THE Koran is categorical. “There is no compulsion in religion,” it says (in the 256th verse of the second sura, or chapter). In another passage of the Muslim holy book, in the tenth sura, we find God asking the Prophet Muhammad a rhetorical question: “Had your Lord so willed it, all on earth together would believe, so can you then force the people to be believers?”

The same question may be posed to the government of Sudan. Not for the first time its courts have condemned a citizen to death for apostasy, the rejection by a believer of his or her faith. In this case the supposed criminal is a 27-year-old married woman with two small children; the smaller one, a girl, was born in prison soon after her mother was sentenced to hang.

The Sudanese authorities protest that the ruling can be appealed, hint that President Omar al-Bashir may commute it, and note that the case is complex. The condemned woman, Maryam Yahya Ibrahim, was born to a Christian mother and a Muslim father and so, under Sudan’s version of Islamic law, must be a Muslim. But her father abandoned the family when she was young. She was brought up as a Christian, married a Christian and, when denounced to the authorities by a relative, refused in court to change her faith.

In practice death sentences for apostasy have rarely been imposed, especially in modern times. Sudan, however, is an exception. In 1985 it executed Mahmud Muhammad Taha, a 76-year-old human-rights activist and religious reformer. He was judged an apostate because, ironically, he preached that Islamic law as practised in Sudan was cruel, based blindly on tradition rather than the tolerant spirit of Islam.

In 1991 Sudan issued a new penal code imposing death for a sweeping range of beliefs that can be categorised as apostasy. Harsh interpreters of sharia cite a hadith (a reported saying of Muhammad): “Whoever changes his religion, kill him.” The Sudanese police in 2011 arrested more than 100 alleged apostates, who “recanted” in court to save their necks.

Open questioning of traditional sharia remains rare in Muslim societies. Cases such as Ms Ibrahim’s have tended to be quietly dismissed; prominent religious scholars—with some noted reformist exceptions—have preferred to speak of other matters. This lack of debate has helped sustain strong public support for applying sharia. In 2010 a survey of Muslim attitudes by the Pew Research Centre, an American pollster, found that more than three-quarters of Egyptians, Jordanians and Pakistanis agreed that the death penalty should be applied for apostasy.

But Ms Ibrahim’s ordeal has produced stronger responses than usual. Prince Hassan of Jordan, for one, issued a bold condemnation. “There is no value in worship performed in the absence of free choice and volition,” he wrote in an article published in Jordanian newspapers. Hussam al-Sukkari, an Egyptian columnist, chose a craftier form of reproach. Writing with stinging sarcasm in Egypt’s bestselling daily, al-Masry al-Youm, he suggests not hanging Ms Ibrahim but stoning her to death, along with her “apostate” children and her husband for good measure. That, he says in a parody of Islamist rhetoric, would show nosy secularists, whining human-rights groups and meddling Western governments who is boss.