The Islamic Antichrist (19 page)

And on Islamic Internet forums, mostly used by radicals, beheading has been a popular topic in recent weeks, with many participants describing it as the “easiest” way to kill an American or a Saudi from the ruling family.
¹

The only mistake that CBS made is to assume that most of the participants who use such forums are indeed radicals. I have participated in several such Islamic “communities” and have befriended many Muslims through such groups. Many who participate in these forums presently live in the United States and Canada and many are converts from Christianity. While the writer of the CBS article assumes that because of the barbaric nature of such discussions that these individuals are all radicals, I have found that many of them simply take their Muslim faith seriously, even as I take my Christian faith seriously. While some of the members of these discussion groups seem disgusted and ashamed by the rise in the number of beheadings, the overwhelming majority seem far more focused on doctrinal issues, such as whether the beheadings were done properly or if the victims were enemies or innocent parties. Sam Hamod, the former director of the Islamic Center in Washington, DC, when given the opportunity to chime in on this issue in an article featured in the
Washington Times
, used the moment not to condemn the beheadings, but to make the point that the men committing the beheadings in Iraq and elsewhere do it all wrong: “You can’t do it like the idiots on TV. The right thing to do is slit the person’s throat, not cut off the entire head.”
²

BEHEADING IN ISLAM: MUHAMMAD’S EXAMPLE

Beheading in Islam is not a new phenomenon by any means. Due to the utter disgust of many throughout the West with this practice, many moderate Muslims and Muslim apologists have repeatedly made the claim that beheading is not an officially sanctioned Islamic practice. They claim it defies the basic tenets of Islam. These claims are made to create a better image of Islam in the Western eye. Unfortunately, these claims are made either
out of an ignorance of Islam’s history or with an active intent to deceive. Indeed, as we are about to see,
beheading is the very heritage of Islam
. Beheading is not only commanded as a specific method of killing one’s enemies in the Qur’an, but was a favored method of killing by Muhammad and many of his followers.

When Muhammad began his career of violence and aggression, his band of Muslim warriors was still very small. Caravans traveling back and forth from Mecca and Damascus became Muhammad’s favorite soft targets. Because the inhabitants of Mecca depended on these caravans for their lives, they were more than a bit disturbed after several attacks by Muhammad and his gang of marauders. Finally, men from the tribe of Quraysh came from Mecca to attack Muhammad and his men. This famous battle, the Battle of Badr, saw Muhammad and his fledgling army gain a surprise victory over the Quraysh. Among the people slain was Abba Hakam:

Abba Hakam was severely wounded but still alive when Abdullah, the servant of Muhammad, ran up, put his foot on Abba Hakam’s neck, got a hold of his beard and started insulting the fatally wounded man whom his own people had named “the father of wisdom.” Abdullah cut off Abba Hakam’s head and carried it to his master. “The head of the enemy of Allah!” exclaimed Muhammad joyously;—“Allah! There is no other god but he!”—“Yea, there is no other!” responded Abdullah, as he cast the severed head at the Prophet’s feet. “
It is more acceptable to me
,”
cried Muhammad, hardly able to contain his joy, “than the choicest camel in all Arabia
.”
³
(emphasis mine)

Sadly the bloodlust of Muhammad and his followers only increased. In AD 627 Muhammad himself oversaw what can only be called a mass slaughter. Muhammad and his army laid a siege around the Jewish village of Qurayzah. After twenty-five days, the village surrendered, hoping that Muhammad would be merciful to them. Instead Muhammad had his soldiers dig several trenches and forced between six hundred to nine hundred men to march into them. At the hands of Muhammad’s
soldiers, they were all beheaded. The trenches became mass graves. From Ibn Ishaq’s
Sirat Rasul
, Islam’s earliest and most well received biography of Muhammad, we read the gruesome account:

Then they [Qurayza] surrendered and the apostle confined them in Medina…. Then the apostle went out to the market of Medina [which is still its market today] and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for them and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought out to him in batches.… They were six hundred or seven hundred in all, though some put the figures as high as eight hundred or nine hundred.… This went on until the apostle made an end to them.
⁴

Apparently this great slaughter awakened something in Muhammad. Beheading those six hundred to nine hundred men from Qurayza was not enough. Soon after this incident, Muhammad beheaded four hundred more Jews. Muhammad was allied with two groups of men, the Khazraj and the Aus. The Khazraj were in charge of beheading the four hundred Jews but the Aus stood by on the sidelines. When Muhammad looked and saw that the faces of the Khazraj showed their pleasure in the beheading and the Aus stood on the sidelines, he ordered that the Aus carry out the last twelve beheadings:

Abu ‘Ubayda told me on the authority of Abu’ Amir the Medinain, when the apostle [Muhammad] got the better of the sons of Qurayza he seized about four hundred men from the Jews who had been allies of Aus against Khazraj, and ordered that they should be beheaded. Accordingly Khazraj began to cut off their heads with great satisfaction. The apostle saw that the faces of the Khazraj showed their pleasure, but there was no such indication on the part of Aus, and…when he saw that there were only twelve of them left he gave them over to Aus, assigning one Jew to every two of Aus, saying, “Let so-and-so strike him and so-and-so finish him off.”
⁵

Later, another campaign of beheading took place under Muhammad. As he reentered the city of Mecca with his army of ten thousand, he called to the warriors in his army from Medina and asked them, “Do you see the soldiers from Quraysh [Mecca]? Go and slaughter them.” Mark A. Gabriel explains the meaning of the word that Muhammad used for slaughter in Arabic:

The Arabic word for slaughter presents the picture of a farmer harvesting his crop with a scythe. In other words, Muhammad was telling them, “Cut their heads from their bodies as you would cut fruit from the branch of a tree.”
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So this is where it all began, with Muhammad. But that’s certainly not where it ended. Remember that whatever Muhammad says or does is considered just as authoritative and as inspired as the very Qur’an itself. The actions of Muhammad dictate the model for living that Allah has ordained as his will for all Muslims:

If you love Allah, then follow me [Muhammad]. (Sura 3:31; Shakir)

Ye have indeed in the Apostle of Allah a beautiful pattern of [conduct] for anyone whose hope is in Allah and the Final Day. (Sura 33:21)

By slaying the men of these Jewish villages this way, Muhammad set the example of what Allah has ordained and commanded for all faithful Muslims to follow.

BEHEADING AMONG MUHAMMAD’S FOLLOWERS

Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s best friend and successor, became the first “rightly guided” caliph of Islam after Muhammad’s death. Abu Bakr’s general was Khalid bin al-Walid al-Makhzumi who also fought under the leadership of Muhammad. Under Muhammad, Khalid fought so effectively that he earned the title “the Sword of Allah.”

Upon Abu Bakr’s orders, in AD 633–634, Khalid extended an invitation to the people of Arabia to accept Islam. This “invitation,” however, was actually an overt threat of war and death to those who refused to convert and submit to the rule of Islam. The actual invitation read as follows:

In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful. From Khalid bin al-Walid to the governors of Persia. Embrace Islam so that you may be safe. If not, make a covenant with me and pay the
jizyah
tax. Otherwise, I have brought you a people who love death just as you love drinking wine.
⁷

After this “invitation” to Islam, many refused to convert. Among those who refused were a group of Persians and Christians from Ullays on the Euphrates River. Khalid attacked them in AD 633. The battle was fierce, so Khalid made a vow to Allah during the battle that if he could defeat them that he would make the canal that surrounded their village literally
run
with their blood. He commanded that all who were defeated be taken alive. There were so many captives that it took a day and a half to behead all of the men. The blood coagulated and Khalid’s troops were forced to release water into the canal to make it run red with the blood of the slain, lest Khalid’s vow remain unfulfilled. Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Jarir At-Tabari, an early Islamic historian and theologian, recorded this event:

Khalid said, “O Allah, if you deliver their shoulders to us, I will obligate myself to you not to leave any one of them whom we can overcome until I make their canal run with their blood.” Then Allah defeated them for the Muslims and gave their shoulders to them. Khalid then commanded to his herald to proclaim to his men, “Capture! Capture! Do not kill any except he who continues to resist.” As a result the cavalry brought prisoners in droves, driving them along. Khalid had detailed certain men to cut off their heads in the canal. He did that to them for a day and a night. They pursued them the next day and the day after, until they reached the Nahrayn and the like of that distance in every direction from Ullays. And Khalid cut off their heads.
⁸

Some of Khalid’s men proclaimed to him:

“[E]ven if you were to kill all the population of the earth, their blood would still not run.… Therefore send water over it, so that you may fulfill your oath.” Khalid had blocked the water from the canal. Now Khalid brought the water back, so that it flowed with spilled blood. Owing to this it has been called Blood Canal to this day.
⁹

Amir Taheri, an Iranian-born journalist, outlines several other incidents throughout Islam’s history of the practice of beheading:

In 680, the Prophet’s favorite grandson, Hussein bin Ali, had his head chopped off in Karbala, central Iraq, by the soldiers of the Caliph Yazid. The severed head was put on a silver platter and sent to Damascus, Yazid’s capital, before being sent further to Cairo for inspection by the governor of Egypt. The caliph’s soldiers also cut off the heads of all of Hussein’s seventy-one male companions, including the one-year-old baby boy Ali-Asghar.
¹⁰

Thus the pattern had been established and now the principle that Muhammad had modeled now came back and touched his own family. Eventually stories of beheading came to fill Islam’s history. Andrew Bostom, editor of
The Legacy of Jihad
, points out that in the late fifteenth century:

Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, who is revered as a paragon of Muslim tolerance by modern revisionist historians, recorded the following in his autobiographical
Baburnama
, about infidel prisoners of a jihad campaign: “Those who were brought in alive [having surrendered] were ordered beheaded, after which a tower of skulls was erected in the camp.”
¹¹

Skipping forward to a slightly more modern era, Taheri again picks up the gruesome tale.

In 1842 the Afghani Muslims overtook the British garrison in Kabul and beheaded over two thousand men, women, and children. The heads were placed on sticks around the city as decorations.
¹²

The practice continued during the 1980s in Afghanistan, where Afghani warriors beheaded an estimated three thousand Soviet troops. The practice of beheading was also common during the Iranian Revolution.

In 1992, the
mullahs
sent a “specialist” to cut off the head of Shapour Bakhtiar, the
shah’s
last prime minister, in a suburb of Paris. When the news broke, Hashemi Rafsanjani, then president of the Islamic Republic, publicly thanked Allah for having allowed “the severing of the head of the snake.”
¹³

Taheri even makes reference to one Algerian “specialist” named Momo le nain, who was recruited by an Islamic group known as the GIA specifically for the purpose of chopping off heads:

In 1996 in Ben-Talha, a suburb of the capital Algiers, Momo cut off a record eighty-six heads in one night, including the heads of more than a dozen children. In recognition of his exemplary act of piety, the GIA sent him to Mecca for pilgrimage. Last time we checked, Momo was still at large somewhere in Algeria.
¹⁴

Taheri likewise relates the situation in Pakistan.

Rival Sunni and Shiite groups have made a habit of sending chopped off heads of each other’s activists by special delivery. By one estimate, over four hundred heads have been chopped off and mailed since 1990.
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