The death threat charge
The claim — as circulated
Muslims send death threats to people who publicly question Islam. That is what the religion produces.
The rebuttal
The fact is conceded before the argument begins. People do send these messages, in public, sometimes under their own names, and it is indefensible. Anyone who has received one was frightened for a reason. We are not going to argue about whether it happens.
The inference is the problem
What the polemic needs is the next step: that the threats express the religion rather than violate it. That step requires the sources to authorise what the sender did, and they do not.
Qur’an 5:32 makes the killing of one innocent soul the killing of all humanity. Qur’an 2:256 forbids compulsion in religion outright. And the classical jurists, who are not usually accused of leniency, closed this door specifically: hudud penalties belong to constituted authority alone, a private individual has no standing to impose them, and the man who takes it upon himself commits an offence in doing so. Declaring another person an unbeliever is likewise reserved to those qualified to judge. The online threatener has no authority under any school to do the thing he is threatening.
Who actually agrees with whom
Set the two men side by side. The one sending the threat believes Islam authorises him to kill a critic. The one citing the threat believes Islam authorises him to kill a critic. They agree completely, and both stand against fourteen centuries of jurisprudence that says otherwise. When a polemicist tells you the threatener is the authentic Muslim, he is accepting the threatener’s account of Islam and discarding the scholars’. That is a strange place for a critic to end up, and he never explains why the most lawless reading is the true one.
What is owed
Something is owed here, and it is not owed to the argument. A Muslim who reads this and recognises the behaviour in people he knows should say so where it will cost him something. The threats do more damage to the faith than any ex-Muslim posting has ever done, because they hand the polemic its only piece of evidence that behaves like proof.
The charge that Muslims do this is true. The charge that Islam commands it is refuted by the same law the threatener imagines he is enforcing.
Sources
- Umair Munir Hashmi et al., 'Former Muslims' Socio-Religious Discourse on Social Media: A Speech Acts Analysis', 3L: The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies 28(4), 2022, pp. 197-211.
- Qur'an 5:32; 2:256.
- On the jurists' restriction of hudud to constituted authority: Ibn Qudamah, al-Mughni, and the classical consensus that vigilante enforcement is itself an offence.