Quranic verse ‘There shall be no compulsion in religion’ is simply not true

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The Fate of Infidels and Apostates under Islam by Azam Kamguian
In a feeble attempt to disguise the Islamic attitude to apostasy, apologists often quote the Koranic verse: “There shall be no compulsion in religion”. For a Muslim wishing to leave Islam this is simply not true. In Yemen it’s punishable by death as it is in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan under the Taliban and other Islamic states. The most famous incidence of Apostasy was in 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini announced a fatwa, or death sentence against Salman Rushdie for his alleged apostasy in writing “The Satanic Verses”. In a similar vein in Iran in July 1998 a man was executed for allegedly converting a Muslim woman to the Baha’i faith, this was even though the woman claimed that her mother was Baha’i and that she was raised according to that faith. Freedom House’s Centre for Religious Freedom recently protested the forthcoming trial, before a Sharia court of Islamic law, of Hamid Pourmand, the 47 year old lay leader of a small Assemblies of God church in the southern port city of Bandar-i-Bushehr. Pourmand, a convert from Islam, is facing charges of apostasy from Islam and proselytising Muslims, both capital offences in Iran. The government of Iran puts someone on trial for his life solely for his religious belief. The state’s criminalisation of apostasy is always subject to political manipulation and indicates an absolute negation of individual rights and freedom. Iran applies an extremist interpretation of Shiite Islamic law or Sharia, which harshly represses the free expression of belief, including religious conversion by Muslims. Iran’s Sharia courts view non-Muslims as second-class citizens, whose testimony is given less weight than Muslims, and sometimes even as non-persons, without any legal protections.

In countries ruled by Islamic law and where political Islam holds sway, writers, thinkers, philosophers, activists, and artists are frequently denied freedom of expression. Islamic regimes are notorious for the violent suppression of free thought. Often, as a government allies itself closely with Islam, any critics of the government will be accused of blasphemy or apostasy.

Non-believers – atheists under Islam do not have “the right to life “. They are to be killed. According to Islamic culture, sins are divided into great sins and little sins. Among the seventeen great sins, unbelief is the greatest, more heinous than murder, theft, adultery and so on. Courageous apostates aim to skewer the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of a faith that commands the allegiance of a billion people-as well as the hypocrisies of those Western defenders of Islam who would not tolerate its strictures in their own cultures.

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