I know many who simply cannot get their heads around the fact that apostasy from Islam -- that is, leaving it for another religion or none -- is punishable by death. But it is.
It's in the Koran as well as the Hadith -- the doings and saying of Muhammad. It's also in the official Manual of Islamic Jurisprudence, the Umdat al-Salik (08.1 et seq).
Some apologists say that the death penalty for apostasy is only pushed by the most extreme of Muslims. That's also not true. Egypt's highest authority is Dr Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Sheikh of Al Azhar University in Egypt, Islam's oldest University (The Oxford of Islam, if you will). He is widely viewed as a "moderate Muslim".
Yet during this year's Ramadan, Sheikh al-Tayeb said:
LATER (3 November): this is an article about 45 Singapore graduates of Cairo's Al-Azhar university who are going to go back home and talk about the wonders of peaceful Islam. It mentions the grand mufti, al Tayeb, who, as we have seen above, says the punishment for apostasy is death. This is the wonderful peaceful message that these graduates are bringing back, to make sure we know the "true nature of Islam", that it's really a religion of peace.
What a joke. Another in the long line of articles claiming to "dispel the myths" of Islam. Whereas the ideas we have of Islam-- that it's a horrrid and violent cult -- is really pretty much spot on.
It's in the Koran as well as the Hadith -- the doings and saying of Muhammad. It's also in the official Manual of Islamic Jurisprudence, the Umdat al-Salik (08.1 et seq).
Some apologists say that the death penalty for apostasy is only pushed by the most extreme of Muslims. That's also not true. Egypt's highest authority is Dr Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Sheikh of Al Azhar University in Egypt, Islam's oldest University (The Oxford of Islam, if you will). He is widely viewed as a "moderate Muslim".
Yet during this year's Ramadan, Sheikh al-Tayeb said:
“Those learned in Islam [al-fuqaha] and the imams of the four schools of jurisprudence consider apostasy a crime and agree that the apostate must either renounce his apostasy or else be killed.”Pretty clear.
LATER (3 November): this is an article about 45 Singapore graduates of Cairo's Al-Azhar university who are going to go back home and talk about the wonders of peaceful Islam. It mentions the grand mufti, al Tayeb, who, as we have seen above, says the punishment for apostasy is death. This is the wonderful peaceful message that these graduates are bringing back, to make sure we know the "true nature of Islam", that it's really a religion of peace.
What a joke. Another in the long line of articles claiming to "dispel the myths" of Islam. Whereas the ideas we have of Islam-- that it's a horrrid and violent cult -- is really pretty much spot on.
