Apostasy and blasphemy laws

Freedom of religion, in the American and broader liberal sense, includes the freedom to leave a religion, to criticize it, and to have no religion at all. A legal or doctrinal rule that punishes apostasy or blasphemy is a direct challenge to that freedom. This page reviews the texts, the statutes, and the survey evidence. It does not claim that Muslim Americans, or Muslims in every country, support those rules.

The textual basis

Sahih al-Bukhari, in the Book of Apostates, records:

Narrated Ikrima: Some Zanadiqa (atheists) were brought to Ali and he burnt them. The news of this event reached Ibn Abbas who said, “If I had been in his place, I would not have burnt them, as Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) forbade it, saying, ‘Do not punish anybody with Allah’s punishment (fire).’ I would have killed them according to the statement of Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ), ‘Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.’”

The report is Sahih al-Bukhari 6922. Parallel reports appear elsewhere in the canonical collections. Classical Sunni schools generally treated the apostasy of a sane adult — typically after a period in which repentance was invited — as a capital offense, at least for men. That is a description of a legal tradition, not a statement about what every Muslim believes today.

The same canon contains a verse often cited against compulsion. Quran 2:256, in the Sahih International rendering, begins: “There shall be no compulsion in [acceptance of] the religion.” The tension between that verse and the hadith is a central issue in modern Muslim debate, and it is taken up in the box below. It does not, by itself, repeal the statutes or the classical rule.

Countries that still write the rules into law

Pew Research Center, in a 25 January 2022 analysis of 2019 data, found that 79 of 198 countries and territories studied (40%) had laws or policies banning blasphemy, and 22 countries (11%) had laws against apostasy. These laws were most common in the Middle East and North Africa, where 18 of 20 countries (90%) criminalized blasphemy and 13 of 20 (65%) outlawed apostasy. Pew found no apostasy laws in Europe or the Americas as of 2019. Apostasy laws were counted when there were restrictions on religious conversion or penalties for leaving one’s faith, even if not enforced that year.

Pew names examples rather than reprinting, in the main text we retrieved, a complete 22-country roster. Among those examples: Algeria denied inheritance to people who convert from Islam; in 2019 Brunei implemented a law that allows death sentences for apostasy from Islam; and blasphemy could carry the death penalty in Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. In Pakistan, Pew reported, at least 17 people were sentenced to death on blasphemy charges in 2019, though “the Pakistani government has never actually executed anyone for blasphemy.”

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, in a December 2018 legislation factsheet on conversion laws, wrote that “at least 23 countries maintain laws that penalize the act of apostasy, according to the Law Library of Congress,” and that “apostasy is a capital offense in countries including Afghanistan, Brunei, Mauritania, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.” That factsheet is dated December 2018; later repeals or amendments in particular countries may not be reflected in it. USCIRF also notes civil penalties short of death — inheritance, marriage, custody — and the use of blasphemy statutes to punish dissent.

These are laws on the books, enforced unevenly, and they are not identical across countries. They are still a formal rejection of the right to change one’s mind.

Pew 2013: support for the death penalty among sharia supporters

Pew’s April 2013 report The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society, based on more than 38,000 face-to-face interviews with Muslims in 39 countries (2008–2012), asked a follow-up question of those who already favored making sharia the official law of the land: whether they favored the death penalty for people who leave Islam. The percentages below are not shares of all Muslims in each country. They are shares of Muslims who favored sharia as official law, in the countries where Pew had an adequate sample.

Among that group, support for executing converts was highest in Egypt (86%) and Jordan (82%). Pew also reported 79% in Afghanistan, 76% in Pakistan, 66% in the Palestinian territories, 62% in Malaysia, 46% in Lebanon, 44% in Bangladesh, 42% in Iraq, 29% in Tunisia, 27% in southern Thailand, 22% in Tajikistan, 18% in Indonesia, 17% in Turkey, 15% in Bosnia-Herzegovina and among Russian Muslims asked about Muslim areas, 14% in Kyrgyzstan, 11% in Kosovo, 8% in Albania, and 4% in Kazakhstan.

In six of the 20 countries with adequate samples, Pew wrote, at least half of those who favored official sharia also supported executing apostates. The same report is careful to add that, compared with family-law and some criminal applications of sharia, “Muslims in the countries surveyed are significantly less supportive of the death penalty for converts.” Both statements can be quoted at once.

A later section of this site, Sharia and liberal democracy, reports the first-stage question: how many respondents in each country favored making sharia official law in the first place.

Sources for this page

• Sahih al-Bukhari 6922, Sunnah.com.
• Quranic Arabic Corpus, Quran 2:256.
• Pew Research Center, “Four-in-ten countries and territories worldwide had blasphemy laws in 2019” (25 January 2022).
• USCIRF, “Legislation Factsheet: Conversion Laws” (December 2018).
• Pew Research Center, The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society (30 April 2013), including the “Death Penalty for Leaving Islam” table (Q79a and Q92b).