Apostasy in Islam

Abstract

Abstract As the first of the two empirical chapters, Chapter 3 looks at how and why the social movement practice of Hizmet produced socially transformative Islamic knowledge on human rights that amounted to a reinterpretation (ijtihad) of the premodern Islamic doctrine on apostasy—one of the two most contested issues in the context of Islam and human rights. It does so by tracing the interplay within and between Hizmet’s doings and sayings over an expansive temporospatial axis. The chapter shows how and why this outcome ensued organically, unassumingly, and unintentionally by combining production, assimilation, legitimisation, and articulation of the emergent reinterpretation into one relational process where knowing arose from the ‘doing-body’ to the ‘thinking-mind’ rather than vice versa. Accordingly, this form of knowledge production accounts for the changing of sensibility as well as scriptural justification through the symbiotic relationship between two movements: internalisation and externalisation aided by cognitive compromise and dissonance.