Hello Prince Adewale @Maya_leeke , I have been watching your tweets and your attacks on our faith lately on this app. Remember you had once tried to engage me by stalking me, and I used to ignore you. I did that deliberately. For the sake of people who may want to be deceived, let me make some explanations as a rebuttal. Prince Adewale is pushing a surface level narrative about Sharia without understanding how classical Islamic practice works. In Islamic law, the ruling on apostasy was never about someone changing their personal beliefs in the privacy of their bedroom. It was the historical equivalent of high treason. In the early days, Islamic societies were under constant military threat. Leaving the faith almost always meant defecting to the enemy army, leaking state secrets, and taking up arms against your own people. The penalty was for political and military betrayal. Even in the ancient world, religion and the state were tied together. If you lived in the Roman Empire or the Persian Empire and defected to their enemies, the penalty was death. In fact, in our Nigerian law, what happens if a Nigerian citizen renounces their allegiance to the country, crosses over to join an armed insurgency, leaks military intelligence, and starts fighting the Nigerian state? Can Nigeria accept that in the name of freedom of association? No. The constitution defines that as treason, and the penalty is death. The United States and every other nation on earth have severe penalties for treason and armed rebellion. In early Islamic history, the Muslim community was a new state fighting for its survival. So leaving the faith was a public defection to the hostile enemy camp. If it was just about changing religion, we would see a very different history. We have authentic records where people left Islam during the time of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and they walked away freely. You can read the famous Hadith narrated by Jabir bin Abdullah in Sahih al-Bukhari, found in the Book of Virtues of Madinah. An unnamed Bedouin came to the Prophet (peace be upon him), he openly canceled his pledge of Islam, and walked right out of the city. Nobody touched him. Read that again. You cannot strip away the historical and political context of a law just to push a fearmongering agenda on Twitter. Prince Adewale, Be Warned.
