Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out is a 2003 book, authored and edited by ex-Muslim and secularist Ibn Warraq, that researches and documents cases of apostasy in Islam. It also contains a collection of essays by ex-Muslims recounting their own experience in leaving the Islamic religion.
Synopsis
Leaving Islam is divided into four parts, with a preface and five appendices.
Part 1: Theory and practice of apostasy in Islam
The first part of the book presents an overview of the theological-juridical underpinnings of apostasy in Islam based upon the Qur’an, the hadiths and written opinions from classical schools of Islamic jurisprudence, as well as contemporary written pronouncements of Islamic jurists.
The next section presents the history of the application of Islamic jurisprudence on apostates, documenting notable cases from the early centuries of Islam, such as those of freethinkers Ibn al-Rawandi and Rhazes (865–925), or skeptical poets such as Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) He cited several of his co-authors and other ex-Muslims who decided to leave the faith for a variety of reasons, but stated that these people rarely dared to speak out for themselves, and non-Muslims such as Western publishers often refused to grant them a platform out of fear.
Aside from giving Muslim apostates a voice, Warraq also conveyed his idea that ex-Muslims should take the lead in criticising Islam and Islamism. As former Muslims, they have experienced Islam from within, and know it better than critics from outside, and perhaps can speak about it with more authority. To support this, Warraq compared 1930s Bolshevism and 1990s Islamism, and modern-day ex-Muslims to ex-communists from the 1930s, referencing Arthur Koestler's statement to his formerly fellow communists: "You hate our Cassandra cries and resent us as allies, but when all is said, we ex-Communists are the only people on your side who know what it's all about."
The New York Review of Books commented that Leaving Islam is "probably the first book of its kind — a compendium of testimonies from former Muslims about their estrangement from the Islamic faith." Finding the personal stories widely varying in quality ("from the tragic to the trite"), it remarked that the "long and illustrious history of Muslim doubt" in the book's first part was most informative.
According to The Boston Globe, "Leaving Islams stories make eye-opening reading."
When a Dutch translation by Bernadette de Wit (with a foreword by Afshin Ellian) was published in 2008, de Volkskrant found the book "interesting, because it shows how the process of deconversion occurs in Muslim migrants." On the other hand, there was an apparent inconsistency in the authors' attitude towards the Abrahamic holy books. They agreed that both the Quran and the Bible described many atrocities and contained a lot of immoral commandments, but while modern Christians and Jews were praised for cherry-picking the good bits and ignoring the unethical parts or taking them as parables, the contributors of Leaving Islam tended to claim that modern Muslims who try to do the same are blind to what the texts literally say, and should stop believing in them altogether.
In a similar book, The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam (2015), Simon Cottee challenged Leaving Islams assertion that the fact that the death penalty for apostasy is supported by several passages in the hadith, this means this reflects the 21st-century mainstream Muslim opinion on the matter.
See also
- Apostasy in Islam
- Criticism of Islam
- Why I Am Not a Muslim
- List of former Muslims