As for al-Shāfiʿī, he holds that disbelief itself makes a person’s blood lawful, but women and children are spared because they constitute property for the Muslims. An apostate is therefore executed because disbelief is present and, in his view, the grounds for sparing life are absent: disbelief remains without any benefit.

Ahmad, however, recognizes several grounds for permitting execution. In the case of someone who has never been Muslim, these are the harm he causes or the absence of any benefit in keeping him alive. The former consists of waging war through physical force or speech. Thus, women, children, monks, the blind, the chronically infirm and others like them who take no part whatsoever in warfare are not to be killed, as is the position of the majority of scholars.

As for an apostate, Ahmad holds that the ground for permitting his execution is disbelief after faith, which is a particular kind of disbelief. If such a person were not executed, someone could enter the religion and then leave it. Executing him therefore protects both the adherents of the religion and the religion itself: it guards against decline and deters them from leaving it. This differs from the case of someone who has never entered it.

If such a person belongs to the People of the Book or is accorded similar status, one of the two conditions for ending hostilities has been met in his case. If he is an idolater and jizya is accepted from him, the same applies. If it is not accepted, there is disagreement over whether he may be enslaved. Whenever his enslavement is permissible, it serves the same purpose as accepting jizya from him. Whenever neither enslaving him nor accepting jizya from him is possible, he remains a disbeliever whose continued life benefits neither himself—because he accumulates further sin—nor the believers. Killing him is therefore better than keeping him alive.

As for someone who abandons prayer and the payment of zakat, if he is executed, Ahmad regards him as belonging to the category of apostates, because by embracing Islam he committed himself to these acts; if he does not perform them, he has abandoned what he committed himself to