The Question We Keep Avoiding

I recently came across a video of a former Muslim arguing that Islam isn't really a religion but a political system of conquest — that Muslims preach tolerance as minorities and abandon it once they hold power.

My first reaction was to reject this as a sweeping, unfair generalisation. I still do. Nearly two billion Muslims are not one political project, and I've seen no convincing evidence of some coordinated strategy to feign tolerance until the numbers turn.

But dismissing the criticism outright isn't enough. There's an uncomfortable question buried inside it, and I think we owe ourselves an honest answer.

The asymmetry

As minorities in the West, Muslims rightly demand full religious freedom: to build mosques, preach, dress as they choose, raise their children in the faith, and invite others to it. That demand is legitimate and shouldn't be diluted.

But in a number of Muslim-majority states, the reverse freedoms are constrained. Apostasy carries the death penalty on the books in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and a handful of other states, even where rarely enforced. Blasphemy laws in Pakistan have been used to imprison people and, in several high-profile cases, preceded mob killings — Mashal Khan's lynching and the public celebration of Governor Salman Taseer's assassin are the cases most people recall. Proselytising by non-Muslims is restricted or banned in Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. These aren't fringe examples; they involve some of the most populous and influential countries in the Muslim world.

I want to be fair to the counterargument here: this comparison isn't perfectly symmetrical. Religious freedom in Britain or America isn't a favour granted to Muslims by a benevolent host — it's a legal default applied to everyone, under a system Muslims didn't design and don't have to defend theologically. Demanding your rights under someone else's constitution is a different act from a Muslim-majority state choosing, through its own scholars and legislature, what rights to grant others. That distinction matters, and it's worth naming rather than skating past.

But it doesn't dissolve the question — it sharpens it. When Muslims do hold the pen, when it's our own scholars, our own states, our own constitutions, what do we choose? That's the test this essay is actually about.

Why "that's not real Islam" isn't a full answer

Classical jurists across all four Sunni schools did develop punishments for apostasy, and blasphemy was often treated as a capital offence tied to it. Protection (dhimma) for Jews and Christians under Muslim rule was real and, in many periods, more generous than what those communities got elsewhere. But protection is not equal citizenship. Dhimmis paid a special tax, faced restrictions on building or repairing places of worship, and did not share identical legal standing with Muslims.

Saying "there is no compulsion in religion" (Qur'an 2:256) is true and important. It doesn't, by itself, explain why major classical scholars nonetheless supported the death penalty for leaving Islam — a position derived less from that verse than from hadith, and from treating apostasy as a political crime, treason against the community, rather than a private matter of belief.

This is not unanswered territory. Scholars like Abdullahi An-Na'im and Khaled Abou El Fadl have argued, from within the tradition, that classical apostasy law responded to a specific 7th-century political threat — tribes using "leaving Islam" as a declaration of war against the new state — and shouldn't be read as timeless theology. Mohsen Kadivar has made a similar case from a Shia framework. Their arguments deserve to be mainstream, not a footnote read only by specialists. That they aren't yet is itself part of what needs explaining.

The real questions

Here's what I'd put to our scholars and institutions, plainly:

Does a Muslim have the legal right to leave Islam without state punishment?

Should non-Muslims have the same right to preach in a Muslim-majority country that Muslims expect in London or Michigan?

Should criticism of Islam — even offensive criticism — be met with argument, not prosecution or violence?

Should a non-Muslim citizen of a Muslim-majority state be a full equal before the law, not a protected minority?

If the answer is yes — and I believe, for most contemporary Muslims, it is — then I want to see that position built openly from within the tradition, the way An-Na'im, Abou El Fadl, and Kadivar have tried to do. Not with slogans. Not by dodging the hard texts. Not by calling every critic an Islamophobe, and not by pointing to Christian Europe's own ugly history as if that settles anything.

Why this matters beyond theology

Anti-Muslim narratives gain traction precisely in the gap this essay is about: we demand freedom loudly as a minority and go quiet when a dissenter or alleged blasphemer is threatened where we hold power. Every time that gap goes unaddressed, it hands the polemicists their best evidence.

The strongest rebuttal to "Islam is just a conquest system" was never going to be denial. It's showing — consistently, not only where we're 2% of a population but also where we're 90% — that the tradition can hold its own reform.

That's the work I think our scholars and intellectuals owe us. Not because Islam needs saving, but because we should have enough confidence in it to ask the hard question and stay in the room for the answer.