Recently, Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, a prominent British Muslim convert to Islam, issued an 'apology' on Twitter/X in which he clarified: "I fully believe in, support and defend all Islamic laws, including hadd for ridda." As the historian and linguist Marijn van Putten notes, just remove the veil of the Arabic terminology and what Hamza is calling for is the application of the death penalty against apostates (i.e. people who have abandoned Islam). While Marijn decried Hamza's remarks and suggested he would report them, Professor Jonathan Brown of Georgetown University (himself a convert to Islam) offered soft apologia for Hamza's position, describing them as "totally unremarkable religious belief." For his part, Javad Hashmi of Harvard University, who co-hosted a Bible-Qur'an course with famous New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, critiqued Hamza's position as a "backwards, medieval view" and offered a substantive refutation of it, but he nonetheless suggested it was reflective of 'cancel culture' to report such views as problematic to social media or employers. That there are academics at prestigious Western universities offering these sorts of soft apologetics for Hamza's position is remarkable to me, but I guess the issue requires some explanation.
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