1. Islam strictly forbids apostating from the religion, once a Muslim, subject to death.
No - certain Muslims who accept certain interpretations of Sharia law forbid apostasy with the penalty of death. Other Muslims believe that this is only because apostasy and treason were almost synonymous concepts at one time and treason was a capital crime. Some Muslims do not accept Sharia law. Let's count up the Muslim populations of predominantly Muslim countries where apostacy is a capital crime:
Yemen (20,000,000) (though it seems nobody has ever been executed for it)
UAE (2,000,000)
Saudi Arabia (26,000,000)
Qatar (800,000)
Iran (67,000,000)
Afghanistan (31,000,0000)
Sudan (26,000,000)
Mauritania (3,000,000) (once again, no recorded executions)
For a grand total of approximately 176,000,000 Muslims who live under a regime that punishes apostasy with death. Maybe I missed some, feel free to correct me on this - I got the information from wikipedia. There are 1,500,000,000 Muslims in the world. From these numbers then we get about 12% of Muslims who live with this 'punishable by death' (it shrinks down to closer to 10% if we remove Yemen and Mauritania). Now many of the Muslims in that total may want the law changed - some of those that live in the death penalty areas may want to have apostasy removed from the capital crimes list, and some of those that live where it is not the death penalty may want the decision reversed. Do you believe that most Muslims want apostasy as a capital crime, but only 12% are lucky enough to live under that system?
Islam is what its believers make it, you can point to the traditions of Arabs in the dark ages and tell me that this is Islam if you like, but why not look at Islam as it exists today since that is the Islam that relevant to the issue at hand, neh?
With Islam, it is the epitamy of insult to renounce Islam by apostacism. Even as a youngster after his changed schools, not a whisper of complaint by any of his Muslim associates and mentors evidenced.
I have seen it written that an apostate has to be a sane man (puberty being the mark of a man). If Obama converted from Islam as a boy, he is not an apostate.
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