Why blasphemy is a capital offence in some Muslim countries

Junaid Hafeez, a university lecturer in Pakistan, had been imprisoned for six years when he was sentenced to death in December 2019. The charge: blasphemy, specifically insulting Prophet Muhammad on Facebook.

According to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Pakistan has the world’s second strictest blasphemy laws after Iran. Hafeez, whose death sentence is under appeal, is one of about 1,500 Pakistanis charged with blasphemy, or sacrilegious speech, over the last three decades. No executions have taken place.

Since 1990, however, 70 people have been murdered by mobs and vigilantes who accused them of insulting Islam. Several people who defended the accused have also been killed, including one of Hafeez’s lawyers and two high-level politicians who publicly opposed the death sentence of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman convicted for verbally insulting Prophet Muhammad. Though Bibi was acquitted in 2019, she fled Pakistan.

Blasphemy and apostasy

Of 71 countries that criminalise blasphemy, 32 are majority Muslim. Punishment and enforcement of these laws varies. In Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brunei, Mauritania and Saudi Arabia, blasphemy is punishable by death. Among non-Muslim-majority cases, the harshest blasphemy laws are in Italy, where the maximum penalty is three years in prison.

Half of the world’s 49 Muslim-majority countries have additional laws banning apostasy, meaning people may be punished for leaving Islam. All countries with apostasy laws are Muslim-majority except India. Apostasy is often charged alongside blasphemy.

This class of religious laws enjoys considerable popularity across the Islamic world. According to a 2013 Pew survey, about 75% of respondents in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia favour making Sharia, or Islamic law, the official law of the land.

Among those who support Sharia, around 25% in Southeast Asia, 50% in the Middle East and North Africa, and 75% in South Asia say they support "executing those who leave Islam" – that is, they support laws punishing apostasy with death.The ulema and the state

My 2019 book Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment traces the root of blasphemy and apostasy laws in the Muslim world back to a historic alliance between Islamic scholars and government.

Starting around the year 1050, certain Sunni scholars of law and theology, called the "ulema", began working closely with political rulers to challenge what they considered to be the sacrilegious influence of Muslim philosophers on society.

For three centuries, Muslim philosophers had been making major contributions to mathematics, physics and medicine. They developed the Arabic number system used across the West today and invented a forerunner of the modern camera.

The conservative ulema felt that these philosophers were inappropriately influenced by Greek philosophy and Shia Islam against Sunni beliefs. The most prominent in consolidating Sunni orthodoxy was the brilliant and respected Islamic scholar al-Ghazali, who died in the year 1111.

In several influential books still widely read today, al-Ghazali declared two long-dead leading Muslim philosophers, Farabi and Ibn Sina (a.k.a. Avicenna), apostates for their unorthodox views on God’s power and the nature of resurrection. Their followers, al-Ghazali wrote, could be punished with death.

As modern-day historians Omid Safi and Frank Griffel assert, al-Ghazali’s declaration provided justification to Muslim sultans from the 12th century onward who wished to persecute – even execute – thinkers seen as threats to conservative religious rule.

This “ulema-state alliance”, as I call it, began in the mid-11th century in Central Asia, Iran and Iraq and a century later spread to Syria, Egypt and North Africa. In these regimes, questioning religious orthodoxy and political authority wasn’t merely dissent – it was apostasy.Wrong direction

Parts of Western Europe were ruled by a similar alliance between the Catholic Church and monarchs. These governments assaulted free thinking, too. During the Spanish Inquisition, between the 16th and 18th centuries, thousands of people were tortured and killed for apostasy.

Blasphemy laws were also in place, if infrequently used, in various European countries until recently. Denmark, Ireland and Malta all recently repealed their laws. But they persist in many parts of the Muslim world.

In Pakistan, the military dictator Zia ul Haq, who ruled the country from 1978 to 1988, is responsible for its harsh blasphemy laws. An ally of the ulema, Zia updated blasphemy laws – written by British colonisers to avoid interreligious conflict – to defend Sunni Islam specifically and increased the maximum punishment to death.

From the 1920s until Zia, these laws had been applied only about a dozen times. Since then they have become a powerful tool for crushing dissent. Some dozen Muslim countries have undergone a similar process over the past four decades, including Iran and Egypt.

Dissenting voices in Islam

The conservative ulema base their case for blasphemy and apostasy laws on a few reported sayings of Prophet Muhammad, known as hadith, primarily: "Whoever changes his religion, kill him."

But many Islamic scholars and Muslim intellectuals reject this view as radical. They argue that Prophet Muhammad never executed anyone for apostasy, nor encouraged his followers to do so.

Nor is criminalising sacrilege based on Islam’s main sacred text, the Koran. It contains over 100 verses encouraging peace, freedom of conscience and religious tolerance.

In chapter 2, verse 256, the Koran states, "There is no coercion in religion". Chapter 4, verse 140 urges Muslims to simply leave blasphemous conversations: "When you hear the verses of God being rejected and mocked, do not sit with them."

By using their political connections and historical authority to interpret Islam, however, the conservative ulema have marginalised more moderate voices.

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Reaction to global Islamophobia

Debates about blasphemy and apostasy laws among Muslims are naturally influenced by international affairs. Across the globe, Muslim minorities – including the Palestinians, Chechens of Russia, Kashmiris of India, Rohingya of Myanmar and Uighurs of China – have experienced severe persecution. No other religion is so widely targeted in so many different countries.

Alongside persecution are those Western policies that discriminate against Muslims, such as laws prohibiting headscarves in schools and the U.S. ban – now revoked by Joe Biden – on travellers from several Muslim-majority countries. Such Islamophobic laws and policies can create the impression that Muslims are under siege and provide an excuse that punishing sacrilege is a defence of the faith.

Instead, I find, such harsh religious rules can contribute to anti-Muslim stereotypes. Some of my Turkish relatives even discourage my work on this topic, fearing it fuels Islamophobia. But my research shows that criminalising blasphemy and apostasy is more political than it is religious.

The Koran does not require punishing sacrilege: authoritarian politics do.

Ahmet T. Kuru

© Qantara.de 2021

Ahmet T. Kuru is Porteous Professor of Political Science at San Diego State University, and FORIS scholar at Religious Freedom Institute. Author of "Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey" and co-editor of "Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey", his works have been translated into Arabic, Bosnian, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Turkish.

His recent book "Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison" was co-winner of the American Political Science Association's International History and Politics Section Book Award.

This article was first published in The Conservation.