Apostasy in Islam (Arabic: ارتداد, irtidād or ridda) is commonly defined as the rejection of Islam in word or deed by a person who has been a Muslim.
The four major Sunni and the one major Shia Madh'hab (schools of Islamic jurisprudence) agree that a sane adult male apostate must be executed.[1] They differ on the punishment for a female apostate - some schools calling for death and others for imprisonment. Whether Sharia laws governing apostasy are derived from the hadith traditions alone or also from the Qu'ran is disputed. According to Wael Hallaq nothing of the apostasy law are derived from the Qur'an,[2] although the jurist al-Shafi'i interpreted the Qu'ranic verse 2:217 as providing the main evidence for apostasy being a capital crime in Islam.[3]
A minority of medieval Islamic jurists, such as Hanafi jurist Sarakhsi,[4] Maliki jurist Ibn al-Walid al-Baji, and Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyyah,[5] and some contemporary Islamic jurists, such as Shafi`i Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa[6][7] and Shi'a Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri,[8] argued or issued fatwas that either the changing of religion is not punishable or is only punishable under restricted circumstances, but these minority opinions have not found broad acceptance among the majority of Islamic scholars.[9][10][11][12]
Some prominent contemporary examples of death sentences or threated issued for apostasy include Salman Rushdie, who was condemned to death in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini, (ruler of Iran at the time) for his book The Satanic Verses; and Abdul Rahman, an Afghan convert to Christianity who was arrested and jailed on the charge of rejecting Islam" in 2006 but later released as mentally incompetent.[13]