had verbally insulted sacred Islamic beliefs or val-
ues. Insulting Muhammad or asserting that there
will be no physical resurrection are but two of
the many verbal actions considered blasphemous.
Muslims and non-Muslims alike could be held
liable on blasphemy charges, which, if proven and
not retracted, could result in punishments ranging
from public censure, to disinheritance, to manda-
tory divorce, to death.
Muslim jurists have enforced blasphemy laws
only occasionally in the past. There were sev-
eral significant instances during the Middle Ages
involving Muslim philosophers and Sufis. The
most famous of these involved the mystic mansUr
al-hallaJ (d. 922), who was accused of saying, “I
am the truth,” (i.e., God). In more recent times,
blasphemy charges have been made against follow-
ers of the bahai Faith and of the ahmadiyya branch
of Islam in pakistan. There was also the famous
case of salman rUshdie (b. 1937), who was con-
demned by Muslims around the world in 1988–89
for his imaginative novel Satanic Verses. Rushdie’s
opponents, led by the ayatollah rUhollah kho-
meini in Iran, said it slandered Muhammad and his
wives, and Khomeini issued a FatWa (an advisory
ruling based on the sharia) calling for his death.
Today, as governments in recently independent
Muslim nation-states increasingly try to centralize
their power and as Islamic activism escalates, some
states and radical Islamic groups are using the
charge of blasphemy to gain legitimacy and popu-
lar support at the expense of intellectuals, Muslim
liberals, and non-Muslim minorities. This has
given new life to the idea of blasphemy in Islam,
while at the same time more and more Muslims are
embracing the ideals of liberalism, pluralism, and
individual freedom of belief and expression.
See also abU zay d, nasr hamid; crime and
pUnishment.
Further reading: Carl W. Ernest, Words of Ecstasy in
Sufism (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1985); Rudolph Peters and Gert J. J. De Vries, “Apostasy
in Islam.” Die Welt des Islams 17 (1976–1977): 1–25;
Abdullah Saeed and Hassan Saeed, Freedom of Religion,
Apostasy and Islam (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publish-
ing, 2004).blood (Arabic: dam)
The vital bodily fluid of blood has special sig-
nificance in the qUran, and in Islamic practice it
is the subject of ritual laws that are discussed at
length in the sharia.
The Quran regards blood as vital for human
life, as reflected in its condemnation of killing as
the shedding of blood (Q 2:30, 84). The Quran
also gives special importance to the blood clot
(alaq), which is considered the substance out of
which God created humans. The chapter titled
“Clots of Blood” (Q 96 al-Alaq) begins: “Recite
in the name of your Lord who created—created
man from clots of blood,” thus stressing the power
of God in creating humans from such a humble
substance. In other verses, the alaq is a particular
stage in the development of the human (Q 22:5;
Q 23:12–14). Some modern interpreters have
compared these Quranic revelations to current
medical understandings of the development of
the human embryo and point to the similarities as
proof that the Quran contains biological knowl-
edge unknown to humans until recent scientific
discoveries.
Another indication of the importance of blood
in the Quran is the prohibition against ingest-
ing it, which is mentioned four times, along
with carrion, pork, and meat not consecrated in
the name of God (Q 2:173; Q 5:3; Q 6:145; Q
16:115). Because of this prohibition, all animals
to be consumed must be slaughtered by slitting
their throats and draining the blood completely.
This procedure must likewise be followed when
animals are sacrificed, as in the annual Feast of
Sacrifice, in which Muslims commemorate abra-
ham’s willingness to sacrifice his son upon God’s
command. Though the Islamic version of the
story of Abraham is similar to that in the Old Tes-
tament, Muslim scholars agree that the purposeblood 109 J