The implementation of this ban was resisted by religious officials and proved difficult. A series of edicts followed during the Ottoman Tanzimat period, such as the 1856 Reform Edict. This was also the time that Islamic modernists like Muhammad Abduh (d.1905) argued that to be executed, it was not enough to be an apostate, the perpetrator had to pose a real threat to public safety. Islamic scholars like Muhammad Rashid Rida (d.1935) and Muhammad al Ghazzali (d.1996), on the other hand, asserted that public, explicit apostasy automatically tened public order and hence; punishable by death. These scholars reconciled the Qur'anic verse "There is no compulsion in religion.." by arguing that freedom of religion in Islam doesn't extend for Muslims who seek to change their religion. Other authors like 'Abd al-Muta'ali al-Sa'idi, S.A. Rahman, etc assert that capital punishment for apostasy is contradictory to freedom of religion and need to be banished. Efforts to convert Muslims to other religions were extremely unpopular with the Muslim community. Despite these edicts on apostasy, there was constant pressure on non-Muslims to convert to Islam, and apostates from Islam continued to be persecuted, punished and threatened with execution, particularly in eastern and Levant parts of the then Ottoman Empire. The Edict of Toleration ultimately failed when Sultan Abdul Hamid II assumed power, re-asserted pan-Islamism with sharia as Ottoman state philosophy, and initiated Hamidian massacres in 1894 against Christians, particularly the Genocides of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and crypto-Christian apostates from Islam in Turkey (Stavriotes, Kromlides). In the colonial era, the death penalty for apostasy was abolished in Islamic countries that had come under Western rule or in places, such as the Ottoman Empire, Western powers could apply enough pressure to abolish it. Writing in the mid 1970s, Rudolph Peters and Gert J. J. De Vries stated that "apostasy no longer falls under criminal law" in the Muslim world, but that some Muslims (such as 'Adb al-Qadir 'Awdah) were preaching that "the killing of an apostate" had "become a duty of individual Moslems" (rather than a less important collective duty in hisbah doctrine) and giving advice on how to plead in court after being arrested for such a murder to avoid punishment. Some (Louay M. Safi), have argued that this situation, with the adoption of "European legal codes ... enforced by state elites without any public debate", created an identification of tolerance with foreign/alien control in the