[18] Maybe the most famous alleged apostate in the Arab world attacked by Islamists was Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, who was harassed and stabbed in the neck by assailants, almost killed and crippled for the rest of his life.
In the Algerian Civil War the insurgent/jihadist Islamist group GIA viewed all who failed to actively support its jihad as collaborators with the government, and thus apostates from Islam and eligible military targets.
[30] Olivier Roy complains of its intellectual stagnation in that "since the founding writings of Abul Ala Maududi, Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb ... all before 1978 ... there are nothing but brochures, prayers, feeble glosses and citations of canonical authors.
[44] Some critics (such as Tunisian-born scholar and journalist Abdelwahab Meddeb) have bemoaned the Islamist belief that in 1400 years of Muslim history, true Islam worthy of imitation was enforced for only a few decades.
"[50] He and at least one other author (Tarek Osman) have questioned how perfect an era was where three of the first four caliphs were assassinated, while "enmities" and "factional disputes"[51] and "almost continuous embarrassing episodes of blood-letting and internal struggles"[52] were played out.
Nevertheless, like `Abd al-Wahhad, Mawdudi and Qutb imagined Islamic law to be a set of clear cut, inflexible and rigid positive commands that covered and regulated every aspect of life.
"[11] Dale C. Eikmeier points out the "questionable religious credentials" of many Islamist theorists, or "Qutbists," which can be a "means to discredit them and their message": With the exception of Abul Ala Maududi and Abdullah Azzam, none of Qutbism’s main theoreticians trained at Islam’s recognized centers of learning.
According to non-Islamist Sudanese cleric Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, the Islamist interpretation of sharia, "is fundamentally inconsistent with the numerous provisions of the Quran and Sunna which enjoin freedom of religion and expression.
Some extremists have even attached spiritual significance to customs that mandate physical violence, such as female genital mutilation and so-called honor killings, oblivious to the pagan roots of the first practice and the unequivocal hostility of the Qur'an and hadiths to the second one.
"[72][73] According to Daniel Pipes, "the historical record shows that every effort in modern times to apply the Shari`a in its entirety – such as those made in Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Libya, Iran, and Pakistan – ended up disappointing the fundamentalists, for realities eventually had to be accommodated.
The pioneering Egyptian Islamic thinker Muhammad `Abdu spoke in similar terms when he criticized Muslim neglect of the concept of `common good` and rulers' emphasis on obedience above justice.
Joseph Schacht's extensive research on the development of the Shariah has shown how quite a large number of widely acknowledged hadith had their chain of transmission added conjecturally so as to make them appear more authentic.
"[86] Such critics claim that the veil predates the revelation of the Quran as it "was introduced into Arabia long before Muhammad, primarily through Arab contacts with Syria and Iran, where the hijab was a sign of social status.
According to reformist author Reza Aslan, belief in the death sentence for apostates originated with early Caliph Abu Bakr's "war against tribes that had annulled their oath of allegiance to the Prophet."
"[99] Critics have noted that Islamists have claimed to uphold eternal religious/political principles but sometimes change with the times, for example embracing "far more modern and egalitarian" interpretations of social justice – including socialist ideas – than the rightly guided caliphs would ever have conceived of.
Other trends, such as centralized control over budgets, appointments to the professoriate, curricula in the seminaries, the creation of religious militias, monopolizing the representation of interests, and mounting a Kulturkampf in the realm of the arts, the family, and other social issues tell of the growing tendency to create an "Islamic episcopacy" in Iran.
"[113] In his famous 1988 appeal to Gorbachev to replace Communism with Islam, Imam Khomeini talked about the need for a "real belief in God" and the danger of materialism, but said nothing about the five pillars, did not mention Muhammad or monotheism.
What he did say was that "nowadays Marxism in its economic and social approaches, is facing a blind alley" and that "the Islamic Republic of Iran can easily supply the solution the believing vacuum of your country".
The most extreme example of this was the Ayatollah Khomeini's declaration in 1988 that "the government is authorized unilaterally to abolish its lawful accords with the people and ... to prevent any matter, be it spiritual or material, that poses a threat to its interests."
Umar Abd ar-Rahman, the blind sheikh, "is adamant on this subject: `it is very well known that no minority in any country has its own laws.`[119] Criticism of Islamist (or Islamic) economics have been particularly contemptuous, alleging that effort of "incoherence, incompleteness, impracticality, and irrelevance;" [120][121] driven by "cultural identity" rather than problem solving.
[124]On the same note, another critic has attacked Islamist organizations in that country for silence about "any kind of genuine social or economic revolution, except to urge, appropriately, that laws, including taxation, be universally applied."
"[133] Khomeini believed "imperialists" – British and then American – had 300-year-long "elaborate plans for assuming control of" the East, the purpose of which was "to keep us backward, to keep us in our present miserable state so they can exploit our riches, our underground wealth, our lands and our human resources.
They want us to remain afflicted and wretched, and our poor to be trapped in their misery ... "[134] One complaint of this approach by critics is that these "conspiracy theor[ies]" revolving around the "ready-to-wear devil" of the West are "currently paralyzing Muslim political thought.
"[140]William Cantwell Smith observes that until Karl Marx and the rise of communism, the Prophet organized and launched the only serious challenge to Western civilization that it has faced in the whole course of its history ... Islam is the only positive force that has won converts away from Christianity – by the tens of millions ...[141]According to the Ayatollah Khomeini and other Islamists, one glaring example of an attempt by the West to weaken the Muslim world was the division of the Ottoman empire, the largest Muslim state and home of the Caliph, into 20 or so "artificially created separate nations," when that empire fell in 1918.
Qutb's anti-Judaism has been criticized as obsessive and irrational by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon who quote him saying that `anyone who leads this community away from its religion and its Quran can only be Jewish agent` – in other words, any source of division, anyone who undermines the relationship between Muslims and their faith is by definition a Jew.
Worried that the rejection of the Jews would somehow discredit his prophetic claims, Muhammad had not choice but to turn violently against them, separate his community from theirs ...[152] Aslan believes this theory is refuted by historical evidence: "Finally and most importantly, ... Jewish clans in Medina – themselves Arab converts – were barely distinguishable from their pagan counterparts either culturally or, for that matter, religiously."
Converts to Islam "in a Christian environment" are generally "marginalized", "fanatics" or a "true mystics," in any case people who seldom have any desire or ability to join or build "a mass movement.
"[161] Examples of the failure of personal virtue and disinterest in "building institutions" capable of handling the corruption of power and human frailty is manifest, (Roy believes), in the Islamic Republic of Iran and mujahideen Afghanistan.
In both cases the heroic Islamic self-sacrifice that brought Islamist insurgents to power was followed by notably un-heroic and un-virtuous governance of the victorious warriors "demanding their due" in spoils and corruption,[162] or abandon politics to "climbers, careerists, and unscrupulous businessmen.
[167] In Turkey, the "moderate Islamist" AKP (Justice and Development Party) government of President Tayyip Erdogan has been in power for nearly twenty years and worked assiduously to cultivate a new "pious generation."