The latest issue of Democratiya includes Ophelia Benson’s review of Ibn Warraq’s Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out:
In his introductory chapter, Ibn Warraq reproduces a pronouncement on apostasy in Islam from the ultra-conservative Tehran daily Kayhan International in 1986. It includes this observation.
The anti-apostasy punishments of Islam are proper laws to rescue mankind from falling into the cesspool of treason, betrayal, and disloyalty and to remind the human being of his ideological commitments. A committed man should not violate his promise and vow, especially his promise to God. (p. 32.)
A more wrong-headed idea is difficult to imagine. To define changing one’s mind about any particular set of ideas and truth claims as treason, betrayal, and disloyalty is to forbid thinking itself. Making the human being’s ideological commitments a permanent, irrevocable matter of loyalty is to impose ossification, dogmatism, conformity, and plain mindless stubbornness on an entire society, or, worse, an entire global ‘community of believers’.
Indeed. The issue of Islamic apostasy and its punishment will, to sane people, most likely have an absurd, looking glass quality, and it may be difficult to grasp the seriousness, even excitement, with which mental freedom, and its punishment, is discussed. Here’s a clip from Kuwait’s Al-Risala TV, filmed November 5, 2007, in which Muslim scholars and audience members share their thoughts on piety and murder. One choice exchange hinges on the charming moral logic that a person is, of course, free to leave Islam – on the understanding that indignant believers are free to kill that person for doing so.
Audience member: Sir, if you become an apostate, your punishment is death. There is a great problem that most of us, 70% of us, are Muslims because they were born to Muslim fathers and mothers. Before a person converts to Islam, he has the liberty to choose, but remember that if you want to convert from Islam, you will be punished by death. So you have the liberty to choose, but on the condition…
Al-Sweidan: That’s not liberty.
Audience member: It has conditions…
Al-Sweidan: What you are saying is: You have the right to become an apostate, but I will kill you.
Audience member: That’s right. I won’t tell him not to.
Al-Sweidan: What can be worse than being killed?
Audience member: That’s why he will not become an apostate.
It may, again, be difficult to conceive of a belief system in which the individual is reduced so severely to a mere sub-unit of the collective and in which affiliation is, according to many, a decidedly one-way street. This belief in punishing doubt and intellectual freedom is an intimately vile contrivance and a profound corruption of moral autonomy. It’s also a tool for generating fear and a license for sadism disguised as piety. Insofar as such ideas are normative within Islamic theology and its institutions, widespread shame is warranted, along with disrepute, resistance and no small amount of disgust. For some strange reason, the term “Roach Motel” springs readily to mind.
Update: Meanwhile, closer to home…
Ibn Warraq can be heard debating with Tariq Ramadan and others here. Warraq’s latest book, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, is reviewed here by Rebecca Bynum. My discussion with Ophelia Benson can be found here.
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