The 'Hadd' Punishment Against Apostasy from Islam

Recently, Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, a prominent British Muslim convert to Islam, issued an ‘apology’ on Twitter/X in which he clarified: “I fully believe in, support and defend all Islamic laws, including hadd for ridda.” As the historian and linguist Marijn van Putten notes, just remove the veil of the Arabic terminology and what Hamza is calling for is the application of the death penalty against apostates (i.e. people who have abandoned Islam). While Marijn decried Hamza’s remarks and suggested he would report them, Professor Jonathan Brown of Georgetown University (himself a convert to Islam) offered soft apologia for Hamza’s position, describing them as “totally unremarkable religious belief.” For his part, Javad Hashmi of Harvard University, who co-hosted a Bible-Qur’an course with famous New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, critiqued Hamza’s position as a “backwards, medieval view” and offered a substantive refutation of it, but he nonetheless suggested it was reflective of ‘cancel culture’ to report such views as problematic to social media or employers. That there are academics at prestigious Western universities offering these sorts of soft apologetics for Hamza’s position is remarkable to me, but I guess the issue requires some explanation.

To be clear, I take a dim view of a lot of discourse about ‘moderate’ or ‘good’ Muslims. I think it is condescending at best to somehow require Muslims to establish ‘moderate credentials’ by endorsing contemporary social liberal positions like support for gay marriage and gay pride parades, or prove ‘political moderation’ by declaring love for Israel or supporting Western foreign policymaking in the Middle East and wider Muslim world. Nor do I think Muslims should be required to establish ‘moderate’ credentials by abandoning certain traditional positions like refusing to give an Islamic seal of approval to marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man, or believing that Islam is the one true religion and that there is an obligation to engage in da‘wa (advocacy/outreach) for the faith, or believing that apostates will be held accountable and punished by God in the next world.

However, none of this means that there are no red lines to be drawn. It is not okay to be advocating the death penalty, legal penalties or any sort of intimidation and attacks against apostates. The freedom to change one’s religion- either by conversion to a different religion or abandoning religion entirely- is a fundamental one. No ifs or buts about the matter.

Although I think the term extremism and the associated noun/adjective extremist are often too loosely applied, it is legitimate to call Hamza’s belief in the necessity to execute apostates a form of extremism, however much he wants to emphasise that the process should be done through an Islamic legal court. For Hamza, the survival and success of Muslims as an in-group cannot be separated from taking hostile action in this world against apostates, an out-group that is to be persecuted merely by virtue of having left Islam. Professor Brown’s defence that Hamza’s view might be “totally unremarkable” by the standards of medieval Islamic jurisprudence does not strip it of its extremist quality, for it is perfectly possible for extremist beliefs and worldviews to become mainstream in an in-group at a given place and time. If it were to be a mainstream belief among Catholics worldwide in this day and age (for example) that those who left Catholicism should be executed, that belief would be an extremist one.

One could accept that there might be something to the view of the need to take worldly action against apostates if apostates in general constituted a religious grouping with an established hierarchy and ‘code of conduct’ in which apostates were required to prove their apostasy credentials by engaging in forms of real harm against Muslims, such as stealing from Muslims, physically assaulting Muslims, harassing Muslims in the street, kidnapping Muslims for ransom, murdering Muslims and desecrating mosques and Islamic holy sites. Of course, there has never been such a grouping of apostates. It does not exist now and it never will exist. In so far as organisations to bring together apostates exist, they are groups advocating for the right of people to leave Islam without facing legal consequences and physical intimidation, and also arguing against the truth claims of Islam. None of these organisations advocates harming Muslims. If Muslims want to push back against these organisations’ attempts to refute Islam’s validity, they can do so through counter-arguments. If an apostate or a group of apostates should engage in the forms of harm against Muslims as described above, then the individual or group should be held accountable through the law. But the criminal conduct should be charged and not the apostasy, which might only be discussed as a motivation for the conduct.

In the bigger picture anyway, apostates are very diverse in their attitudes and positions and can hardly be thought of as a single ‘sect’ simply because they share the attribute of having left Islam, let alone be deemed a collective doing actual harm to Muslims. To name some very different random examples of apostates: (i) David Wulstan Myatt, known for his philosophy of παθει μαθος (“learning by experience”), Ancient Greek translations, and interests in pre-Socratic philosophers and the hermeticism contained in the Divine Pymander, (ii) the Iranian-American intellectual Sohrab Ahmari, who was initially raised a Muslim and then became an atheist before finally converting to Catholicism, best known as a conservative and critic of the neo-conservatism he once espoused, (iii) the British pop singer Zayn Malik, (iv) former Miss USA and one-time aspiring professional wrestler Rima Fakih. These individuals would be very surprised if it were to be put to them that they should be seen as part of a collective actually harming Muslims.

As for Hashmi’s concerns about ‘cancel culture’, I accept that there can sometimes be a risk of overblown outrage about some opinion or another. In reality though, few if any of those who speak against ‘cancel culture’ or express anxiety about it are actual absolutists on the issue and think that no views can reasonably lead to adverse professional consequences for the one who expresses them. Professional bodies and educational institutions are entitled to set their own codes of conduct and can reasonably view explicit incitements to hatred and calls to persecute and kill people on the basis of their religious and/or ethnic identity as unacceptable behaviour that might bring their professions and institutions into disrepute if tolerated. In a similar vein, it is not unreasonable for social media applications to have rules against actual calls for persecution and execution of people on the basis of religion and/or ethnicity, and for users to be reported and de-platformed for expressing them.

For example, if a professor at a university or a teacher at a school were to say that Islam should be seen as a form of ‘treason’ against the constitutions of Western countries and that Muslims should therefore be imprisoned, deported or killed, it would not be unreasonable to expect that the students would complain about such remarks to the university or school, leading to disciplinary action and possible dismissal from employment. I indeed expect that Hamza and Hashmi would be upset to hear any professor or school-teacher in a Western country advocating such a view and I somehow doubt they would worry about ‘cancel culture’ if the individual consequently got fired from his/her job. Nor would I expect them to be very sorry to see someone’s account suspended on Twitter for advocating death penalty laws against conversion to Islam in Western countries.

To reiterate then, there is no reasonable defence or apologia for Hamza’s views here. Calling to execute apostates- whether through vigilantism or a court process- is an extremist belief, and it is not unreasonable to expect him to face denunciation and professional and social ostracism as a consequence.

More generally, if Muslims want to establish the validity of their faith, they are not going to do so by threatening legal punishments, attacks and intimidation against those who choose to leave it. In fact, such measures give the impression that there is something bad or wrong about the faith that requires coercion to maintain adherence to it. Instead, let there be the freedom to accept or leave the faith, with proofs established through discourse and argument.