To understand what is meant by kufr, or unbelief, it is instructive to move on to Book O, “Justice” in the Reliance of the Traveller. In the Chapter on “Apostasy from Islam,” 135 it states:
• “Leaving Islam is the ugliest form of unbelief and the worst.”
• “Whoever voluntarily leaves Islam is killed.”
• “When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed.”
This is an absolute rule in shariah that does not admit of an alternate interpretation. Recall Abdul Rahman, the Afghan national who, in 2006, converted to Christianity. When the Islamic authorities found out about his conversion, Rahman was sentenced to death for apostasy. The European Union determined this was a human rights violation and they reacted by threatening to withhold five hundred million euros in economic aid from Afghanistan.
This created a significant political and legal issue for Afghan President Hamid Karzai. If he failed to put Rahman to death for apostasy, he would be violating Islamic law (and the Afghani Constitution in which shariah is the Law of the Land) and failing in his duty as a Muslim leader. If carried out the sentence, he would lose the European economic aid.
The solution: Rahman was declared insane.136 Under Islamic law, declaring a person insane is one of the only ways a Muslim leader (who is required to follow shariah) can avoid putting the apostate to death.
In the Western world, this would be an abominable human rights violation, but under shariah, it can be the only thing that allows the authorities to avoid imposing the death sentence that is prescribed by Islamic law for apostasy.
The enumerated reasons in shariah for declaring a Muslim an “apostate” include: “to deny any verse of the Koran or anything which by scholarly consensus…belongs to it” and “to deny the obligatory character of something which by the consensus of Muslim…is a part of Islam.”137 This means that Islamic law makes violation of scholarly consensus an unambiguous act of apostasy.
So, if one were to disagree with something where there is consensus among the scholars, one could be charged with apostasy and put to death. This shariah concept of “scholarly consensus” effectively precludes any effort to moderate or reform any element of shariah sustained by such consensus. Reliance underscores the magnitude of the crime of apostasy in Book C, “The Nature of Legal Rulings”138:
Here, the author notes, “Scholars distinguish between three levels of the unlawful:
(1) minor sins…;
(2) enormities…; and
(3) unbelief (kufr), sins which put one beyond the pale of Islam… and necessitate stating a Testification of Faith….”
The only way a Muslim who is declared a “kufr” can escape this is to recant and recite the Shahada the declaration of Islamic faith in Allah and the Prophet), thus declaring a new testimony of faith. He has tore-enter the Islamic faith, as it were.
As Louay Safi, a top Muslim Brotherhood member operating in the United States who is nonetheless considered by many officials to be a respected “moderate,” wrote in his 2001 book Peace and the Limits of War — Transcending Classical Conception of Jihad: “The war against the apostates is carried out not to force them to accept Islam, but to enforce the Islamic law and maintain order.”139
Safi then adds: Therefore, the individual apostasy which takes place quietly, and without causing any public disorder, should not be of concern to Islamic authority…. Only when the individual openly renounces Islam and violates Islamic law should he be punished for breaking the law.
In other words, Safi is saying, in effect: We do not put people to death for becoming apostates. We put people to death when we find out that they have become apostates. In the final analysis, defining elements of shariah are intolerant of any deviation. There is freedom of belief in Islam only to the extent that matters of individual conscience do not threaten the ummah, whose cohesion and public appearance of rigid compliance with shariah is paramount and takes precedence over any individual’s personal preferences.