Beheadings in Islamic Law
A little less than a week ago, the Saudi government beheaded three men convicted of drug trafficking, and I thought it might be useful to discuss a bit the notion of beheading as a criminal sanction in the Muslim world. There seems to be a lot of ignorance on the internet.
First, despite what the polemicists might claim,the Qur'an doesn't actually suggest anywhere that beheading is supposed to be punishment for any sort of crime. The most commonly cited verse in favor of this silly proposition, 47:3, refers to smiting the unbelievers above their necks and, once subdued, to then talk about generosity and ransom and the rest of it. (A particularly ignorant account of the beheading phenomenon in English also cites verse 8:12, which is God telling the angels something He had ordered them to do in the past. It's so weird to draw anything from that that I wouldn't mention it, but since this guy got a hearing on Middle East Quarterly, I thought I should.)
Okay, anyone who doesn't know that the Qur'an is on occasion (but not always) ferocious in its attitudes towards those who reject the Message in times of war has either been in a cave, or something. Still, the import of the verse, which is more or less when you shoot, aim for the head, really doesn't have anything to do with criminal punishment. (Though there is an irony here--the Saudis have been distinguishing their beheadings from Zarqawi's earlier unconscionable brutality in Iraq on the grounds that the guys they are killing have been convicted of crimes. But that distinction immediately removes the Qur'anic justification for their actions, particularly since they are decapitating Muslims.)
Added to this is a general revulsion in Islam towards the desecration of corpses, the Prophet supposedly having said that even a dog's corpse should be left alone. This has made organ donation into a rather lively area of discussion, as well as autopsies, as my father the pathologist can attest. (The issue being what balance is to be struck between necessity and a general Islamic sanction on desecration). It has also led to the rather stringent penalties in most Islamic countries against corpse desecration, the punishment in Iraq being potentially imprisonment for some number of years. For messing with a dead guy. Of course the person one is beheading isn't actually dead until beheaded, but the theory sort of carries over--that if one shouldn't desecrate bodies, maybe there are better ways of killing folks.
But then if we delve into Islamic history, we can see that beheadings have a fairly strong pedigree in the Sunni tradition, even outside of war. In one of the most storied tellings of the election of the third caliph Uthman, the second caliph Umar set up a process whereby six people were to elect his successor, and they had three days to do it. If they did not agree after three days, the majority ruled (or if a tie, one guy was declared the tiebreaker) and the dissenters were beheaded. (I've rather ironically heard this nonsense defended as the world's first exercise in democracy, which is rather funny I think).
In any event, no unbelievers, no war, but a beheading. Add to that the fact that the shari'a prescribes death for any number of crimes but doesn't really describe a means, and add the rather disturbing early Sunni Muslim practice of beheading enemies in war and putting their heads on pikes, and you get what one might expect in the reinvention of shari'a in the modern world, once we leave the history behind.
Namely, those regimes and movements intent on Islamization, which have successfully turned the shari'a into a vehicle for anti-Western resistance and protest (see earlier posts for more on that), insist on the Islamicity of beheading and use it to cover crimes that really didn't exist in the classical era but that are associated in particular with Western decadence with at best a tenuous connection to Islamic history (drug trafficking, the crime that led to the latest Saudi beheadings, being a pretty good example--there was no such Islamic crime in the classical era). You westerners, the theory goes, are kind to your adulterers, your debaucherers, your naked women, your drunkards and your addicts, and this is why your societies are so sick. We strike them above their necks, in order to create a cleaner more moral more just society. Or something like that.
On the other hand, pressures of modernity and global demands are an important counterforce (one can only resist so much), and so beheading is a rather easy thing for a country to drop given its rather ambiguous position. Hence its relative rarity as a recognized punishment in most of the Muslim world.
With the Shi'a, you do get a dramatically different result. The second caliph is reviled and the rules he made on his successor could have theoretically sanctioned the beheading of Shi'ism's first Prophetic successor, the Imam Ali (one of the council of six). The third Imam, the Prophet's grandson, is beheaded on Ashura by the thug Shimr. You should hear the wailing when that part of the story is read. There is as a result such revulsion at the notion of beheading due to these histories that Shi'ism tends to recoil at the notion of it in the modern age for the most part.
Thus, even death penalty happy Iran, which takes the shari'a as resistance to the West proposition as seriously as anyone else, stones and hangs a fair amount. As in the Sunni world, it targets on Islamic grounds those convicted of crimes associated with Western debauchery. The rhetoric is the same. But given the above, Iran does not behead so far as I know, though if there is contrary evidence, I'd be interested in hearing it. And surprised to hear it, given how vehemently I've heard Najaf's clerics rail against it as barbaric, ignorant (as in, of the unenlightened preIslamic jahiliyya) and un-Islamic (and then they defend stoning of adulterers, but that's another issue.)
(This where our Middle East Quarterly friend cited above seems to go disastrously wrong, quoting some Sunni sheikh in Cairo on the Qur'anic verse 47:4 who says that the Shi'a unlike the Sunnis think the verse is applicable beyond the Prophet's time. Therefore, says the professor-author, Zarqawi's beheading of Shi'a is adopting the practices of his nemesis. So why would anyone do something so silly as quote a Sunni sheikh on Shi'i positions, and does the Sunni sheikh really say that the verse is read by the Shi'a to have anything to do with beheading or is he reciting an entirely differnt Shi'i position that is being misunderstood? Spend 5 minutes in Najaf and you get a very different idea of what is and is not permitted in Shi'i fiqh respecting beheading, and trust me, it won't sound like Zarqawi. but the professor-author I am sure can't read or speak Arabic, hence the quote from the one English source he could find on Shi'ism, by a Sunni. Now why people who can't read or speak Arabic get a hearing on any Middle East journal confuses me, I don't even think Jazeera would put a guy who knew no English in the position of explaining the US constitution, and certainly if the guy started explaining it based on what a French legal expert told him, then he'd be cut off. I am ranting. The point is, nonspeakers of Arabic who purport to explain shari'a beware--if I find you, and you are wrong, I'm flushing you out on these pages.)
HAH
First, despite what the polemicists might claim,the Qur'an doesn't actually suggest anywhere that beheading is supposed to be punishment for any sort of crime. The most commonly cited verse in favor of this silly proposition, 47:3, refers to smiting the unbelievers above their necks and, once subdued, to then talk about generosity and ransom and the rest of it. (A particularly ignorant account of the beheading phenomenon in English also cites verse 8:12, which is God telling the angels something He had ordered them to do in the past. It's so weird to draw anything from that that I wouldn't mention it, but since this guy got a hearing on Middle East Quarterly, I thought I should.)
Okay, anyone who doesn't know that the Qur'an is on occasion (but not always) ferocious in its attitudes towards those who reject the Message in times of war has either been in a cave, or something. Still, the import of the verse, which is more or less when you shoot, aim for the head, really doesn't have anything to do with criminal punishment. (Though there is an irony here--the Saudis have been distinguishing their beheadings from Zarqawi's earlier unconscionable brutality in Iraq on the grounds that the guys they are killing have been convicted of crimes. But that distinction immediately removes the Qur'anic justification for their actions, particularly since they are decapitating Muslims.)
Added to this is a general revulsion in Islam towards the desecration of corpses, the Prophet supposedly having said that even a dog's corpse should be left alone. This has made organ donation into a rather lively area of discussion, as well as autopsies, as my father the pathologist can attest. (The issue being what balance is to be struck between necessity and a general Islamic sanction on desecration). It has also led to the rather stringent penalties in most Islamic countries against corpse desecration, the punishment in Iraq being potentially imprisonment for some number of years. For messing with a dead guy. Of course the person one is beheading isn't actually dead until beheaded, but the theory sort of carries over--that if one shouldn't desecrate bodies, maybe there are better ways of killing folks.
But then if we delve into Islamic history, we can see that beheadings have a fairly strong pedigree in the Sunni tradition, even outside of war. In one of the most storied tellings of the election of the third caliph Uthman, the second caliph Umar set up a process whereby six people were to elect his successor, and they had three days to do it. If they did not agree after three days, the majority ruled (or if a tie, one guy was declared the tiebreaker) and the dissenters were beheaded. (I've rather ironically heard this nonsense defended as the world's first exercise in democracy, which is rather funny I think).
In any event, no unbelievers, no war, but a beheading. Add to that the fact that the shari'a prescribes death for any number of crimes but doesn't really describe a means, and add the rather disturbing early Sunni Muslim practice of beheading enemies in war and putting their heads on pikes, and you get what one might expect in the reinvention of shari'a in the modern world, once we leave the history behind.
Namely, those regimes and movements intent on Islamization, which have successfully turned the shari'a into a vehicle for anti-Western resistance and protest (see earlier posts for more on that), insist on the Islamicity of beheading and use it to cover crimes that really didn't exist in the classical era but that are associated in particular with Western decadence with at best a tenuous connection to Islamic history (drug trafficking, the crime that led to the latest Saudi beheadings, being a pretty good example--there was no such Islamic crime in the classical era). You westerners, the theory goes, are kind to your adulterers, your debaucherers, your naked women, your drunkards and your addicts, and this is why your societies are so sick. We strike them above their necks, in order to create a cleaner more moral more just society. Or something like that.
On the other hand, pressures of modernity and global demands are an important counterforce (one can only resist so much), and so beheading is a rather easy thing for a country to drop given its rather ambiguous position. Hence its relative rarity as a recognized punishment in most of the Muslim world.
With the Shi'a, you do get a dramatically different result. The second caliph is reviled and the rules he made on his successor could have theoretically sanctioned the beheading of Shi'ism's first Prophetic successor, the Imam Ali (one of the council of six). The third Imam, the Prophet's grandson, is beheaded on Ashura by the thug Shimr. You should hear the wailing when that part of the story is read. There is as a result such revulsion at the notion of beheading due to these histories that Shi'ism tends to recoil at the notion of it in the modern age for the most part.
Thus, even death penalty happy Iran, which takes the shari'a as resistance to the West proposition as seriously as anyone else, stones and hangs a fair amount. As in the Sunni world, it targets on Islamic grounds those convicted of crimes associated with Western debauchery. The rhetoric is the same. But given the above, Iran does not behead so far as I know, though if there is contrary evidence, I'd be interested in hearing it. And surprised to hear it, given how vehemently I've heard Najaf's clerics rail against it as barbaric, ignorant (as in, of the unenlightened preIslamic jahiliyya) and un-Islamic (and then they defend stoning of adulterers, but that's another issue.)
(This where our Middle East Quarterly friend cited above seems to go disastrously wrong, quoting some Sunni sheikh in Cairo on the Qur'anic verse 47:4 who says that the Shi'a unlike the Sunnis think the verse is applicable beyond the Prophet's time. Therefore, says the professor-author, Zarqawi's beheading of Shi'a is adopting the practices of his nemesis. So why would anyone do something so silly as quote a Sunni sheikh on Shi'i positions, and does the Sunni sheikh really say that the verse is read by the Shi'a to have anything to do with beheading or is he reciting an entirely differnt Shi'i position that is being misunderstood? Spend 5 minutes in Najaf and you get a very different idea of what is and is not permitted in Shi'i fiqh respecting beheading, and trust me, it won't sound like Zarqawi. but the professor-author I am sure can't read or speak Arabic, hence the quote from the one English source he could find on Shi'ism, by a Sunni. Now why people who can't read or speak Arabic get a hearing on any Middle East journal confuses me, I don't even think Jazeera would put a guy who knew no English in the position of explaining the US constitution, and certainly if the guy started explaining it based on what a French legal expert told him, then he'd be cut off. I am ranting. The point is, nonspeakers of Arabic who purport to explain shari'a beware--if I find you, and you are wrong, I'm flushing you out on these pages.)
HAH
Good timing for this post:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7215486.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7215081.stm
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Iran yes does occasionally use beheading as an execution method, at least thrice in the 2000's: 2000, 2001 and 2003.
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Very interesting. Might you have a reference for this?
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CLERIFICATIONS
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dEAR bROTHER-IN-ISLAM,
pLEASE LET HAVE YOUR CLERIFICATION ON THE ISLAMIC SHARIAH LAW - PERTAINING TO THE CRIMINAL ACT , SUCH AS MURDER
AND ALSO WHAT WILL BE THE PUNISHMENT ON ALLEGATION OF A MURDER WHICH IS NOT WILLFULLY OR PRE-PLANNED BUT EITHER ACCIDENTLY OR UN-KNOWINGLY IN OTHER WORDS , NOT SUBJECT COMIITING A MURDER BUT THE ARBITRARY DICISION MADE SUCH PERSON GUILTY FOR NOTHING.
PLEASE BE GOOD ENOUGH TO CLEAR MY DOUBTS WITHOUT HESTATION AND YOU MAY PLEASE FORWARD YOUR REPLY TO MY EMAIL :
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