Why Twelve Countries Still Execute Apostates While Zero Execute Ex-Christians: The Question We're Not Allowed to Answer.
One executes apostates in twelve countries. One makes YouTube videos. Noticing that difference isn't Islamophobia—it's observation.
Twelve countries will kill you for leaving Islam. State law. Zero countries will kill you for leaving Christianity.
And we’re supposed to pretend that’s not relevant because noticing it might hurt someone’s feelings.
Let’s have this conversation properly using three questions: Is it practical? Is it logical? What’s the likely outcome?
What happened to Christianity.
Christianity was brutal. Burning people alive for heresy. The Inquisition. Crusades slaughtering entire cities. Priests blessing slave ships.
Centuries of state-backed violence.
What changed? Europe tore itself apart in religious wars. The Thirty Years’ War - up to 8 million dead, arguing about whether bread literally becomes Jesus’s flesh or just symbolically represents it.
Eventually enough people looked around and went, “This isn’t practical.” Separated church from state. Not from moral enlightenment but because continuing meant mutual annihilation.
Then came industrialisation, economic development. People got jobs, education, futures. Churches lost state power. No more executions.
Christian fundamentalists now? Annoying. Protest abortion clinics. Won’t bake gay wedding cakes.
But they’re not executing apostates. Not running theocratic states.
Christianity’s enforcers got beaten into submission by modernity.
Islam’s different trajectory.
Twelve countries maintain the death penalty for apostasy: Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia (varies by state), Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria (12 northern states), Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia (al-Shabaab regions), UAE, Yemen.
Women stoned for adultery. Gay people executed. Bloggers flogged. Cartoonists murdered.
The Taliban’s August 2024 morality laws prohibit women’s voices being heard by unrelated men in public.
Here’s the thing - brilliant guerrilla fighters, completely useless at running countries. Can’t fix the economy, can’t stop the famine. So they create entire departments monitoring women’s voices and ankle coverage.
That’s not governance. That’s incompetence desperately controlling something to mask failure.
Same pattern across the region. Can’t create jobs, can’t build infrastructure. So they ramp up religious enforcement. Keeps everyone busy while the country burns.
The theological difference nobody states clearly.
Islamic fundamentalism divides the world into Dar al-Islam (House of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (House of War). The endgame isn’t “we’ll have our religion, you have yours.” The endgame is one world under Islamic law.
Modern Christianity says “we want to save your soul.” Islamic fundamentalism says “we want to govern your society.”
Strip away the complexity:
My prophet supersedes your prophet. Your prophet got it wrong. My prophet delivered the final version. Therefore my law should govern you.
Christianity claims the same in reverse - Jesus is God, Muhammad was a false prophet.
Both say “I’m exclusively right, you’re exclusively wrong.”
But right now:
Christianity limits that to “you’re wrong about the afterlife, I’ll pray for your soul.”
Islamic fundamentalism says “you’re wrong about the afterlife AND you should live under Sharia law, enforced by state power, whether you convert or not.”
One’s annoying. The other’s a political programme backed by state violence in twelve countries.
Christianity had this vision too. The Crusades failed. Religious wars ended in exhaustion.
Islamic fundamentalism hasn’t had that forced moderation yet.
Who’s actually trying to fix this.
Millions of Muslims are trying to reconcile their faith with modernity. Reformists. Feminist Muslims. Ex-Muslims risking their lives. Progressive scholars.
They’re the vital 20% holding everything up.
ISIS at peak was estimated at 20,000-30,000 fighters according to CIA assessments. Out of 1.9 billion Muslims. 0.0015%.
But they dominated everything. The news. The military spending. The conversation. The reformists trying to create solutions? Invisible.
Western policy does the same. Spend billions bombing the extremists. Zero supporting the reformists who might actually fix things.
The context argument.
“You can’t criticise without acknowledging Western colonialism created this!”
Right. The West screwed the Middle East repeatedly. Sykes-Picot drew arbitrary borders. Backed autocrats. Overthrew Iran’s government in 1953. Invaded Iraq in 2003 on lies about WMDs. Armed the mujahideen in the 1980s.
Not conspiracy. Just repeated, spectacular incompetence.
All true. Acknowledged.
But explaining why something happens isn’t saying it’s acceptable.
Yes, Western intervention created fertile ground for extremism through incompetence.
No, that doesn’t make it acceptable to throw gay people off buildings.
The bloke getting beheaded doesn’t care about Sykes-Picot. The woman who can’t go to school doesn’t feel better knowing about colonialism.
They’re still dead.
Holding both truths.
You can think both these things:
Islamic fundamentalism executing people is barbaric
Western intervention created conditions where fundamentalism recruits
Both. Same time. Neither cancels the other.
Most Muslims (1.9 billion) aren’t fundamentalists. They’re living their lives. The fundamentalists are a tiny, violent minority.
But that tiny minority runs twelve countries with state power.
Watch what they actually do.
Taliban can’t run a modern state. So they’ve created government departments enforcing dress codes. Religious police monitoring ankles and beards. Thousands employed in performative enforcement while the country starves.
Busy work masking failure to solve actual problems.
Iran’s economy is collapsing. So they execute protesters and expand morality police.
ISIS declared a caliphate while losing territory daily. Convinced they were winning because they had God’s truth. Couldn’t recognise their incompetence because they were too incompetent to recognise it.
And before you get smug - watch what we do. Can’t fix root causes? Create massive security bureaucracies. Expand surveillance. Increase military budgets. Bomb more countries.
Same pattern. Busy work masking systemic failure on both sides.
What’s the likely outcome.
Practical? No. Executions accomplish nothing except corpses. But it serves incompetent leaders maintaining power while masking inability to govern.
Logical? From fundamentalists’ perspective, yes - if apostasy threatens cosmic order, execution makes sense. From rational perspective, no - you’re murdering people for thought crimes while your society crumbles.
Likely outcome? More of the same.
Incompetent fundamentalist leaders maintain power through religious enforcement. Western powers intervene incompetently, creating blowback. The 80% noise drowns out the 20% who might solve things. Reformists get abandoned.
This continues until Muslim-majority countries achieve development and education (hard when we keep bombing them), fundamentalist regimes collapse under incompetence (happening slowly), or reformists gain external support (not happening).
Most likely? Decades more suffering because incompetent systems take a long time dying.
The observation.
Right now, parts of Islam are executing apostates, stoning women, throwing gay people off buildings. Running theocratic states led by incompetent leaders supremely confident despite failure, spending resources on religious enforcement to mask inability to solve problems, drowning out reformists who might create change.
Parts of Christianity aren’t doing this at the same scale.
If making that observation clearly - without hedging, without apologising - makes me Islamophobic, your definition has lost all meaning.
The people who suffer most from our silence are reformist Muslims, ex-Muslims, gay Muslims, Muslim women trying to fix this from within.
We’ve been bullied into silence by definitions protecting fundamentalists rather than reformists.
That’s backwards.
Until we state facts clearly, support reformists openly, and stop protecting fundamentalists with definitions designed to silence criticism, the likely outcome remains: more corpses, more suffering, more incompetence masquerading as governance.
Am I wrong about the facts? Or just wrong about being allowed to say them?
The people who suffer most from our silence are the ones trying to fix this from within. Abandoning them to protect our comfort is the real moral failure.
CITATIONS.
Apostasy Laws: Library of Congress, “Laws Criminalising Apostasy,” 2014; Pew Research Centre, 2016; USCIRF Annual Reports 2022-2024
Taliban Morality Laws: The Telegraph, August 2024; UNAMA, August 2024; Human Rights Watch, August 2024
ISIS Estimates: CIA via CNN, September 2014; The Guardian, September 2014
Muslim Population: Pew Research Centre (2024: 1.9-2.0 billion)
Thirty Years’ War: Wilson, “Europe’s Tragedy,” Penguin, 2010 (4.5-8 million deaths)
Western Interventions: Sykes-Picot Agreement, National Archives UK, 1916; Senate Intel Committee, 2004; Chilcot Inquiry, 2016; Coll, “Ghost Wars,” Penguin, 2004
Dar al-Islam/Harb: Esposito, “Oxford Dictionary of Islam,” 2003; Abou El Fadl, “The Great Theft,” 2005