Death for apostates

Islamic Studies twitter seems to be taking on a harsher tone. If so, what could be causing the shift?

A scholar friend was attacked on X last week for writing something that used to be a universal truth: That you should not murder people for what they believe.

The attack and the subsequent debate reveal something noteworthy about a shift in Islamic Studies twitter — in my experience a new tone of discourse on this platform. Here I will not give names or post links, because the issues at stake are general and have broad application. If readers consider it important and necessary to name the participants, I could consider asking my friend for permission. Let me know.

My friend responded to an intentionally public statement of a Muslim who specifically wanted to assure his followers that he is now toeing the line on an important Islamic legal ruling. But the Muslim coded the ruling in Arabic, a language my friend knows very well. So my friend wrote, in effect, “Say plainly what you mean: You believe that apostates should be killed.” My friend does not agree.

In the flurry of comments that then flooded in, my friend clarified that he considers this Islamic ruling to be evil intolerance and incitement to violence. Opposition to his expression of this view covered a remarkable range:

Perhaps the most common comment was, “Nothing to see here — this is a totally ordinary religious belief. What are you on about?”

There was also plenty of whataboutism, referring for example to laws in the Hebrew Bible and national political statements about treason.

And of course, “What about Gaza?”

I saw many strikingly rude and even magisterial commands to “shut up, you have nothing to say about Muslim matters.” Remember, this is about killing people and a genial scholar’s disagreement with that. Actually, my friend has been doing some significant research in the past few years, research generously shared on X and which many Muslims have explicitly appreciated. Turning in an instant on my friend (and “unfollowing”), some of the beneficiaries are now saying, “keep up the research we like, but you don’t understand Islamic laws so keep quiet.”

What I did not see:

I did not see many Muslims writing to either deny that this is a basic Islamic belief, or to disagree with killing apostates. One wrote to say that killing apostates was not part of his “Islamic modernist agenda.” But since his voice was unique among the comments, one wonders what proportion of Muslims his agenda represents.

I did not see many non-Muslims writing to support my friend on his basic point that Muslims who want to leave Islam should not be murdered. Not many academics, for example, who know my friend well and even (otherwise) celebrate his research. And it was astonishing to see at least one well-known American professor of Islamic Studies side with the attackers.

Not only in this exchange, but in other social media exchanges these days I am finding a harsher and more dismissive tone. Polite discourse related to Islam seems to be disappearing. Or was the politeness merely a mask? Are non-Muslim academic scholars of Islam today feeling more or less free to state what they think about the realities they know?

It may all just be my imagination. But if a shift is taking place, what could be causing it?

I will try to follow up on these and other twitter exchanges and provide an update on the content and tone of discourse before too long.