A new Draft Law proposes Death Penalty for Apostasy in Iran. the link is to a christian farsi language website, but in terms of my priors i’m willing to believe reports of iranian government attempts to violently clamp down on christian converts from islam. via Shirin Bahrami, who says:
According to a study published by the census bureau of Norway, half of Iranian immigrants leave the religion with which they were raised, and of every ten Iranian immigrants, four agree that religion and faith are of no importance to their daily lives.
i’ve seen plenty of similar data on west european muslims. contrary to perception (by muslims and non-muslims), there are large parts of the world where muslims convert to other religions, e.g., africa, the slavic world and indonesia. but in the “core” arab-turkic-persian (and turkic-persian inflected south asian) societies this is strictly verbotten. there have long been news reports of harassment of converts to christian from muslim communities in the UK, which shows that the cultural norms are naturally exported. but just as some western muslims claim that they are reshaping islam in its new environs, so nations who have diasporas in the west have to grapple with the reality that a non-trivial number of “non-resident nationals” are going to convert to christianity. this is nothing new; almost every spaniard and a large number of russians have many ancestors within the past several hundred who was a muslim (russia’s nobility was1/4 tatar in background in the 17th and 18th centuries).
