corporal punishment to apply to apostates in this world—let alone commands to kill apostates—either explicitly or implicitly; In fact, other verses emphasize mercy and lack of compulsion in belief: Hadith The classical shariah punishment for apostasy comes from Sahih ("authentic") Hadith rather than the Quran. Writing in the Encyclopedia of Islam, Heffening holds that contrary to the Qur'an, "in traditions [i.e. hadith], there is little echo of these punishments in the next world... and instead, we have in many traditions a new element, the death penalty. Other hadith give differing statements about the fate of apostates; that they were spared execution by repenting, by dying of natural causes or by leaving their community (the last case sometimes cited as an example of open apostasy that was left unpunished). The Muwatta of Imam Malik offers a case were Rashidun (rightly guide) Caliph Umar admonishes a Muslim leader for not giving an apostate the opportunity to repent before being executed: The argument has been made (by the Fiqh Council of North America, among others) that the hadiths above — traditionally cited as proof that apostates from Islam should be punished by death — have been misunderstood. In fact (the council argues), the victims were executed for changing their allegiances to the armies fighting the Muslims (i.e. for treason), not for their personal beliefs. As evidence, they point to two hadith, each from a different "authentic" (sahih) Sunni hadith collection where Muhammad calls for the death of apostates or traitors. The wording of the hadith are almost identical, but in one, the hadith ends with the phrase "one who reverts from Islam and leaves the Muslims", and in the other it ends with "one who goes forth to fight Allah and His Apostle", (in other words, the council argues the hadith were likely reports of the same incident but had different wording because "reverting from Islam" was another way of saying "fighting Allah and His Apostle"): What constitutes apostasy in Islam? Scholars of Islam differ as to what constitutes apostasy in that religion and under what circumstances an apostate is subject to the death penalty. Conditions of apostasy in classical Islam Al-Shafi'i listed three necessary conditions to pass capital punishment on a Muslim for apostasy in his Kitab al-Umm. (In the words of Frank Griffel) these are: "first, the apostate had to once have had faith (which, according to Al-Shafi'i's definition, means publicly