The Genealogy of the Death Penalty for Apostasy and Blasphemy in Islam
On Tuesday, March 11, 2025, via Zoom, at the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School, Professor Mohsen Kadivar (Duke University) presented “The Genealogy of the Death Penalty for Apostasy and Blasphemy in Islam.” This talk examines the historic invention and spreads reports attributed to the Prophet (ḥadīth) in support of a criminal penalty—and in some cases capital punishment—for apostasy in Islamic law. These reports have served as the foundation for conservative textualist interpretations of Islamic criminal law. Kadivar argues, however, that the texts in question are weak, have no known chain of transmitters, and were often isolated rather than from numerous narrators who would have first “heard” and transmitted the report. Furthermore, he argues, these texts directly contradict the Quran, Islam’s main foundational text, which condemns but never mentions any criminal punishment for blasphemy, apostasy, or otherwise leaving Islam. Tracing the historical process of text-fabrication, Kadivar suggests that these texts entered the Islamic ḥadīth collections regarding other Near Eastern traditions of the time during Islam’s first two dynasties—under Umayyad and Abbasid rulers, between 661 and 1258. One text in particular imposing the death penalty for those who change their religion (to be discussed in the talk), emerged only in the eighth and ninth centuries, more than a century after the death of the Prophet Muḥammad, first in mainstream Sunnī communities. A century later, such texts spread and were attributed to the Shīʿī Imams, who enjoy authority over their respective minority communities. This talk explores the process of the creation and dissemination of a serious criminal penalty that seems to be based on authentic Islamic texts, but a close review reveals was not.