Dear friends,

Mr. Javed I. Chaudry wants us to believe that the case in Afghanistan where a person who was facing death penalty (and thankfully got released this morning) for abandoning Islam and embracing Christianity was based on "Afghanistan's culture". I can't imagine a weaker defense of Islam as practiced by 99% of Muslims in the world. Mr. Chaudry wants us to totally ignore the Muslim scholarship of more than a thousand years and look the other way just as he is doing. May I remind Mr. Chaudry that apostasy as a crime is is one of the few issues where there is consensus among all schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Every school considers it a crime but prescribes different punishments. Most of the jurisprudence experts agree that the punishment should be death. According to these schools, when someone renounces Islam, he has three days to rethink his position. If within three days, he recants his renouncement, he is to be spared otherwise killed. That is for an apostate i.e. someone who declares that Islam is not his religion anymore. For someone who pushes his non-Islamic ideas as Islam, someone who is called a Zindiq in Fiqha, there is not even the three days grace period. This kind of person is guilty punishable by death without any provision of clemency according to Hanfi school. I have no doubt that Mr. Chaudry's Islam doesn't agree with that but that's what mainstream Islam is. Saying that just because Mr. Chaudry and a few other Muslims think that Islam doesn't punish apostasy by death and hence it follows that this trial was based on Afghanistan's culture is simply mind-boggling. By following the same logic, one can deduce that since, according to Mr. Chaudry's beliefs, Christ never claimed to be Son of God hence it follows that the people in USA who believe Christ to be son of God do that because of American culture and it has nothing to do with religion. People getting killed for blasphemy and apostasy, governments announcing bounties on writers' heads, women rotting in jails for getting raped is all culture and no religion.

Mr. Chaudry and Mr. Karmally have quoted the verse of Quran that says that there is no compulsion in deen . They have presented it as if its the argument to end all arguments. It's presumptuous of them to think that the shiploads of scholars hadn't read that verse or if they did, they cannot interpret it in a way to completely agree with the capital punishment of apostasy. Mr. Chaudry claimed in a previous discussion that when Quran says that the skin of people in hell will be burnt and then grow again and then burn again is actually a foretelling of pain receptors. Making the verse of "no compulsion in deen" compatible with capital punishment for apostasy is actually much simpler a task than that interpretation. The verse doesn't pose an iota of difficulty for Muslim scholars. In the presence of sahih ahadees that confirm Qatl-e-Murtad (in one reported incident, the fourth caliph of Islam burnt three apostates alive) beyond any doubt, it wasn't harder for Muslim scholars to see that the verse is saying that there is no need to force people to become Muslim because, as the verse says, "truth stands out clear from error" but once you become Muslim, as pointed out by numerous ahadees, you have to stay one or die. These scholars even refer to Quran (9:73-74) to support their notions. Taking the verse literally and saying that there is absolutely no compulsion in deen doesn't make any sense. For example, there is a compulsion to pay zakat and the Islamic history tells us that Muslims went to war with tribes that refused to pay it. There is no compulsion to become Muslim if you are not but you better because if you don't, you will have to pay a special tax (Jiziya) levied on you. Some compulsion-free ideology that is.

Mr. Chaudry is absolutely free to tell us that he doesn't agree with the majority of Muslims thru out the history and with Islamic scholars from Ibn-Kathir to Dr. Israr Ahmad (most of whom had nothing to do with Afghanistan or it's culture) but if, just because of that, he wants me to write-off the cruelties and absurdities of Islam as practiced by majority of Muslims for 14 centuries as "Afghanistan's culture", I'm afraid I can't oblige.

Regards,

Rafi