing to no longer follow the religion. The problem was when such a decision became a public act with political implications.”
What does Dr. Brown mean exactly by “public act with political implications” and why wouldn’t that same logic apply today in a modern Islamic state?
So if someone today were to publicly announce that he became Christian, is there a “political” implication there? We need details here (and then proof for those details). No one is propagating witch hunts and inquisition councils, rather the issue here is with someone publicly proclaiming his apostasy without getting violent. Do we still apply the punishment on him if he doesn’t repent or not?
Dr. Brown said:
“In the logic of this order, questioning Islam’s primacy was to undermine the societal order itself. As a result, all pre-modern Muslim schools of law considered apostasy to be a serious crime."
Dr. Brown also said:
“That apostasy was understood primarily as a threat to an overarching political order and not as a crime in and of itself is clear from how Muslim jurists described it.”
Notice that Dr. Brown said… “As a result…” and he also said that the jurists said that apostasy is “not as a crime in and of itself”, while in fact those very same jurists said that persistence in that الكفر الغليظ (i.e. “crude” kufr) is the actual reason they are being punished for.
Did Dr. Brown cite any classical jurists for us who would support his theory? No, unfortunately. His entire “order of the world under heaven” theory is simply a modern theory being retrojectively read back into the books of Fiqh.
Dr. Brown said:
“Apostasy differed from other serious crimes, such as fornication and murder, because on its own it did not transgress the rights of others.”
How about the rights of the Islamic state? How about the rights of Allah? Didn’t the very same as-Sarakhsi (whom Dr. Brown later on cites from) say:
وهذا لان القتل جزاء على الردة لان الرجوع عن الاقرار بالحق من أعظم الجرائم ولهذا كان قتل المرتد من خالص حق الله تعالى
“The killing is due to the apostasy itself. This is because renegading from the truth is from amongst the worst of crimes. It is of the right of Allah that the apostate be killed.”
Dr. Brown then proceeds to talk about as-Sarakhsi’s stance.
What he didn’t quote from al-Sarakhsi however was when he said:
وبالاصرار على الكفر يكون محاربا للمسلمين
“And persisting upon his kufr makes him an antagonist against the Muslims”
Notice that as-Sarakhshi said that it’s the very insistence on the kufr itself which makes the person an antagonist and not any actual physical threats of violence, intention to topple the state, intention to disrupt public order etc. This point should be made very clearly in Dr. Brown’s article. Because many people reading Dr. Brown’s paper would get the impression that Dr. Brown is strictly stating that apostasy should be punished if it leads to public disorder.
And once again we ask Dr. Brown: Why wouldn’t as-Sarakhsi’s words still hold true for a modern Islamic state?! Seriously why not? A clear and direct answer is needed here.
So when Dr. Brown says:
“Someone who repeatedly and insistently proclaimed their apostasy from Islam was akin to a violent criminal threatening public safety, al-Sarakhsī explained.”
This is not a true and accurate representation of as-Sarakhsi’s stance at all. As-Sarakhsi is very clear that the punishment is for the actual kufr itself (i.e. that’s the علة or reason), and this is accompanied by the wisdom of maintaining public order, etc.
Dr. Brown then talks about how in classical times, hadd punishments required the permission of the Caliph and consultation with the judges. So what? How’s that relevant to the actual ruling in Islam itself? As Dr. Brown himself stated in the article, this also applied to theft and premeditated murder. If the Islamic states followed a certain policy when it came to approvals on punishment setting, then fine. That does nothing to support the case of Dr. Brown here and it’s simply a red herring.
Dr. Brown said:
“ But mainly what shaped the Muslim juristic tradition’s position on apostasy from Islam was how it understood order and identity. This influenced the rules on apostasy more than any clear prescription in the Quran or the Prophet’s teachings.”
A very important remark, yet not backed up by any evidence.
Dr. Brown makes this remark in passing and assumes that his readers should accept it, while such a remark requires an entire and extensive book in and of itself just to prove that what it is saying is actually true.
The fact of the matter is that Dr. Brown’s remark isn’t true. And this could easily be proven by referring back to the books of the jurists and reading what they said on apostates, and you will see that the hadith of the prophet… “Whoever changes his religion, kill him” is the driving factor for why they held this view.
Dr. Brown could respond by saying that the hadith was what they based their ruling on for scriptural precedence, but it wasn’t the main motivational factor. But, one could argue that this is the case for literally everything then. One could argue that the jurists forbade riba because it was an unjust policy. One could argue that the jurists forbade fornication because it was bad for society, etc. etc. We shouldn’t be conflating the wisdom behind rulings with their actual scriptural basis.
Dr. Brown said:
“Muslim scholars have disagreed on two other details of apostasy. The Hanafi school differs with the other schools of law in holding that women apostates are not killed but only imprisoned. They base this on a Hadith considered reliable by Hanafis in which the Prophet banned killing women who left Islam. The majority of Muslim scholars, however, consider this Hadith to be unreliable and instead follow the principle that men and women are treated equally in Hudud punishments.”
To be fair to the Hanafis, they mainly appealed to the authentic ahadith of the prophet where he forbade killing of women and children. They then argued that such ahadith restrict the application of the “whoever changes his religion…” hadith, while the other schools of thought argued that it was the other way around.
I would also add that the Hanafis didn’t simply say that the woman would be imprisoned, but that she would also be lashed every 3 days until she repents as well.
Dr. Brown said:
“There is no reliable evidence that the Prophet ever executed anyone for apostasy, as was observed by the famous scholar of Cordoba, Ibn al-Ṭallāʿ (d. 1103).[28]”
Assuming for the sake of argument alone that this is true, how does this serve as a proof when it’s possible that the opportunity to apply the hadd for apostasy didn’t arise during the Prophet’s time?
Also, this assumes that what Imam Ibn al-Ṭallāʿactually said is true, since many other scholars would beg to differ. For there is evidence that the Prophet did have apostates killed.
For example, there is the story of the man who made it halal to marry the wife of his father, and the Prophet had him killed.
There are other arguments out there which prove that the Prophet had apostates killed.
Dr. Brown said:
“When one of the Companions, ʿUbaydallāh bin Jaḥsh left Islam and became Christian while the Muslims were seeking refuge in Ethiopia, the Prophet did not order him punished.”
Keeping aside the questionable authenticity of this story (since some authors argued that the isnads for this story are not saheeh), two points to mention here are:
1) How does Dr. Brown know that this incident didn’t occur BEFORE Allah revealed the ruling on apostasy to the Prophet?
2) Why does Dr. Brown think that the Prophet should have ordered for the ruling of apostasy to be implemented in a land where the Muslims did not have authority?
Dr. Brown said:
“The Treaty of Ḥudaybiyya, which the Prophet concluded with the Quraysh, stated that if anyone decided to leave the Muslim community in Medina no harm would befall them. There was no mention of a punishment for apostasy.”
What did the treaty actually stipulate though? It stipulated the following…
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If a Quraysh person comes to Muhammad (i.e., after accepting Islam) without the permission of his guardian, Muhammad shall return him to them, but if one of the Muhammad’s people come to the Quraysh, he shall not be returned.
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If a Qurayshite abandons his beliefs and goes to Prophet Muhammad, then Prophet Muhammad must return him. If a Muslim recants and goes to Quraysh, then Quraysh do not have to return him.
There's a big difference here. This is a matter of returning and not returning people who come to them. The only thing that the Prophet agreed to was that if someone went to the Quraysh, then the Quraysh don't have to return him. That's all. It doesn't say that the Prophet has to let the person leave Medinah. The Muslims could wake up one day and find out a Muslim escaped to Makkah. According to the treaty, the Muslims wouldn't have a right to demand him back. However, if the Quraysh realized one morning that someone accepted Islam and ran away to Medinah, then it would be binding upon the Muslims to return them back.
How does this support Dr. Brown’s stance? This is just a red herring.
Dr. Brown said:
“In fact, when a man who had come to the Prophet just the day before to pledge his loyalty to Islam wanted to be released from his oath, the Prophet let him go.”
The hadith Dr. Brown is referring to could be found here https://sunnah.com/bukhari/93/76
Regarding this hadith, Imam An-Nawawi quotes in Ibn al-Teen who says that before the conquest of Mecca, Hijrah to the Prophet was obligatory and he argues that this could indicate that this incident took place before the conquest of Makkah and the bedouin was asking to violate this condition. If that's the case then this would have been a sin. Furthermore, even if the incident took place after the conquest of Makkah (where hijrah would have been permissible), the Prophet could have still refused the person's pledge out of it being makruh as some scholars argued (but I don't take that position). AND EVEN IF the Prophet understood the person to apostatize and left Medina, YOU HAVE TO PROVE that this incident took place after the Prophet's hadeeth "Kill those who change their religion". So there are a lot of things Dr. Brown needs to prove here.
Furthermore……..
The hadith mentions that the man had a fever and other hadith clarify that it was due to Medina’s weather (and not disbelieving in Islam) that the man wanted to cancel his pledge. That’s why the hadith mentions he had a “fever”, otherwise it would have been an irrelevant point to mention.
So, what interpretation of this hadith makes sense then? Let’s compare and contrast shall we…
Dr. Brown’s Understanding... "The man came up to the Prophet and basically said to him "I don't want to be a Muslim anymore, so please let me go"
Would the Prophet say "No I won't let you leave Islam" to a person who doesn't want to be a Muslim? Why would the Prophet want someone to pretend to be a Muslim and stay in the community? Why would the Prophet want munafiqeen amongst the Muslims? The Prophet recognized that only sincere Muslims are truly Muslims, wouldn't the Prophet instead have re-initiated his da'wah to this person instead of forcing him to remain a Muslim? Why didn't the Prophet follow the lakum deenukum wali ya deen (unto your religion and unto me my own) principle with this guy then? Was the Prophet Muhammad so desperate to keep followers?
Second problem, why on earth would this Bedoiun even bother asking Prophet Muhammad his permission to leave Islam when he doesn't even believe that the Prophet Muhammad is a prophet anymore? He could just pick up his bags and leave (that's what he eventually did, right?). It's not like the Prophet had a checkpoint surrounding Medinah checking who leaves and doesn't.
Mainstream Scholarly View Understanding... "The man came up to the Prophet and basically said to him "I know I have to stay with you here in Medina, but the weather is killing me and I can't stand it"
This makes perfect sense in light of the fact that before the conquest of Makkah, hijrah to the land of kuffar was impermissible. The Prophet kept refusing the man's request as he wanted the man to be more patient and bear the weather.
The man also constantly asked the Prophet's permission because he was a Muslim and he cared about the Prophet's permission to leave, but eventually the man's Eemaan was soo low that he couldn't bear the weather anymore for the sake of his faith.
As for the Prophet's statement " "Madina is like the blacksmith's furnace. It removes impurities and purifies the good." as An-Nawawi explained, it means that those who completed their faith stay in Medina, while those who haven't leave.
It’s ironic that modernists (NOT talking about Dr. Brown here, as I do not believe Dr. Brown is a modernist in his usul) interpret that hadith in that way in order to escape the "killing apostates" argument and trying to show that Islam is tolerant of people's beliefs, yet that very interpretation actually makes the Prophet out to be someone who doesn't respect religious freedom, since according to that interpretation the Bedoiun man wanted to leave Islam, but the Prophet didn't let him.
Dr. Brown said:
“Imam al-Shāfiʿī himself notes how, during the Prophet’s time in Medina, “Some people believed and then apostatized. Then they again took on the outer trappings of faith. But the Messenger of God did not kill them.”
Imam al-Shafi’ is speaking about munafiqun here and not apostates, since he said… “they again took on the outer trappings of faith” and we know that the Prophet didn’t have the munafiqun killed because he had to judge them by their outward behavior.
This is a red herring.
Dr. Brown said:
“This is equally clear in the conduct of the early caliphs. When six men from the Bakr bin Wā’il tribe apostatized during a campaign in southern Iran, the leaders of the army had them killed. When the caliph Umar was informed of this, he upbraided the commanders. Had he been making the decision, the caliph explained, he would have offered the men “a way back in from the door they took out,” or he would have put them in prison.”
This has already been addressed over here https://theislamiclens.wordpress.com/2015/12/10/comments-on-classical-islamic-views-on-the-punishment-for-apostasy/
Dr. Brown said:
“When the pious Umayyad caliph ʿUmar bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (d. 720) was told that a group of recent converts to Islam in northern Iraq had apostatized, he allowed them to revert to their previous status as a protected non-Muslim minority.”
Also addressed over here https://theislamiclens.wordpress.com/2015/12/10/comments-on-classical-islamic-views-on-the-punishment-for-apostasy/
Dr. Brown said:
“After the Muslim armies conquered the city of Bukhara in 673-4 CE, its inhabitants kept converting to Islam and then returning to their previous faith of Zoroastrianism as soon as the Arab armies left town. The army had to keep returning to reestablish discipline. At no point was anyone killed for this.”
Well, if they kept on repenting back to Islam, why would they be killed, since there is no limit on repenting back?
Dr. Brown said:
“Of course, some people were executed for apostasy in the early Islamic period. Yet, in instances where details are provided, what stands out is their public nature. The apostasy occurs not in private but comes with a very public announcement by the person in question. This is exemplified in the famous story of the caliph Ali reportedly executing a man named al-Mustawrad al-ʿIjlī for converting to Christianity. Although reports of this event overall are unreliable according to most Muslim scholars, what seems to have condemned al-Mustawrad was not converting but rather rubbing this in Ali’s face publicly.[36] “
Dr. Brown said that Sh. Al-Albani declared this weak, however if one carefully reads the words of Sh. Al-Albani over here http://islamport.com/l/alb/2455/9750.htm, one would see that Al-Albani was only criticizing one of the chains for the story and not all the chains. There are more reliable chains for this story such as this one http://library.islamweb.net/newlibrary/display_book.php?bk_no=73&ID=2172&idfrom=17803&idto=17837&bookid=73&startno=19 or this one http://library.islamweb.net/newlibrary/display_book.php?bk_no=73&ID=2172&idfrom=17803&idto=17837&bookid=73&startno=20 and several others when all combined together give credibility to the story.
As for what Dr. Brown said regarding Ali, I can’t express how disappointed I am in what Dr. Brown has said. I hope Dr. Brown removes this bit from his article, as this is not respectful to Ali’s stature. Ali won’t kill someone just for simply “rubbing something in his face”. The narrations are clear in that the crime of the individual was pure apostasy.
Dr. Brown said:
“It also explains why centuries of Muslim jurists all affirmed a ruling that seems to clash so clearly with the Quran’s repeated statements on the freedom of religious choice, a choice that each person makes before God as a determination of their personal conscience.”
In other words, how could all these jurists for several centuries be so incompetent to ignore these clear teachings of the Qur’an?
How about the fact that they believed that the ahadeeth on apostasy restricting the meaning of those Qur’anic verses?
Where’s the rebuttal to such a simple response as that?
Dr. Brown said:
“The Quran warns those who abandon Islam after embracing it that their good deeds will mean nothing in this life or the next (Quran 2:217). It mentions no worldly punishment.”
So every time the Qur’an mentions a crime, it has to mention both the worldly and hereafter punishment? Says who? What rule of Qur’anic hermeneutics is this based on? Isn’t this just a subjective and non-academic argument? Who’s the first one who came up with such an argument?
Dr. Brown said:
“The Arabic word used to describe what they had done, irtaddū, was understood in the early Islamic period to be a public act of political secession from or rebellion against the Muslim community.”
No proof presented whatsoever. Citations from dictionaries and jurists would be much appreciated. In fact, the scholars very clearly differentiated between the “rebel” and “apostate” and didn’t conflate the two.
Ibn Rushd al-Maliki in his "Bidayatul Mujtahid" said:
والمرتد إذا ظفر به قبل أن يحارب ، فاتفقوا على أنه يقتل الرجل لقوله - عليه الصلاة والسلام : " من بدل دينه فاقتلوه
“As for the apostate who is seized before he becomes belligerent (qabla an yuhaariba); they agreed that the male apostate is to be killed due to the saying of the Prophet peace be upon him: "Whoever changes his religion, kill him."
The scholars made the distinction between the belligerent and non-belligerent apostates.
Dr. Brown said:
“The second main piece of Hadith evidence for the apostasy ruling leaves a similar impression. When the Prophet says that a Muslim cannot be killed except as punishment for murder, adultery or leaving Islam, he qualifies the apostate here as one who “leaves his religion and forsakes the community (al-tārik li-dīnihi al-mufāriq li’l-jamāʿa)”[43] or, in another version, one who “makes war on God and His Messenger.”
Dealt with this already over here https://www.facebook.com/bassam.zawadi/posts/10157595995460245 in the comments section. One may follow the exchange between myself and Dr. Brown.
Dr. Brown said:
“The only Hadith evidence that does not include a specific political dimension for the crime of apostasy is the discussion between the Companions Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī and Muʿādh bin Jabal over a Jewish man who had converted to Islam and then left it. But this is only because the report has no real contextual information at all. Moreover, there is evidence that the caliph Umar was later informed about Abū Mūsā’s and Muʿādh’s decision and expressed his displeasure. “Could you not have imprisoned him for three days, fed him each day a loaf of bread, and asked him to repent?,” asked Umar. “He might have repented and returned to the command of God.”[45]”
This hadith is actually a big proof against Dr. Brown and Umar’s statement doesn’t indicate that he disagrees with the hadd of apostasy. Rather, Umar’s concerns was that the apostate didn’t have sufficient time to repent.
In this hadith there is enough context for us to know that the Jewish man wasn’t being violent or rebelling, yet the Sahabah still insisted on killing him for his apostasy.
As one reads Dr. Brown’s final section, one could find himself agreeing with him, yet disagreeing with him at the same time. And I believe the reason for that is due to the vagueness of Dr. Brown’s stance itself.
On the one hand, Dr. Brown argues that in the current state that we are in today, especially with the modern nation secular dictatorial states we have governing over Muslims, in addition to intellectual doubts pervading many Muslim minds, it doesn’t make so much sense to selectively apply the hadd of apostasy today. On the other hand, this same logic would also apply to many other Islamic laws as well, so why single out apostasy then?
As for where one may find himself disagreeing with Dr. Brown, it is the absence of what HE SHOULD have said as an orthodox and traditional Muslim. And that’s the ruling of apostasy still holds true till today, but could only applied accurately and validly in a proper Islamic state (may Allah hasten it to come soon). And whatever Dr. Brown has been arguing his entire article, despite my disagreeing with it (i.e. that the punishment for apostasy was viewed for its political ramifications, not theological), would not change in the 21st century in a proper Islamic state.
In other words, one could still argue back to Dr. Brown by saying… “Okay fine Dr. Brown, we will agree with you for the sake of argument that the apostasy law should be viewed for its political dimensions only. Well… nothing has changed, since that would still apply today!”
In essence, Dr. Brown HAS NOT shown any proof that the reasons he offered for the implementation of apostasy laws in the past, wouldn’t’ be applicable in a modern Islamic state. So in reality, what new contribution has Dr. Brown truly offered here?
Or perhaps Dr. Brown wasn’t aiming to show proof for that? It’s hard to tell, given the much vagueness in his article.