Some American commentators say that Islamist decapitations are intended as psychological warfare and devoid of any true Islamic content.
Imam Muhammad Adam al-Sheikh, head of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, for example, claimed incorrectly that “beheadings are not mentioned in the Koran at all.”
Asma Afsaruddin, an associate professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Notre Dame, also misrepresented Islamic theology and history when she told a reporter, “There is absolutely no religious imperative for this.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as well as the American Anti-Arab Discrimination Committee (ADC) have both signed on to a statement that such killings “did not represent the tenets of Islam.”
Sam Hamod, former director of the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., claimed that the Qur’anic passage on beheading unbelievers did not actually mean that people should be killed.
Such fulminations have had an effect: the Western news media has, perhaps as a result of political correctness or its own bias, twisted the reality of Islamic history and propagated such revisionism.
With such apologetics, Western academics either display basic ignorance of their fields or purposely mislead.
The intelligentsia’s denial of any religious roots to the recent spate of decapitation has parallels in the logical back flips and kid-glove treatments in which many professors engaged in order to deny a religious basis for violent jihad.
Afsaruddin and Hamod aside, Islamists justify murder and decapitation with both theological citations and historical precedent.
Groups such as Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi’s Al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad (Unity and Jihad) and Abu ‘Abd Allah al-Hasan bin Mahmud’s Ansar al-Sunna (Defenders of [Prophetic] Tradition)[10] justify the decapitation of prisoners with Qur’anic scripture.
Sura (chapter) 47 contains the ayah (verse): “When you encounter the unbelievers on the battlefield, strike off their heads until you have crushed them completely; then bind the prisoners tightly.”
| The practice of beheading non-Muslim captives extends back to the Prophet himself.
Ibn Ishaq (d. 768 C.E.), the earliest biographer of Muhammad, is recorded as saying that the Prophet ordered the execution by decapitation of 700 men of the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe in Medina for allegedly plotting against him.
Islamic leaders from Muhammad’s time until today have followed his model.
Examples of decapitation, of both the living and the dead, in Islamic history are myriad.
Yusuf b. Tashfin (d. 1106) led the Al-Murabit (Almoravid) Empire to conquer from western Sahara to central Spain.
After the battle of Zallaqa in 1086, he had 24,000 corpses of the defeated Castilians beheaded “and piled them up to make a sort of minaret for the muezzins who, standing on the piles of headless cadavers, sang the praises of Allah.”
He then had the detached heads sent to all the major cities of North Africa and Spain as an example of Christian impotence.
The Al-Murabits were conquered the following century by the Al-Muwahhids (Almohads), under whose rule Castilian Christian enemies were beheaded after any lost battles.
The Ottoman Empire was the decapitation state par excellence.
Upon the Ottoman victory over Christian Serbs at the battle of Kosovo in 1389, the Muslim army beheaded the Serbian king and scores of Christian prisoners.
At the battle of Varna in 1444, the Ottomans beheaded King Ladislaus of Hungary and “put his head at the tip of a long pike … and brandished it toward the Poles and Hungarians.”
Upon the fall of Constantinople, the Ottomans sent the head of the dead Byzantine emperor on tour to major cities in the sultan’s domains.
The Ottomans even beheaded at least one Eastern Orthodox patriarch. In 1456, the sultan allowed the grand mufti of the empire to personally decapitate King Stephen of Bosnia and his sons—even though they had surrendered and, seven decades later, the sultan ordered 2,000 Hungarian prisoners beheaded.
In the early nineteenth century, even the British fell victim to the Ottoman scimitar. An 1807 British expedition to Egypt resulted in “a few hundred spiked British heads left rotting in the sun outside Rosetta.”
Decapitation has also been quite common among Muslims whenever orthodoxy confronts Mahdist movements.
According to Islamic tradition, the Mahdi, or “rightly-guided one” will come before the end of time to usher in a worldwide, perfect Islamic state.
Every few generations, a charismatic leader emerges claiming to be the Mahdi. Since the Mahdi is the harbinger of just government, then any leader he challenges is by nature corrupt.
The fervor of such claims often leads both the orthodoxy and the Mahdists to label the other unbelievers, allowing them to invoke Qur’anic verse 47:3 and behead
captives.,?font> |
Islamic civilization is not a historical anomaly in its sanction of decapitation.
The Roman Empire beheaded citizens (such as the Christian Saint Paul) while they crucified non-citizens (such as Jesus Christ).
French revolutionaries employed the guillotine to decapitate opponents.
Nevertheless, Islam is the only major world religion today that is cited by both state and non-state actors to legitimize beheadings.
And two major aspects of decapitation in an Islamic context should be noted: first, the practice has both Qur’anic and historical sanction.
It is not the product of a fabricated tradition.
Second, in contradiction to the assertions of apologists, both Muslim and non-Muslim, these beheadings are not simply a brutal method of drawing attention to the Islamist political agenda and weakening opponents’ will to fight.
Zarqawi and other Islamists who practice decapitation believe that God has ordained them to obliterate their enemies in this manner.
Islam is, for this determined group of Muslims, anything but a “religion of peace.” It is, rather, a religion of the sword with the blade forever at the throat of the unbeliever.
The hardest thing for Westerners to understand is not that a war with militant Islam is underway but rather the nature of the enemy’s ultimate goal.
That goal is to apply the Islamic law (the Shari‘a) globally. In U.S. terms, it intends to replace the Constitution with the Qur’an.
This aspiration is so remote and far-fetched to many non-Muslims, it elicits more guffaws than apprehension.
Of course, that used to be the same reaction in Europe, and now it’s become widely accepted that, in Bernard Lewis’ words, “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.”
The Muslim population in this country is not like any other group, for it includes within it a substantial body of people—many times more numerous than the agents of Osama bin Ladin—who share with the suicide hijackers a hatred of the United States and the desire, ultimately, to transform it into a nation living under the strictures of militant Islam
