Religion of Peace

Islam Files, No. 3 — The Interfaith Brochure Says Anyone May Leave. Reliance of the Traveller, Certified by al-Azhar, Says the One Who Leaves “Deserves to Be Killed.”

Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri died in 1368. His Umdat al-Salik, published in English as Reliance of the Traveller and carrying al-Azhar’s certification, is a standard Shafi‘i handbook, not a Telegram channel. Section o8.1: “When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed.” Section o8.2: the caliph asks him to repent; if he refuses, “he is immediately killed.” Section o8.4: no blood-money for the killer. The list of acts that count as leaving includes sarcasm about a sunna.

The hadith is older than the manual. Sahih al-Bukhari 6922: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.” After 632, the first caliph, Abu Bakr, spent the Ridda Wars on Arab tribes that wanted the arrangement dissolved. The name of the wars is the name of the crime: ridda, apostasy.

Pakistan still criminalizes blasphemy. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Taliban Afghanistan, and Mauritania retain death for apostasy in statute or in practice. Converts in Britain have moved house in the middle of the night after neighbors decided the hadith still applied. The brochure on the folding table at the “Abrahamic dinner” does not quote o8.1. The fiqh manual does not reprint the brochure.

The public-relations sentence is that Islam is a religion of peace. The lexical sentence is that islam means submission and that peace, in the classical division of the world, arrives when the dar al-harb has become the dar al-islam. Moderate congregations treat that horizon as eschatology. The manuals treat it as jurisdiction. The two sentences use the same word and do not mean the same thing. Abraham Lincoln noticed the pattern with “liberty.” He was talking about a different war. The dictionary problem is identical.

Filed from the primary texts and the public record:

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A Hand-Tightened Blind Flange and a Botched Shift Handover Killed 167 Men on Occidental Petroleum's Piper Alpha Platform in 22 Minutes. No One at the Company Was Ever Criminally Charged.

Netflix Spent Six Years Telling Customers Love Is Sharing a Password. Once It Started Charging $7.99 a Month Per Shared Password Instead, Subscriber Growth Hit Its Best Year Since the Pandemic.

New York Paused Congestion Pricing for 'Affordability' Weeks Before a 2024 Election, Then Relaunched It at a Lower Price Once Voting Was Over. A Year Later, Traffic Was Down 11 Percent and the Federal Government Was Still in Court Trying to Kill It.

Twitter Cut Off the Third-Party Apps That Built Its Developer Ecosystem in January 2023 With No Warning. One of Those Apps Coined the Word Tweet and Designed Twitter's Bird Logo Before Twitter Had Either.