Apostasy as objective and depersonalized fact: two recent Egyptian court judgments.(Part II: Islamic law: boundaries and rights)

THE court judgments in the recent apostasy trials in the Arab world have brought about fundamental changes in the control of belief and religious affiliation that are directly related to the transformation Islamic law underwent when it became integrated into the legislative codes of the new nation-states.

From the eighth to the nineteenth century, the norms of Islamic law were the result of learned debates among independent jurists and their schools of law. Islamic law was a jurist's law. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was integrated into the codes enacted…