Islam's stop-loss program

Recently, it was reported that a former Muslim and convert to Christianity faces death in Afghanistan under sharia law.

Shariah law states that any Muslim who rejects Islam should be sentenced to death, according to Ahmad Fahim Hakim, deputy chairman of the state-sponsored Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. Repeated attempts to impose a jail sentence were barred.
The prosecutor, Abdul Wasi, said he had offered to drop the charges if Mr Rahman converted back to Islam, but he refused. "He would have been forgiven if he changed back. But he said he was a Christian and would always remain one," Mr Wasi said. "We are Muslims and becoming a Christian is against our laws. He must get the death penalty."

In this short article, Mr. Sayyid Muhammad Rizvi explains that apostasy is deemed treason and thus punishable by death.

In Islam, the concept of treason is not limited to political and military affairs, it also has a spiritual and cultural dimension to it. In the Islamic order of sacredness, Allãh, then the Prophet and then the Qur'ãn occupy the highest positions. Tawhid, nubuwwa, and qiyãma form the constitution of Islam. Just as upholding and protecting the constitution of a country is sign of patriotism, and undermining it is a form of treason-in the same way open rejection of the fundamental beliefs of Islam by a Muslim is an act of treason.

Thus, executing apostates is deemed an act in defense of Muslim society. From a game theoretic standpoint, imposing the death penalty for apostasy serves to minimize the number of adherents defecting from the religion via deterrence. Thus, the policy acts to maximize the number of adherents.

The analogy that is drawn to nationalism, patriotism, and thus treason is illuminating with regard to underlying psychology justifying the policy. This 2004 brain-imaging study on revenge seems applicable.

The findings, reported in today's issue of the journal Science, may partly explain a behavior known as altruistic punishment: Why do we reprimand people who have abused our trust or broken other social rules, even when we get no direct practical benefits in return?
"A person who has been cheated is [left] in a bad situation—with bad feelings," said study co-author Ernst Fehr, director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. "The person would feel even worse if the cheater does not get her or his just punishment." [...]
Fehr and his colleagues suggest that the feeling of satisfaction people get from meting out altruistic punishment may be the glue that keeps societies together.
"Theory and experimental evidence shows that cooperation among strangers is greatly enhanced by altruistic punishment," Fehr said. "Cooperation among strangers breaks down in experiments if altruistic punishment is ruled out. Cooperation flourishes if punishment of defectors is possible."

Thus, the apostate individual is punished on this earth (rather than in any afterlife) in order to maintain social order. This implies acceptance of a communal value that the individual is less important than society at large, a value in conflict with individualism.