Machine summary:
Jamal Badawi (Islamic Information Foundation), after stating his agreement with Alalwani’s arguments as presented in Apostasy in Islam: A Historical and Scriptural Analysis (IIIT: 2011), said that the book covers two major areas: (1) the historical aspect of ḥadd punishments and how some rulers used them as political tools to rid themselves of critics or opponents and (2) a scriptural analysis of how the Qur’an and the Hadith literature views apostates.
Zulqifar Ali Shah (Fiqh Council of North America) remarked that earlier scholars frequently employed selective methodologies and harbored subjective attitudes because they did not distinguish between Islam as religion and Islam as state.
After Abdallah Sidahmed’s general remarks, Zahid Bukhari (Islamic Cir- cle of North America) said that Muslims are witnessing “a new colonial prism.
Emad ad- Dean Ahmad made several points: Islamic movements can be at odds with each other (a fact that is often overlooked); secularism, which is a wedge used to divide people, also is not monolithic (Islamists can accept American-style secularism, in his opinion); and a distinction needs to be made between ne- oliberal and free market economics.
Ahmad began by saying that Ahmad al-Raysuni wrote Al-Shura: The Qur’anic Principle of Consultation (IIIT, 2011) to remind Muslims of this largely ignored approach mentioned in Q.
He went on to say that shūrā needs to become part of the political realm, as it is closely related to the concept of running a state, and thus Muslim scholars have to understand liberalism, cap- italism, and democracy.