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  Qur’anic Punishments

  On December 15, 2014, the Islamic State released a document entitled “Clarification [regarding] the Hudud”—that is, punishments Allah specifies in the Qur’an. This was essentially the Islamic State’s penal code, and every aspect of it was drawn from Islamic teaching.

  The “Clarification” mandates death for blasphemy against Allah or Muhammad. The document also specifies that murder with stealing will be punished by death and crucifixion (of the dead body). Murder alone will be punishable by just death. Stealing as part of banditry will be rewarded with the amputation of the right hand and the left leg, and terrorizing people will result in exile.42

  All these penalties are derived from this Qur’anic verse: “Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment, except for those who return before you apprehend them. And know that Allah is Forgiving and Merciful” (5:33–34).

  Blasphemy against Islam is likewise punishable by death, also as per the Qur’an: “If they violate their oaths after pledging to keep their covenants, and attack your religion, you may fight the leaders of paganism—you are no longer bound by your covenant with them—that they may refrain” (Qur’an 9:12).

  In fact all of the Islamic State’s penalties line up with the Qur’an and Muhammad’s words in the hadith. Adulterers, for example, are to be stoned to death; fornicators will be given a hundred lashes and exile.

  Stoning for adultery is in the hadith—a hadith which the caliph Umar claimed had once been in the Qur’an:

  ‘Umar said, “I am afraid that after a long time has passed, people may say, ‘We do not find the Verses of the Rajam (stoning to death) in the Holy Book,’ and consequently they may go astray by leaving an obligation that Allah has revealed. Lo! I confirm that the penalty of Rajam be inflicted on him who commits illegal sexual intercourse, if he is already married and the crime is proved by witnesses or pregnancy or confession.” Sufyan added, “I have memorized this narration in this way.” ‘Umar added, “Surely Allah’s Apostle carried out the penalty of Rajam, and so did we after him.”43

  Sodomy (homosexuality) is also to be punished by death, as per Muhammad’s reported words: “If you find anyone doing as Lot’s people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done” (Sunan Abu Dawood 38:4447).

  The hand of the thief will be amputated: “The thief, the male and the female, amputate their hands in recompense for what they committed as a deterrent from Allah. And Allah is Exalted in Might and Wise” (Qur’an 5:38).

  Those who drink alcohol will be lashed eighty times, also as per a hadith:

  Abu Huraira said, “A man who drank wine was brought to the Prophet. The Prophet said, ‘Beat him!’” Abu Huraira added, “So some of us beat him with our hands, and some with their shoes, and some with their garments (by twisting it) like a lash, and then when we finished, someone said to him, ‘May Allah disgrace you!’ On that the Prophet said, ‘Do not say so, for you are helping Satan to overpower him.’”44

  Slanderers will likewise get eighty lashes: “And those who accuse chaste women and then do not produce four witnesses—lash them with eighty lashes and do not accept from them testimony ever after. And those are the defiantly disobedient” (Qur’an 24:4).

  Those caught spying for the unbelievers will be put to death: “Let not believers take disbelievers as allies rather than believers. And whoever does that has nothing with Allah, except when taking precaution against them in prudence. And Allah warns you of Himself, and to Allah is the destination” (Qur’an 3:28).

  Apostates will also be put to death: “They wish you would disbelieve as they disbelieved so you would be alike. So do not take from among them allies until they emigrate for the cause of Allah. But if they turn away, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them and take not from among them any ally or helper” (Qur’an 4:89).45

  Punishment by Fire

  On February 3, 2015, the Islamic State released a video showing the burning alive of the Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh—and brought upon itself a new chorus of condemnation. The Saudi Muslim cleric Salman Al-Odah wrote: “Burning is an abominable crime rejected by Islamic law regardless of its causes. It is rejected whether it falls on an individual or a group or a people. Only God tortures by fire.”46

  Indeed, there is a hadith to this effect:

  Narrated ‘Ikrima: Some Zanadiqa (atheists) were brought to ‘Ali and he burnt them. The news of this event, reached Ibn ‘Abbas who said, “If I had been in his place, I would not have burnt them, as Allah’s Apostle forbade it, saying, ‘Do not punish anybody with Allah’s punishment (fire).’ I would have killed them according to the statement of Allah’s Apostle, ‘Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.’”47

  But as is so often the case with hadith, there is also a contradictory one (likely because these sayings were fabricated by competing factions among Muslims and have little historical value). In the contradictory hadith, Muhammad is depicted as saying that those who don’t answer the call to prayer should be set on fire, along with their houses: “Certainly I decided to order the Mu’adh-dhin (call-maker) to pronounce Iqama (the second call to Islamic prayer) and order a man to lead the prayer and then take a fire flame to burn all those who had not left their houses so far for the prayer along with their houses.”48

  The clerics who condemned the burning alive of al-Kaseasbeh also did not mention this story from Muhammad’s conquest of Khaybar:

  Kinana b. al-Rabi’, who had the custody of the treasure of B. al-Nadir, was brought to the apostle who asked him about it. He denied that he knew where it was. A Jew came . . . to the apostle and said that he had seen Kinana going round a certain ruin every morning early. When the apostle said to Kinana, “Do you know that if we find you have it I shall kill you?” he said Yes. The apostle gave orders that the ruin was to be excavated and some of the treasure was found. When he asked him about the rest he refused to produce it, so the apostle gave orders to al-Zubayr b. al-Awwam, “Torture him until you extract what he has,” so he kindled a fire with flint and steel on his chest until he was nearly dead. Then the apostle delivered him to Muhammad b. Maslama and he struck off his head, in revenge for his brother Mahmud.49

  And ISIS had a Qur’anic justification for the immolation of the Jordanian pilot, as well: “AND IF YOU PUNISH (AN ENEMY), PUNISH WITH AN EQUIVALENT OF THAT WITH WHICH YOU WERE HARMED.” That verse is a call out in the feature on the burning of the pilot in the March 2015 issue of the Islamic State’s slick online English-language propaganda magazine Dabiq. As the article explained,

  In burning the crusader pilot alive and burying him under a pile of debris, the Islamic State carried out a just form of retaliation for his involvement in the crusader bombing campaign which continues to result in the killing of countless Muslims who, as a result of these airstrikes, are burned alive and buried under mountains of debris. . . . This āyāh [the verse of the Qur’an in the call out, quoted above] sufficiently demonstrates the shar’ validity [the rightness in Islamic law] of burning someone alive in a case of qisās (retribution). . . . in addition to the aforementioned āyah from Sūrat An-Nahl [the book of the Qur’an titled “The Bee,”] the fuqahā’ used as evidence for these exceptions the following āyah [verse of the Qur’an] from Sūrat Al-Baqarah [another book of the Qur’an, titled “The Cow”]. {So whoever has assaulted you, then assault him in the same way that he has assaulted you} [Al-Baqarah: 194].

  The article in Dabiq also pointed to a hadith about “the ‘Uran men whose eyes were gouged out by the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam) with heated iron” and to several historical examples of burning alive used as a punishment in the era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs.50

  B
esides Islamic punishments, the Islamic State authorities are also reviving the jizya tax on the “People of the Book”—demanding that the Christians of Mosul “pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” as Muslims are commanded in the Qur’an to force Christians to do (9:29) and, also in line with the Qur’an, killing those who “turn away” from Islam (4:89), among whom they count all the Muslims fighting on the side of the “Crusaders,” that is, the Western powers. Thus the headline of the Dabiq article justifying the burning alive of the Jordanian pilot calls him “murtadd”—the word for apostate, derived from the verb for “turn away.”51

  Brutal—like Muhammad

  The Islamic State regularly justifies its own brutality by invoking Muhammad’s example. The September 2014 issue of Dabiq includes copious citations of the Qur’an and hadith, along with invocations of incidents from Muhammad’s life in which he was just as brutal and bloodthirsty as the Islamic State has ever been.

  One Dabiq article justifies the shooting of Muslims in Syria who had been accused of rebelling against the authority of the caliphate by recalling a particularly spine-chilling incident from the early Muslim accounts of Muhammad’s life—one that we have already seen referred to in passing to justify the pilot’s burning alive:

  Narrated Abu Qilaba: Anas said, “Some people of ‘Ukl or ‘Uraina tribe came to Medina and its climate did not suit them. So the Prophet ordered them to go to the herd of (Milch) camels and to drink their milk and urine (as a medicine). So they went as directed and after they became healthy, they killed the shepherd of the Prophet and drove away all the camels. The news reached the Prophet early in the morning and he sent (men) in their pursuit and they were captured and brought at noon. He then ordered to cut their hands and feet (and it was done), and their eyes were branded with heated pieces of iron, They were put in ‘Al-Harra’ and when they asked for water, no water was given to them.” Abu Qilaba said, “Those people committed theft and murder, became infidels after embracing Islam and fought against Allah and His Apostle.”52

  OSTRICH ALERT

  “If you want to know why ISIS exists, don’t bother searching Islamic texts, or examining Islamic traditions.”

  —Salon magazine, February 19, 201553

  “This hadith,” the Dabiq article explains, “shows the severity of the prophetic punishment against the treacherous, false claimants of Islam.” The executed Syrians, it asserts, were guilty of a “wicked deed” that called for a punishment similar to that which Muhammad had meted out.54

  There is, of course, no end to the articles assuring Americans that the Islamic State is misunderstanding and misinterpreting Islamic texts, but this message has not gotten through to the thousands of Muslims from the West who have already joined the Islamic State, and the others who attempt to do so every day.

  Those who glibly dismiss the numbers of these Muslims as only a minuscule percentage of the billion-plus Muslims worldwide are missing the point. If twenty-five thousand young Christians had flocked from all over the world to join a terror group, no one would wave the phenomenon away by pointing out that there are over a billion Christians in the world.

  If the Islamic State is not Islamic, its success represents a massive failure on the part of Muslim authorities. They have failed, and failed spectacularly, to communicate the true, peaceful tenets of their religion—teachings that are so obvious to non-Muslims such as John Kerry and Joe Biden—to tens of thousands of their young people. They are presiding over a catechetical disaster of proportions unknown in the history of the world: never before has such global havoc been wrought by people acting upon a massive misunderstanding of the core beliefs of their own religion.

  OSTRICH ALERT

  “The extremism that we see, the radical exploitation of religion which is translated into violence, has no basis in any of the real religions. There’s nothing Islamic about what ISIL/Daesh stands for, or is doing to people.”

  —Secretary of State John Kerry55

  The thing is, those young people can read the Qur’an. They can see what it says, and see that the Islamic State is acting in accord with the plain words of a book that repeatedly tells its readers that it is clear (6:114, 11:1, 16:89, 41:3)—and also with the example of Muhammad and the rulings of traditional Islamic jurisprudence. Articles explaining how the Qur’an really means something quite different from what it seems to say keep appearing, but they have not managed to staunch the flow of foreign jihadis into the Islamic State.

  UNFORTUNATELY, THERE’S A LOT IN THERE FOR MASS-MURDERING SOCIOPATHS TO LIKE

  Professor Caner K. Dagli of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, explains away ISIS’s reading of the Qur’an: “Its members search for text snippets that support their argument, claim that these fragments are reliable even if they are not, and disregard all contrary evidence—not to mention Islam’s vast and varied intellectual and legal tradition. Their so-called ‘prophetic methodology’ is nothing more than cherry-picking what they like and ignoring what they do not.”56

  It would be refreshing if their authors, instead of devoting their efforts to calming jittery infidels and convincing us that there is no problem within Islam that anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, need address, would formulate programs designed to convince young Muslims that the Islamic State’s understanding of Islam is wrong. But no such programs exist in mosques in the U.S. or anywhere else at this time. Programs of that kind would require Muslim leaders to confront what no one anywhere on the political spectrum seems willing to examine: the Qur’anic roots of the Islamic State’s “extremism.”

  Nothing is gained, however, by ignoring and avoiding uncomfortable questions—and meanwhile, the only beneficiary of all this denial is the Islamic State.

  But Muslims Have Condemned the Islamic State!

  In September 2014, the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Fiqh Council of North America held a press conference in Washington at which they announced with great fanfare that they had refuted the religious ideology of the Islamic State.

  They issued a lengthy “open letter” (not, interestingly enough, a fatwa, which would be an actual religious ruling) addressed to the Islamic State’s Caliph Ibrahim, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, explaining how he was misunderstanding Islam. The international media was, predictably, thrilled.57 But unfortunately, and not surprisingly, there is less to this repudiation of the Islamic State than meets the eye.58 Even the “moderates” who signed on to this open letter endorsed elements of Islam that most non-Muslim Westerners consider to be “extremist.”

  And it will not change the mind of a single jihadi. This letter is not an Islamic case against the Islamic State’s jihad terror that will move Islamic State fighters to lay down their arms, but rather a deceptive piece of propaganda designed to fool gullible non-Muslim Westerners into thinking that the case for “moderate Islam” has been made.

  The disingenuous nature of the open letter should have been clear from the outset—from the involvement not only of Hamas-linked CAIR, but also of some of the 126 signers.

  These included Professor Mustafa Abu Sway, who holds the Integral Chair for the Study of Imam Ghazali’s Work at al Quds University in Jerusalem—and is a Hamas activist; Dr. Jamal Badawi, an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas terror funding case; Mustafa Ceric, former grand mufti of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who has called for Sharia in Bosnia; Professor Caner Dagli, a venomously hateful Islamic apologist at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, who traffics in Nazi imagery about “unclean” unbelievers; Ali Gomaa, former grand mufti of Egypt, who endorses wife-beating, Hizballah, and the punishment of apostates from Islam; Hamza Yusuf Hanson, founder and director of Zaytuna College, USA, who blamed the West for Muslim riots over a teddy bear named Muhammad; Ed Husain, senior fellow in Middle Eastern Studies for the Council on Foreign Relations, who claimed in September 2014 that seizing British jihadis’ passports so that they couldn’t return to t
he UK from the Islamic State would only create more jihadis; Muhammad Tahir Al-Qadri, founder of Minhaj-ul-Qur’an International, Pakistan, who drafted Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy law and had already issued a disingenuous and hypocritical Fatwa Against Terrorism; and Muzammil Siddiqi, chairman of the Fiqh Council and former head of the Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).59

  Hardly names to inspire confidence in the group’s “moderation.”

  And sure enough, in the course of their very lengthy open letter, the signatories endorse these six elements of what is usually considered to be “extremist” Islam:

  NOT THAT THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM

  “Fight them until there is no more rebellion and religion is all for Allah.”

  —Qur’an 8:39

  “Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into the enemies of Allah and your enemies . . . .”

  —Qur’an 8:60

  “We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve for what they have associated with Allah of which He had not sent down authority. And their refuge will be the Fire, and wretched is the residence of the wrongdoers.”

  —Qur’an 3:151

  1. Jihad

  Recently “jihad” has been the subject of a massive rebranding campaign—undertaken by none other than the very same Council on American-Islamic Relations that promoted this disingenuous letter. In 2013 CAIR began running bus ads featuring cheerful-looking Muslims with slogans such as “My Jihad is to stay fit despite my busy schedule. What’s yours?,” “My Jihad is to not judge people by their cover. What’s yours?,” and “My Jihad is to build friendships across the aisle. What’s yours?”60