Christ is Risen (in the West)!

As I was taught it Islam's view is that "your blood is forefeit" if you go apostate. Meaning you can be killed without any reprecussions to your killer, but it's not required you be killed. If it were otherwise many leaders in West Africa would've been killed and for that matter so would a few poets in the Mideast.

Thomas R., what distinguishes the Muslim practice regarding apostasy from that of Medieval Christendom is the absence in Islam of clear authority and of even the concept of separation of the religious and secular spheres.

St. Thomas, for example, wrote about what legitimate secular authority was entitled to do about heretics or apostates, who at that time were regarded as a threat to the social order. No Christians today -- anywhere in the world, as far as I know -- accept the medieval approach, and obviously the Catholic Church today is emphatic in its advocacy of religious freedom.

But the Muslim doctrine has a far more repressive practical effect than anything in medieval Christendom, because it means that ANY individual Muslim can take matters into his own hands and kill an apostate. The apostate-killer will, of course, want a fatwa to ensure that his action is religiously justified. But since Islam has neither clergy nor hierarchy, any self-appointed Islamic scholar can issue such a fatwa. As a result, even in Muslim states with relatively tolerant governments, the apostate from Islam is always at risk of being murdered by someone who is convinced, with the backing of religious authority, that the murder is God's will.

In other words, ideas do not arise out of a vaccum. They arise out of cultures. In this case, these ideas arose out of a profoundly Christian culture.

Precisely. And what gives these ideas salience is that they are coherent within a Christian theological context. If toleration represented some sort of reluctant Christian accommodation to the "Enlightenment" it would never have taken hold in society, much less in the churches themselves. That's more or less the experience of Islam under Turkish secularism, which is rapidly falling apart and never offered a very plausible model for the rest of Islam.

Of course, the unpleasant experience of the French Revolution suggests that respect for religious freedom wasn't exactly one of the Englightenment's strong suits, but that's another story....