Offering insult (sabb) to God, to the prophet Muḥammad, or to any part of the divine revelation is a crime in Islamic religious law, fully comparable to blasphemy. In the Christian tradition, blasphemy properly denotes mockery or lèse majesté of God. There is no exact equivalent to blasphemy in the Islamic tradition, although the Qurʾanic phrase "word of infidelity" (kalimat al-kufr) comes fairly close. From the viewpoint of Islamic law, blasphemy may be defined as any verbal expression that gives grounds for suspicion of apostasy (riddah). In theological terms, blasphemy often overlaps with infidelity (kufr), which is the deliberate rejection of God and revelation; in this sense, expressing religious opinions at variance with standard Islamic views could easily be looked upon as blasphemous. Blasphemy can also be seen as the equivalent of heresy (zandaqah), a pre-Islamic Persian term used in reference to the...