Old news...

An old news item from 2012; but since apparently the Quantum Ignorance of our Western Mainstream has no expiration date, it remains maddeningly timeless.

Hence:

We see, to our weary, dreary dismay, that David D. Kirkpatrick, Middle East correspondent for the New York Times based in Cairo, needs to brush up on his literacy of Islam.  Writing about the Benghazi jihadists, particularly Abu Khattala, Kirkpatrick opined:

He [Abu Khattala] also said he opposed democracy as contrary to Islamic law, and he called those who supported secular constitutions “apostates,” using the terminology Islamist radicals apply to fellow Muslims who are said to disqualify themselves from the faith by collaborating with corrupt governments.  
(from a story in the NYT published October 18, 2012)

First of all, what is a journalist doing injecting in a news story (not an op-ed) his own opinion about what "terminology" is being used by "Islamist radicals"...?

Secondly, the "terminology" apostate is not merely that of "Islamist radicals" (is there such a thing as an "Islamist non-radical" or a "non-Islamist radical", one wonders...?) -- it is part of mainstream Islamic law, and under that law it denotes anyone who leaves or betrays Islam, and the penalty is death.  All four schools of ordinary, mainstream Islamic law -- Shafi, Maliki, Hanbali, and Hanafi (none of them "Islamist" or "radical", much less "Islamist radical") -- mandate death for apostasy.

The rulings of one of those four schools, the Shafi, may be found in the Umdat al-Salik (translated as the “Reliance of the Traveler” in English -- making it sound like some kind of cool spiritual guide from the 60s in a Penguin paperback one would have alongside Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Alan Watts' Psychotherapy East and West, Krishnamurti's Total Freedom: Reflections of the Self, Thomas Merton's The Seven-Storey Mountain, J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, and a dog-eared copy of e.e. cummings).  Sub-titled "A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law" it is an authoritative summary of Sharia law certified by the prestigious Islamic university in Cairo, al-Azhar.  Here's what that manual says about apostasy:

"Leaving Islam is the ugliest form of unbelief... and the worst... When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostasizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed.  In such a case, it is obligatory... to ask him to repent and return to Islam. If he does it is accepted from him, but if he refuses, he is immediately killed."

Then we have the hadiths, which make up the heart of the Sunna, which is arguably as important to Muslims as is the Koran.  In the most canonical hadith collection, Sahih Bukhari (one of the main sources of mainstream Islamic law in all four of the major schools of Islamic law), it is recorded that:

Muhammad says, "Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him." (Sahih al-Bukhari, 9.84.57)

Various other canonical hadiths attest that Muhammad called for death to those who leave Islam. This video has David Wood simply explaining -- and quoting verbatim -- from hadiths and other Islamic sources to this effect.

Furthermore, if all that isn't ghastly enough, a December 2013 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found relatively widespread popular support for death penalty as a punishment for apostasy from Islam: in Egypt (86% of respondents in favor of death penalty), Jordan (82% in favor), Malaysia (62% in favor), Pakistan (76% favor); and so forth.

Further Reading:

Buckley and Islam (in which I demonstrate how even that vaunted Godfather of Modern Conservatism revealed his Islamo-illiteracy)

A Civil War of Ideas (scroll down to where I begin, "A vivid example of what I am talking about...")