The imposition of the death penalty for apostasy and related offences is not unique to Islam - it existed in Judaism and Christianity, and was widely practiced under the latter in the Mediaeval period. Yet these notions have been effectively eliminated from any current Jewish or Christian discourse, and there is no possibility of imposing the death penalty for these crimes in the modern context of these societies. In contrast, such punishments remain entrenched in Islamic jurisprudence and those found guilty of these offences can still be sentenced to death in countries like Pakistan and, as is now being widely reported, Sudan.

The pressing question, I believe, is not how Islamic societies can "catch up" with their Jewish and Christian counterparts in this regard, but rather how Islamic jurisprudence can be revised as an internal Islamic imperative. How, in other words, can traditional notions of apostasy be seen as incompatible with the Islamic conception of religious freedom, rather than as contrary to international human rights norms which some Muslims regard as impositions from Western countries?

The Arabic word riddah, commonly translated as apostasy, literally means to "turn back." In Islamic law, riddah is understood to be reverting from the religion of Islam to kufr (unbelief), whether intentionally or by necessary implication. The vast majority of classical Muslim scholars agree that once a person becomes a Muslim by his or her free choice, there is no way by which he or she can change religion.

According to such scholars, ways in which riddah may occur include denial of the existence of God or the attributes of God, denial of a particular messenger of God, denial of a principle that is established as a matter of religion (such as the obligation to pray five times a day or fast during the month of Ramadan), declaring prohibited what is manifestly permitted (halal), or declaring permitted what is manifestly prohibited (haram). But since some of these issues have always been the subject of significant and persistent disagreement among Muslim scholars, it is difficult to establish the definitive and categorical view by which all other views are to be judged.

Moreover, apostasy is said to apply whenever a person is deemed to have reverted from Islam, by an intentional or blasphemous belief, act or utterance. For instance, the first category is supposed to include: doubts about the existence of God or about the message of the Prophet Muhammad or any other prophet; doubts about the Qur'an, the Day of Judgment, the existence of paradise and hell; doubts about the eternity of God; and doubt about any point of belief on which there is consensus (ijma) among Muslims, such as the attributes of God.

It would therefore logically follow that where there is no consensus on an issue, apostasy is not possible on that count. Yet, as a matter of fact, there is no consensus on many of the issues included in the list of various scholars and schools. For example, there is significant disagreement among those early scholars on God's attributes, which mean that one can be condemned as an apostate for accepting or rejecting an attribute of God according to the views of one scholar that is asserted or denied by another scholar.

An obvious problem with the notion of apostasy is that, while the Qur'an repeatedly condemns apostasy as a religious sin, it does not provide any punishment for it in this life (as can be seen in verses 2:217, 4:90, 5:54, 59, 16:108 and 47:25). In fact, the Qur'an clearly contemplates situations where an apostate continues to live among the Muslim community and engaged in repeated apostasy, rather than being put to death for the first time they commit this alleged crime. For example, verse 4:137 of the Qur'an can be translated as follows: "Those who believed, then disbelieved, then believed, and then disbelieved [once more] and became more committed to disbelief, God will not forgive them or guide them to the righteous pathway."

Moreover, the value of protecting the possibility of dissent and difference can be appreciated in terms of the relationship of heresy to the authenticity and rejuvenation of religious life. Obviously, many heresies simply perish and disappear, but there is no orthodoxy that was not a heresy when it started. From this perspective, every religious community should safeguard the psychological and social as well as legal possibility of heresy and disagreement among its members, because that is the best indicator of the honesty and authenticity of the beliefs and practice within that community.

Believers must always remain within their religious community completely voluntarily or leave by their free choice - there is simply no value or any purpose in coerced religious belief or practice. Unfortunately, the harsh legal consequences of failure to respect freedom of religion and confusion and fluidity over the concepts and terms used to suppress this freedom in the Islamic context are far from theoretical or historical.

For example, members of the Ahmadiyya community in Pakistan were considered a religious minority within Islam, governed by Muslim personal law in the area of family law, allowed to contest elections as Muslims and to assume public office reserved for Muslims. In 1974, the Government of Prime Minister Zulfiqar Bhutto amended Article 260 of the 1973 Constitution of Pakistan in order to declare all Ahmadiyyas non-Muslims, thereby denying them all the legal benefits of being classified as Muslims.

In 1984, the President Zia-ul-Haq's martial law regime added new sections 298B and 298-C to the Pakistan Penal Code of 1860, and amended the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1898 and West Pakistan Press and Publications Ordinance of 1963 Penal to punish with up to three years imprisonment for any member of the Ahadmiyya community who uses certain expressions which are characteristics of their religious faith, or use the Muslim call for payer, or identifies himself or herself as a Muslim.

Since the rationalization of such persecution is alleged to be "Islamic," it is therefore necessary to challenge such violations of freedom of religion from the same Islamic perspective. In particular, the Qur'an neither defined apostasy and related concepts in legal terms, nor imposed a punishment for any of them in this life. These issues should be taken as matters of freedom of conscience, rather than capital crimes. But that possibility of re-interpretation must begin with a clear acknowledgement of the traditional position, despite all its ambiguities and contradictions.

An Islamic reform methodology that I find to be appropriate for achieving the necessary degree of reform is that proposed by Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. The premise of Ustadh Mahmoud's methodology is that the earlier universal message of Islam of peaceful propagation and non-discrimination was contained in parts of the Qur'an that were revealed in Mecca (610-22). But when the Prophet migrated with his few persecuted followers to Medina in 622, the Qur'an had to provide for the concrete needs of the emerging community, which had to struggle for survival in an extremely harsh and violent environment.

It is clear that traditional shari'a principles, like apostasy, were in fact concessions to the social and economic realities of the time, and not the message Islam intended for humanity at large into the indefinite future. Since those principles were developed by early Muslim jurists applying their own methodology of interpretation that was not sanctioned as such in the Qur'an or Sunna of the Prophet, different conclusions can be drawn by applying a new methodology.

This analysis, I believe, provides a coherent and systematic methodology of interpretation of the totality of the Qur'an and Sunna, instead of the arbitrary selectivity used some other modern reformers who fail to explain what happens to the verses they choose to overlook.

While traditional conceptions of apostasy and related notions were accepted as valid by earlier Muslims in the historical context of the formative stages of shari'a, that is no longer true today. The individual and collective orientations of Muslims today, I believe, are probably different from those of earlier generations because of the radical transformation of existential and material circumstances of today compared to those of the past.

In contrast to the localized traditional existence of past Islamic societies, Muslims today live in multi-religious nation-states which are fully incorporated into a globalized world of political, economic and security interdependence, and constantly experiencing the effects of mutual social/cultural influence with non-Islamic societies. While some individual Muslims may still choose to advocate traditional notions of community and conditionality of rights, the reality of the pluralistic national and international political communities of today support entitlement to freedom of belief as a human right rather than a conditional right of membership of a religious community.

If the benefits of freedom of belief are available only to believers who are accepted as such, what is the rationale for having a right to freedom of belief at all? The right to freedom of belief is needed, and can be claimed, only by nonbelievers and believers who are not accepted as such by the community in question.

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. He is the author of Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari'a and Muslims and Global Justice.