- Warraq, Ibn [pseud.] ed.
Leaving Islam.
Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003.
ISBN 1-59102-068-9.
-
Multiculturalists and ardent secularists may contend
“all organised religions are the same”, but
among all major world religions only Islam prescribes
the death penalty for apostasy, which makes these accounts
by former Muslims of the reasons for and experience of
their abandoning Islam more than just stories of
religious doubt. (There is some dispute as to whether
the Koran requires death for apostates, or only
threatens punishment in the afterlife. Some prominent
Islamic authorities, however, interpret surat
II:217
and
IX:11,12
as requiring death for apostates. Numerous
aḥadīth are unambiguous on the point, for example
Bukhārī
book
84, number 57 quotes Mohammed saying, “Whoever changed his
Islamic religion, then kill him”, which doesn't leave a lot of
room for interpretation, nor do authoritative manuals of Islamic
law such as
Reliance of the Traveller, which
prescribes (o8.1) “When a person who has reached puberty
and is sane voluntarily apostasizes from Islam, he deserves
to be killed”.
The first hundred pages of Leaving Islam explore
the theory and practice of Islamic apostasy in both ancient and
modern times.)
The balance of the book are personal accounts by apostates, both
those born into Islam and converts who came to regret their
embrace of what Salman Rushdie has called
“that least huggable of faiths”.
These testaments range from the tragic (chapter 15), to the
philosophical (chapter 29), and ironically humorous (chapter 37). One
common thread which runs through the stories of many
apostates is that while they were taught as children to
“read” the Koran, what this actually meant was learning
enough Arabic script and pronunciation to be able to recite the Arabic
text but without having any idea what it meant. (Very few of
the contributors to this book speak Arabic as their mother tongue, and
it is claimed [p. 400] that even native Arabic speakers can
barely understand the classical Arabic of the Koran, but I don't know
the extent to which this is true. But in any case, only about 15% of
Muslims are Arabic mother tongue speakers.) In many of the
narratives, disaffection with Islam either began, or was strongly
reinforced, when they read the Koran in translation and discovered
that the “real Islam” they had imagined as idealistic and
benign was, on the evidence of what is regarded as the word of God,
nothing of the sort. It is interesting that, unlike the Roman
Catholic church before the Reformation, which attempted to prevent
non-clergy from reading the Bible for themselves, Islam encourages
believers to study the Koran and Ḥadīth, both in the
original Arabic and translation (see for example this
official Saudi site).
It is ironic that just such study of scripture seems to encourage
apostasy, but perhaps this is the case only for those already so
predisposed.
Eighty pages of appendices include
quotations from the Koran and Ḥadīth illustrating
the darker side of Islam and a bibliography of books and list
of Web sites critical of Islam. The editor is author of
Why I Am Not a Muslim
(February 2002), editor of
What the Koran Really
Says (April 2003), and
founder of the
Institute for the
Secularisation of Islamic Society.
February 2006 