The saga of Abdul Rehman’s conversion to Christianity may be over, but the aftermath is far from settled. Like a clockwork of hate, the episode has brought upon yet another wave of criticisms against Islam and its record for religious tolerance. But what few would realise is that the West has a history of religious intolerance and persecution of apostates that would put Muslim Afghanistan to shame.
Examine the following verse closely :
“If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying : Let us go and worship other gods, do not yield to him or listen to him. Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death. Your hand must be the first in putting him to death, and then the hands of all the people.“1
Despite all the staunch criticisms they make about Islam, that was not a verse from the Qur’an. In fact, the Qur’an is void of any instructions to murder apostates. Instead, the line above has been taken taken from Deuteronomy 13 : 6 – 9 that outlines very vividly, the fate of apostates and followers of other religions.
Another verse reads :
“And he should go and worship other gods and bow down to them or to the sun or the moon or all the army of the heavens, .….and you must stone such one with stones and such one must die.“2
And follow these verses, they did.
In May 1096, a group of Crusaders en route to the Holy Land to kill Muslims, stopped by a Rhineland town called Worms between Mannnheim and Mainz, near present day Germany to preach the message of God to its population of Jews. The Crusaders urged them to convert to Christianity, explaining that it is the only path to salvation.
But when the town refused, the Crusaders under the command of Count Emmich of Leiningen, dragged them out of their homes and put up a massacre of every one in the town. 800 people met a bloody death at the edge of a sword for their refusal to convert. Women and children were not spared and many were decapitated as blood flowed through the streets of the town. Some of them were even burnt alive as they took refuge in the very same church that the Crusaders have built and preached from.3
These acts were not committed by marginal sects acting in defiance of Christian self-understanding, but by Church-sanctioned forces who believed themselves to be acting in continuity with biblical precedent and divine mandate as understood in their own time.
Worms was definitely not the only town that was plundered over the years. Christian preachers storming their way from the West forced the religion upon the locals through threat and terror. In the city of Mainz, 1000 Jews met the same morbid fate when they refused to take up Christianity. Entire families were slaughtered systematically.
The author of Gesta Francorum wrote to describe the mayhem during the incident : “All the streets of the city on every side were full of corpses, so that no one could endure to be there because of the stench, nor could anyone walk along the narrow paths of the city except over the corpses of the dead’. Historians have referred to this obscure incident as the “first holocaust”.
The people of other religion who refused to convert into Christianity were not the only ones who were feverishly persecuted. Christians who were known to opt out of the religion or were seen as heretics, have been mercilessly put to death too over the course of history.
Somewhere around 1200, a new religion emerged in Western France amongst the people of Languedoc called Catharism and was gaining a steady stream of converts from the Christian world. The Cathars, as they are called, abjured marriage and the eating of meat in an effort to obtain purity. The new religion appealed to the Christians in a very refreshing way.
The spread of Catharism alarmed the Christians of Europe greatly and the Church sent in preachers and papals year after year to reverse the situation. In an effort to delegitimise the movement further, Catharism was declared a heresy and a deviant branch of Christianity. But the religion continued to flourish and threatened to spread to an even greater part of Europe.
The Christians could take it no more and in 1208, the Pope decided to unleash a full-blown crusade against the Cathars, known as the Albigensian Crusade. Thousands of apostates were slaughtered in the ensuing campaign, including 7000 residents of a town called Beziers who were locked and burnt in a church. A horrified onlooker rushed to the papal gates and reminded the Crusaders that some Christians were still trapped in the church together with the Cathars. The officer overseeing the massacre then made a remark that has resounded through the centuries : “Kill them all. God will know his own”.
It would be tempting to list all the other examples of Christians killing apostates in order to answer the growing wave of criticisms from the West against Islam. But that is not the point of this article. Two wrongs do not make one right.
The point is to compare the attitude of Christianity towards apostasy then and now. Christianity today has none of these violent characteristics against apostates. People who leave the religion are not given death threats nor persecuted violently at the edge of a sword — unlike what happened before during the medieval times. It is now a largely peaceful religion and has taken few qualities of its earlier practitioners from the earlier periods.
But this peaceful nature of Christians towards apostasy took time and a considerable amount of evolution over the centuries. Education, tolerance and enlightenment did not find its way into Christianity overnight. It took an awful part of 2000 years for Christianity to be where it is today.
Islam must be given the same chance. At only 1400 years old, Islam is a relatively young religion when compared to other faiths of revealed scriptures. It is unfair to keep putting Islam to the perpetual ridicule of violence and intolerance, when Christianity has been given a much longer time to evolve in a head start of about 600 years.
Apostasy is still a very touchy subject in much of the Muslim world, similar to Christianity during the times of the Crusades. Different interpretations may exist, but Islam is definitely not a religion of violence nor murder towards any group, including apostates who leave the religion peacefully and mean no harm.
Already, beacons of tolerance and excellence can be seen emerging in a handful of Muslim communities around the world, such as Singapore, the United States and the United Kingdom. The rest of the Muslim Ummah must be given that same chance.
Notes
Good article ‚I invite readers to read also
“Apostasy and Religious Freedom”
at http://www.islamophobia.org/readarticle.php?article_id=80
to anonymous ;
we would highly appreciate it if you can tell us what was taken out of context from the bible.
To anonymous,
What context are you referring to ? Isn’t the verse quoted in the article in its context ? Also, many more have read the Bible and converted out or Christianity and many have read the Bible and not converted. What is your point ? Instead of going off on tangents, why don’t you try to explain why the Bible says that apostates shoud have been killed ?
http://www.faithfreedom.com/ali_sina_exposed/apostates.html
you all are interpreting the Bible out of its context, please don’t interpret it by just looking at a small portion, look at the bigger picture, read it all ! many have read the Bible and converted. many have tried their best to disprove the Bible but in the end got converted to Christianity themselves. we do not need to do anything for anyone who is against God wil not stand for long. that’s my advise for everyone out there, especially Muslims.
isn’t the bombing of iraq and other Muslims countries a new way of christian compulsion ?
i fully agree with you, brother danny.
while the Beloved Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi wa salaam) said something to the effect that Muslim judges should actively seek out any way possible to avoid capital punishment, the verse from the bible cited by the writer of the article specifically stated that no mercy should be shown to someone who secretly entices worship of any deity other than the israelite god.
christians are tolerant nowadays not because of the bible (though admittedly there are verses of compassion and mercy in the bible, possibly unadulterated by the lying pens of the scribes, but Allah knows best) but inspite of the bible.
regarding apostates in islam, there is generally an agreement that an apostate of legal age (if i remember correctly, in the hanafi madhab, adult women are not included, and of course, children, the lame, and the insane are not included in all 4 madhahib as well. it can be seen that the status of the apostate is clearly identified as an enemy soldier in wartime) should be killed. i once wrestled with my conscience regarding this. if islam is really a tolerant religion, teaching us that there is no compulsion in religion, why that kind of verdict ?
this could be answered if we view the stance of islam towards other religions and the nature of our holy shariah. firstly, the shariah is not a mind-reader. irtiddad or apostasy could only be verified and the life and property of the apostate declared licit (a subtle point, but one to which i may stand to be corrected : licit, not obligatory, in as much as we dont have to kill every enemy soldier in the battelfield but we are PERMITTED to do so) if a public dimension accompanies the person’s denial of his islam, for in that case he would be treated as an enemy combatant in the battlefield. it begs the question : why should someone who left islam publicly announce it, if that person is not hostile towards islam and the islamic community ? take note that there is no doctrinal inquisition in islam, and hence, no death penalty could apply, say if a person leaves islam, (Allah forbid!) converts to another religion, and manages to keep it to himself without inciting public attention (such a person becomes a kafir, but not a murtad). no one is questioned about his private beliefs. thus, those who publicly announce their conversion are really hostile, and are fully aware that they are inciting sedition.
a christian may argue that ‘oh, i love muslims, but i hate islam, that’s why im ready to become a martyr for Christ, if that would mean winning many souls to him. so i will publicly blaspheme Allah, Muhammad and islam, so that these muslim souls would be enlightened, even if it means my death. islam is the devil’s religion, and this is proven by the fact that they persecute the believers in christ’. well, this could be answered by saying that, devil’s religion or not, islam is the basis of that nation (assuming that it is an islamic country), and, as brother danny so skillfully puts it, those who wish to leave islam and publicly announce it have the option to leave that islamic country and live with the kuffar. if you really love muslims, prove islam wrong by fighting a fair fight, not by demolishing it from within. would it be God’s work to overthrow the basis of a nation through slander and libel ? an apostate can blaspheme islam all they like if they are in a hostile kafir country (dar-ul harb), that way, muslims could respond appropriately to their attacks, since jihad through the tongue, pen,or sword, or against the base desires (nafs) is obligatory (fard).
let’s have an example. you are a guest in a household, however, your family is hostile to that household. overtime, you are treated as part of the household since you are a peaceful guest. then you find out that the father of the household is a drunkard and immoral man. however, he is still a good host (and the mere fact that islam tolerates other religions within its realm proves that it is a good host). would it be alright for you to say out loud in that immoral man’s house ‘this is an immoral man, do not follow his evil ways, he is not worth following as a father. i myself am disobeying and condemning him,’ all the while you are eating at his table ? if you are really disgusted at his evil ways, leave the house immediately, do not eat at his table, do not incite sedition within his household, join his enemies outside his house, condemn him outside his household, that way he can respond. but if you live within his house, and plan to continue living there, it would be better for you to shut up, rather than turn his own family against him in such an unfair way. all of this is assuming that the household (or islam) is really evil. even if it is really evil, there would still be no problem if that household takes measures from being destroyed from the inside, for every household, institution, or community has the right to protect itself. those who would say that that household should just allow itself to be slandered and demolished from within are themselves hostile to that household, in much the same way that those who are against islam’s apostasy and blasphemy laws are just against islam, and are really not for freedom of religion.
muslim brothers, please correct me if i said anything wrong about our religion. And Allah knows best.
I don’t entirely agree with the assessment of the author. It is not that Christianity “evolved” into a peaceful religion, it’s just that Christians decided not to follow their religion so vehemently any more. Present Europe and America are secular, not Christian. They are peaceful towards apostates, athiests, agnostics and non-Christians not because of Christianity but because of putting Christianity aside and adopting secularism.
Does that mean we should ditch Islam like the “Christians” have ditched Christianity ? Or that Islam also need an “evolution”? No. Although Islam is a much younger religion, it is already far more advanced than Christianity when it comes to dealing with adherents of other faiths and dealing with everyday issues. Islam has a much better record of performance than Christianity. For instance, even though Islam is not a pacifist religion, nonetheless, Muslims have treated minorities far far more humanely than Christians. Not that Muslims have been angels, but Islam gave them enough sense to offer a better treatment towards others and display kindness/mercy. The problem in the current world is that Muslims generally are themselves ignorant of Islam and when anything comes up, they react angrily instead of Islamically.
Coming to apostasy, although the punishment is death according to most scholars, some prominent scholars insist it is not. So the matter is not so clear. But, for arguments sake, even if we grant that the punishment for apostasy is death, it remains that there are very strict procedures to follow. You cannot just kill an apostate instantly. There are many ways how his life can be spared, as has happened in Afghanistan. Plus, the punishment of apostasy is not metted out at women and children. It is only directed towards the sane male. So we do not wipe off entire communities even if they apostize and if such large numbers do leave Islam, then they are to be left alone. In the case of an individual make, even then, there are many opportunities for him to go free, for instance, given assylum in another land with the guarantee that he would not act against the Islamic state.
It would be no exagerration to state that Christians have killed more than 10 times the number of apostates ever killed by Muslims.