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330chapter sixnothing to do with martyrdom, missionary activities, and warfare;that Allah does not stipulate any legal punishment for apostasy; thatin Islam there does exist a concept of freedom of religion; that loyaltyto the religion of Islam does not mean an exclusivist identity eliminatingall other attachments and loyalties; and that finally Allahwants us to live a peaceful existence of multiple identities. It willbecome evident how close the #ulam§"’s and the Islamists’ argumentsare. Both demand the death penalty for apostasy; both deny freedomof religion; both treat humans as ‘slaves of God’; both use the conceptsof al-jih§d and al-qit§l as aggressive tools to justify militancy andviolence; and both abuse the qur"anic al-amr bi’l-ma#råf wa-nahy #anal-munkar as a strategy to intimidate people, to intrude into theirprivate lives, and to function as a kind of combined thought policeand vice squad. It is the aim of this chapter, which has been adaptedfrom our fifth book, 1 that the readers will understand why bothgroups, the Islamists and #ulam§", since their views on these mattersfundamentally contradict everything that Allah says in the Book, havelost the right to speak in the name of God.FreedomWe begin with the issue of freedom whose proper conceptualisationis absolutely vital for a critique of Political Islam and for a reconfigurationof the collective consciousness of Arab Muslims. The currentintellectual crisis has been caused by a century-long absence of anyviable notion of freedom in the public mind. As a result, in ourdebates about Islam and religion the issue of freedom counts for verylittle or is entirely absent. This section intends to contribute to awider awareness of how important the notion of individual and collectivefreedom is for a reformulation of Islamic ethics and for thedraining of the sources of religious fundamentalism.Philosophically, the notion of freedom allows human beings theright to act and make decisions without external constraints. It refersto a state of being free or at liberty to exercise a conscious choicebetween affirmation and negation with regards to all aspects of objectivereality. Expressed in the terminology of the Book, freedom givesindividuals the power to determine their action by moving from1Shahrur, TajfÊf man§bi# al-irh§b, 2008.