It might, but I think the current climate in much of the Islamic world, while not the crazed image many have, is actually pretty brutal to people within the religion who are seen as blasphemous. From what I know, and I have to admit that this isn't as much as I'd like, the process of proclaiming your faith pretty much involves accepting the existence of god, prophets, the "punishment of the grave," that kind of thing. My impression is that if you're seen to have lied about that, you're lucky just to be outcast.
tl;dr It really doesn't pay to be seen as an "apostate" in Islam, at least in most places at this time.
> From what I know, and I have to admit that this isn't as much as I'd like
In general when you're talking about a group of a billion people you should avoid generalisations, especially if you also need to say that you don't know what you're talking about.
Dan, I'm sorry that you've taken my attempts at diplomacy as a declaration of ignorance. However diverse a billion people may be, that diversity is limited when a requirement of the claimed identity is to recite the shahada with conviction. If you can explain how that can be done, "I declare that there is no deity worthy of worship except Allah; and I declare that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah...." without belief in god and a divine prophet of that god, you're going to have to walk me through it.
That's a good one. In other words, if you state "I declare there is no deity worthy of worship but Allah", you leave it entirely possible that Allah itself doesn't exist. The follow up that "Mohammed is his messenger" is not a contradiction either.