Milli Sands writes for the American Thinker about a common trait of communism and Islamism.
Classical Islamic law treats leaving the faith as a capital offense with no statute of limitations. The doctrine rests on a hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari, “whoever changes his religion, kill him,” and legal manuals such as Reliance of the Traveller, codify apostasy as a capital crime. …
… Marxist-Leninist communism reached an equivalent position toward the political apostate. Ignace Reiss, an NKVD officer who ran Soviet networks abroad, wrote to Stalin and the Central Committee on July 17, 1937, returning his Order of the Red Banner for Trotsky’s opposition. Seven weeks later, on September 4, near Lausanne, Switzerland, an NKVD team shot him on a country road.
Leon Trotsky, expelled from the Communist Party in 1927 and deported in 1929, had done the same, organizing from exile against Stalin’s direction of the revolution he had helped lead. The NKVD spent nearly two years cultivating agent Ramón Mercader before he drove an ice axe into Trotsky’s skull in Mexico City on August 20, 1940.
The parallel is not that Islamic law and Soviet practice share a rationale. One is a claim about divine law; the other is about the discipline required to defend a revolution. It is that both treat departure itself, not active resistance, as the offense that matters, and both hold the claim open indefinitely.
Abdul Rahman never organized against Islam. He simply stopped being a Muslim. Reiss and Trotsky never took up arms against the Soviet state. They simply stopped being Bolsheviks in good standing. In every case, the state’s claim on the person did not end when the person renounced it. It began there. …
… China, governed by a party that has never renounced the doctrine, launched Operation Fox Hunt in 2014 and Operation Sky Net in 2015 to bring home Chinese “fugitives” and “corrupt” officials living abroad. Beijing claims over ten thousand returned.
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