Apostasy in Islam by country

[7][8] Charges against Abdul Rahman were dismissed on technical grounds of being "mentally unfit" (an exemption from execution under sharia law) to stand trial[7] by the Afghan court after intervention by the president Hamid Karzai.

In 2014 the article was translated to Pashto by the son-in-law of powerful warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leading to an uproar on social media with many accusations of apostasy and death threats directed at Javeed, and a large public demonstration in Kabul calling for his execution.

[12] In late 2015, 21-year-old student and ex-Muslim atheist, Morid Aziz, was secretly recorded by his erstwhile girlfriend, Shogofa, criticising Islam and begged her to "forsake the darkness and embrace science".

Shogofa, who had been radicalised whilst studying Sharia, played the recording at a mosque Friday prayer, following which came under considerable pressure to retract his remarks from his family and went into hiding shortly before a group of enraged men armed with Kalashnikovs showed up at his house.

He was seconded by philosopher and ex-Catholic Patrick Loobuyck, who argued that secularisation in the West gives Western Muslims such as Hamza the opportunity to embrace religious liberalism and even atheism.

[9] During the Ottoman Turkish Muslim rule of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1463–1878), a large minority of the Southern Slavic-speaking inhabitants converted to Islam for various reasons, whilst others remained Roman Catholics (Croats) or Orthodox Christians (Serbs).

The Austrian government held that any mature citizen was free to convert to another religion without having to fear any legal penalty, and issued a directive to its officials to keep their involvement in religious matters to a minimum.

[35] In August 1890, during the Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a sixteen-year-old Bosnian girl called Uzeifa Delahmatović claimed to have voluntarily converted from Islam to Catholicism, the Habsburg state's official and majority religion.

[36] In the 20th century, religion became highly politicised in Bosnia, and the basis for most citizens' national identity and political loyalty, leading to numerous conflicts culminating in the Bosnian War (1992–1995).

Mahfouz was the only Arab ever to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature,[57] but was widely reviled by many revivalist preachers for the alleged blasphemy of his work Children of Gebelawi, which was banned by Egyptian religious authorities.

[72]Some commentators have reported a growing trend of abandoning religion following the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, reflected through emergence of support groups on social media, although openly declared apostates still face ostracism and danger of prosecution and vigilante violence.

[73][74] A well-known example is the Internet activist Aliaa Magda Elmahdy (then-girlfriend of Kareem Amer), who protested the oppression of women's rights and sexuality in Islam by posting a nude photo of herself online.

[107] (Though the killings were carried out in secret by "Special Commissions" and the government denies their having taken place, human rights groups have been able to gather information from interviews with relatives,[108] survivors,[109] and a high level dissident, namely Hussein-Ali Montazeri).

[115] In August 2018, more than 200 members of a Dervish Sufi order (Nemattolah Gonabadi) were sentenced to "prison terms ranging from four months to 26 years, flogging, internal exile, travel bans".

[116] In July 2013 eleven Sufi activists were given sentences of from one to ten-and-a-half years in prison, to be followed by periods of internal exile, for among other charges "establishing and membership in a deviant group".

Group member Keyvan (32), raised as a Sunni Muslim but confusingly educated in a Shia school, long had doubts about religion, and became an apostate after reading atheist literature.

Some cite the lack of women's rights in Islam, others the political climate, which is dominated by conflicts between Shia Muslim parties who seek to expand their power more than they try to improve citizens' living conditions.

Although the Ottomans did not force the Catholic and Orthodox Christian population to convert to Islam, there was strong social pressure (such as not having to pay the jizya) as well as political expediency to do so, which ethnic Albanians did in far greater numbers (including the entire nobility) than Serbs, Greeks and others in the region.

When the laramans of Letnica asked the district governor and judge in Gjilan to recognise them as Catholics, they were refused however, and subsequently imprisoned, and then deported to Anatolia,[128] from where they returned in November 1848 following diplomatic intervention.

Deputy Minister of Islamic Affairs Asyraf Wajdi Dusuki ordered an inquiry into whether anyone in the picture had committed apostasy or had 'spread atheism' to any Muslims present, both of which are illegal in Malaysia.

On 27 April 2014, the Maldives ratified a new regulation that revived the death penalty (abolished in 1953, when the last execution took place) for a number of hudud offences, including apostasy for persons from the age of 7 and older.

[165] Supported by pressure from human rights activists and international diplomats, Mkhaitir's case was reviewed several times, amid public civilian protests calling for him to be killed.

[176] Ayaan Hirsi Ali deconverted from Islam after seeing the September 11 attacks being justified by Al Qaeda's leader Osama bin Laden with verses from the Quran that she verified personally, and subsequently reading Herman Philipse's Atheïstisch manifest ("Atheist Manifesto").

[177] She was elected to Parliament in 2003 for the VVD, and co-producing Theo van Gogh's short film Submission (broadcast on 29 August 2004), which criticised the treatment of women in Islamic society.

In June 2019, Rishvin Ismath decided to come forward as spokesperson for the Council in order to denounce government-approved and distributed textbooks for Muslim students which stated that apostates from Islam should be killed.

[226] Twenty-five Muslim men from the Hausa minority ethnicity were arrested at gunpoint in December 2015 and imprisoned for several weeks for "rejecting the prophet Muhammad's teaching" – charges punishable by death – because they took the Quran as the sole source for Islam.

[227] The charges were condemned by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF part of the US government),[228] the African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies and the Sudanese Human Rights Initiative.

[230] In July 2020, Justice Minister Nasredeen Abdulbari announced that the punishment for apostasy had been scrapped a few days earlier, as the declaration that someone was an apostate was "a threat to the security and safety of society".

[221] Following the 2010–11 Tunisian Revolution, a Constituent Assembly worked for 2.5 years to written a new Constitution, approved in January 2014, contained a provision in Article 6 granting freedom of conscience.

[234] Although claiming to be a secular country and legally not enforcing any punishments for apostasy from Islam in Turkey, there are several formal and informal mechanisms in place that make it hard for citizens to be registered as non-Muslim.