Capital Punishment for Apostasy in Islam
Abstract
This article sheds light on the Islamic legal ruling concerning apostasy (riddah). It reviews the verses of the Qur’an and the Hadiths of the Prophet Muhammad concerning apostasy, with the aim of reaching a firm conclusion on this topic, particularly because Islam has been accused of being a religion that forces people to embrace it, even against peoples’ free will. The article also reviews Muslim scholars’ points of view concerning this topic and the historical circumstances and conditions regarding it. The article concludes that Islam never sentences anyone to death for eschewing Islam; it merely does so for riddah.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Recent scholarship has begun to critically re-examine traditional interpretations, questioning the direct textual basis for severe penalties in the Qur'an, which predominantly emphasises divine retribution in the afterlife rather than temporal punishments for apostasy.
“However, recent scholarship has begun to critically re-examine these interpretations, questioning the direct textual basis for such severe penalties in the Qurʾān, which predominantly emphasises divine retribution in the afterlife rather than temporal punishments for apostasy (Baker, 2018;Nik Wajis, 2018).”
From APOSTASY PUNISHMENT IN ISLAMIC SCHOLARLY DISCOURSE: PERSPECTIVES AND IMPLICATIONS IN THE MALAYSIAN CONTEXT (2025) · cites this paper as Baker, 2018
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Sholehudin, M., Fadli, M., Sulistyarini, R., & Djumikasih, D. (2025) · De Jure: Jurnal Hukum dan Syar'iah · doi:10.18860/j-fsh.v17i1.31465 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
Musa, R., Razali, K., Mohamad Fakhrulrozi, A. S., Ali, M. S., Zulkifli, M. F., & Mohammad Nasir, N. S. (2025) · Malaysian Journal of Syariah and Law · doi:10.33102/mjsl.vol13no3.755
- Authors
- Baker, M.
- Affiliations
- Zayed University (AE)
- Corresponding author
- Baker, Man
- ORCID
- Baker, Man
- Venue
- Arab Law Quarterly
- Publisher
- Walter de Gruyter GmbH
- Published
- 2018-11-09
- Volume
- 32
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 439-461
- ISSN
- 0268-0556 (ISSN-L)
- 1573-0255
- OpenAlex
- W2795794238
- Cited by
- 7
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2024: 1 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 1.62
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Arab Law Quarterly (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Education › Qur’anic Interpretation Studies
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Religious studies › Islamic Thought and Society Studies
- Social Sciences › Law › Religious Freedom and Discrimination
- Keywords
- apostasy, riddah, death penalty, Islamic criminal law, Quran, hadith, religious freedom, forced conversion, Islamic history
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
