Apostasy in the Abrahamic traditions

Every one of the Abrahamic traditions has had to decide what becomes of a member who leaves. The answers differ sharply, and each has changed over time: from the rabbinic insistence that a Jew remains a Jew, through the Christian empire’s civil penalties and the medieval Church’s death sentence for heresy, to the classical Islamic jurists’ capital ruling and the modern Muslim scholarship that has reopened it.

Judaism: once an Israelite

The Hebrew Bible prescribes death for one who entices others to serve other gods.¹ Rabbinic law, however, settled on a principle drawn from the story of Achan: an Israelite who has sinned remains an Israelite.² In practice the principle meant that a Jew who adopted another religion kept the family obligations and rights of a Jew: his marriage stood, a divorce still required his writ, and he could still inherit.³ The standard modern reference work on Judaism states the consequence plainly: in Jewish religious law it is technically impossible for a Jew to change religion.⁴ Later authorities distinguished the provocative apostate from the one who left for convenience, and some medieval jurists took a harder line on the descendants of converts, but the governing principle has held.⁵

Christianity: from civil penalty to religious freedom

The first Christians suffered for their faith and could not punish anyone for leaving it. Once the Roman Empire became Christian, apostasy turned into a civil offence. A law of 381 CE, preserved in the code compiled under Theodosius II, stripped Christians who had become pagans of the right to make a will; a law of 391 CE barred those who had “betrayed the holy faith” from giving testimony and from inheriting.⁶ In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas argued that heretics, who corrupt the faith, deserve not only excommunication but death at the hands of the secular authority, a judgement that shaped the practice of the Inquisition.⁷

The Catholic Church reversed that position in 1965. The Second Vatican Council declared that every person has a right to religious freedom and must be immune from coercion by any human power in matters of belief.⁸ The change is recent: the right that Western Christianity now defends as its own was, for most of its history, one it denied.

Islam: scripture, law and reconsideration

The Qur’an condemns apostasy in strong terms and warns that the deeds of one who dies an unbeliever are lost in this world and the next.⁹ It describes people who believed, disbelieved, believed again and disbelieved once more, which presumes that they were living among the believers throughout.¹⁰ It prescribes no worldly punishment for apostasy anywhere in its text, and it states the principle that there is no compulsion in religion, lā ikrāha fī al-dīn (لا إكراه في الدين, no compulsion in religion).¹¹

The classical jurists of all four Sunni schools nonetheless held that an adult male apostate who refused to repent after being invited to do so should be put to death, drawing on reports from the Prophet’s sayings and the wars against the tribes that broke away after his death.¹² That ruling has been challenged from within the tradition itself. Taha Jabir al-Alwani, a graduate of al-Azhar and a member of the Islamic Fiqh Academy of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, argued in a detailed study that neither the Qur’an nor the Sunnah mandates death for a change of belief alone, that the Prophet never put anyone to death for apostasy, and that the early penalties concerned apostasy joined to rebellion or treason against the community.¹³ On this reading, leaving Islam is a grave sin answered in the next world, and the state’s concern begins only where the act becomes a crime against public order.

Mandaeism: a closed community

Mandaeism does not seek converts, and belonging is a matter of birth and observance within the community. Marriage is arranged within Mandaean families, and a bride must come of a suitable Mandaean family with no taint of alien blood.¹⁴ For so small a community the practical question has been loss through marriage outside it and through emigration, not the punishment of those who leave.

A modern case: Malaysia

Malaysia shows how these questions persist in a modern constitutional state. Its Federal Constitution defines a Malay as a person who professes Islam, habitually speaks Malay and conforms to Malay custom, so that a Malay who leaves Islam also leaves the constitutional category, and the special position it carries.¹⁵ In 2007 the Federal Court, in a two to one decision, dismissed the appeal of Lina Joy, who sought to have “Islam” removed from her identity card, holding that a person who wishes to leave a religion must do so according to that religion’s own law, which for Muslims places the question before the Syariah courts.¹⁶

What the comparison shows

Judaism answered apostasy by refusing to let a Jew stop being one. Christianity and Islam, once each held political power, both attached severe penalties to leaving; Christianity abandoned them in the twentieth century under the pressure of the modern state, while in Islam the argument against the classical ruling has been made from the Qur’an itself, which never prescribed it. See Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

Further reading: The Sabians of the Qur’an and The Amman Message and A Common Word.

Notes

1. Deuteronomy 13:6-10. ↩
2. Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 44a, on Joshua 7:11. ↩
3. Central Conference of American Rabbis, responsum “Apostate,” citing Sanhedrin 44a and Avodah Zarah 26b. ↩
4. Encyclopaedia Judaica, s.v. “Apostasy,” vol. 3, p. 211, as quoted in “When Is a Jew Not a Jew?”, Israel My Glory. ↩
5. Central Conference of American Rabbis, op. cit., on the mumar l’hachis and mumar l’teavon; Responsa of Maharshdam, Even HaEzer 10, as discussed in Shmuel Kadosh, “Once a Jew, Always a Jew? Part 3,” Kol Torah, 9 August 2018. ↩
6. Codex Theodosianus 16.7.1 (381 CE) and 16.7.4 (391 CE), in the translation reproduced by Scroll Publishing; cf. “Apostasy,” Encyclopedia of Religion, Encyclopedia.com. ↩
7. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 11, a. 3, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1920). ↩
8. Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae (7 December 1965), §2. ↩
9. Qur’an 2:217. ↩
10. Qur’an 4:137; cf. 3:86-90. ↩
11. Qur’an 2:256. ↩
12. Taha Jabir al-Alwani, Apostasy in Islam: A Historical and Scriptural Analysis, trans. Nancy Roberts (London: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2011), chapter “Muslim Jurists’ Views on the Penalty for Apostasy.” ↩
13. Ibid., chapters “Apostasy during the Prophet’s Life” and “Response to Apostasy in the Verbal Sunnah”; cf. the review by the American Journal of Islam and Society (2013). ↩
14. E. S. Drower, The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), p. 59. ↩
15. Federal Constitution of Malaysia, Article 160; Articles 11 and 153; cf. Radzuwan Ab Rashid and Azweed Mohamad, New Media Narratives and Cultural Influence in Malaysia (Singapore: Springer, 2019), pp. 1-2. ↩
16. Lina Joy v Majlis Agama Islam Wilayah Persekutuan & Ors [2007] 3 AMR 693 (Federal Court, 30 May 2007). ↩