professing all tenets of Islam); secondly, there had to follow unbelief (meaning the public declaration of a breaking-away from Islam), (having done these two the Muslim is now an unbeliever but not yet an apostate and thus not eligible for punishment); "third, there had to be the omission or failure to repent after the apostate was asked to do so." Three centuries later, Al-Ghazali wrote that one group, known as "secret apostates" or "permanent unbelievers" (aka zandaqa), should not be given a chance to repent, eliminating Al-Shafi'i's third condition for them although his view was not accepted by his Shafi'i madhhab. Characteristics Describing what qualifies as apostasy Christine Schirrmacher writes there is widespread consensus that apostasy undoubtedly exists where the truth of the Koran is denied, where blasphemy is committed against God, Islam, or Muhammad, and where breaking away from the Islamic faith in word or deed occurs. The lasting, willful non-observance of the five pillars of Islam, in particular the duty to pray, clearly count as apostasy for most theologians. Additional distinguishing features are a change of religion, confessing atheism, nullifying the Sharia as well as judging what is allowed to be forbidden and judging what is forbidden to be allowed. Fighting against Muslims and Islam (Arabic: muḥāraba) also counts as unbelief or apostasy; Kamran Hashemi classifies apostasy or unbelief in Islam into three different "phenomena": Converting from Islam to another religion (or abandoning religion altogether), also described as "explicit" apostasy. (Hashemi gives the example of Abdul Rahman, an Afghan who was arrested in February 2006 and threatened with the death penalty in a lower court in Kabul for converting to Christianity). Blaspheming (sabb) (by a Muslim) against God, Islam, its laws or its prophet, which can be defined, in practice, as any objection to the authenticity of Islam, its laws or its prophet. Heresy; or "implicit" apostasy (by a Muslim), where the alleged apostate does not formally renounce Islam, but has (in the eyes of their accusers) verbally denied some principle of belief prescribed by Qur'an or a Hadith; deviated from approved Islamic tenets (ilhad). (Accusations of heresy, or takfir, often involve public thinkers and theologians -- Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, Nasr Abu Zayd, Hashem Aghajari—but can involve the collective takfir of a large group and mass killings -- takfir of Algerians who did not support the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria in 1997, takfir of Shia by Abu