What is meant here?
This atom does not decide that every inward attitude or internal doubt is to be treated as disbelief. The recorded definitional witness associates disbelief with concealment and the public display of hostility. In dealing with individuals, Shahrur makes a declaration issued by the person himself a condition for attributing disbelief to him; he does not make declaration alone a basis for punishment.
(A) What is attributed to Shahrur
The definitional witness states: “Disbelief: covering/concealing/publicly displaying hostility; it is a declaration of an antagonistic position.”
In the context of relations among religious communities and freedom of belief, Shahrur says: “No one has the right to judge anyone as associating partners with God or disbelieving in God unless that person declares it himself.” He then adds: “Even when he declares his disbelief in God, so long as he does not use violence and coercion to impose his ideology on others, no one has the right to punish him for that.”
For reading in the context of the book: Muhammad Shahrur Islam and Human.
(B) Atlas explanation
Two levels in the available texts should be distinguished: the definitional formulation of disbelief, and the rule for judging and treating a particular person. The first witness records a brief definition, but no raw context is available for it in the package. The second witness, however, has raw context available and addresses people’s right not to judge others; it then makes violence and coercion the relevant threshold for punishment. It therefore does not indicate that merely declaring disbelief amounts to violence or entails punishment.
This page does not conflate disbelief with polytheism. Although they occur together in the second witness, the evidence provided here offers no comparative definition between them. See Islam, faith, and righteous action and disbelief.
(C) Conclusion
The evidence can be combined cautiously as follows: in this context, publicness matters for attributing the description of disbelief to an individual from the standpoint of human judgment, but declaration in itself does not amount to grounds for punishment. The association of disbelief in the definition with “publicly displaying hostility” still requires its full textual context before it can be generalized to every use of the term.
(D) Open question
Is the phrase “publicly displaying hostility” a necessary general definition of disbelief for Shahrur, or is it a formulation limited to a particular context? The package does not settle this, because the definitional witness is unavailable with its full source context.