NEW YORK – Despite the efforts of President Obama and various Islamic scholars to deny that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's ISIS movement has anything to do with Islam, Baghdadi bases his army's brutal tactics on sacred Islamic texts dating back to the time of Muhammad, as well as the Quran, that call for beheading and the burning to death of Muslims who betray Islam, such as was done to a captured Jordanian pilot.
According to a medieval Islamic scholar, a letter written by the first caliph to succeed Muhammad after the founder's death in A.D. 632, Abu Bakr, states Muhammad “struck whoever turned his back to him until he came to Islam, willingly or grudgingly.”
Muhammad promised regarding anyone who abandoned Islam, Abu Bakr said, to “burn them with fire, slaughter them by any means, and take women and children captive."
Meanwhile, at the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday, Obama called ISIS a “death cult," not an Islamic movement.
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“We are summoned to push back against those who would distort our religion for their nihilistic ends,” he said, reinforcing the White House's insistence that the ISIS execution of Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, 26, was a “barbaric” act that had nothing to do with Islam.
In an apparent effort to advance his argument, Obama cited historical examples of violence committed in the name of Jesus Christ that were antithetical to the core principles of Christianity.
"Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ," Obama said. "In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
"So it is not unique to one group or one religion," he continued. "There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency that can pervert and distort our faith."
An article published by editorial fellow Jenna McLaughlin in the leftist publication Mother Jones went so far as to argue Islamic teachings explicitly forbids death by burning.
McLaughlin cited Emma El-Badawy, a Middle East expert from the University of Exeter in England, who told Sky News, "Burning someone alive is absolutely barbaric, and it is expressly forbidden in Islam."
McLaughlin also noted that the Council on American-Islamic Relations – a front group of the Muslim Brotherhood named by the State Department as an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to fund the terrorist group Hamas – held a press conference in response to the ISIS burning of the Jordanian pilot in which Nihad Awad, the national director, called the act "unspeakable and anti-Islamic."
She also noted that Hussam Ayloush, director of the CAIR branch in Los Angeles, has argued, “as many Islamic clerics have,” that ISIS “should not even be compared to Islam, as it does not fit the category of an Islamic group, but rather a ‘murderous terrorist cult.’”
Obama: 'barbaric act'
In his initial reaction to the ISIS video showing the Jordanian pilot being burned alive inside a cage, Obama characterized the murder as “barbarity,” distancing it from Islam.
“I just got word of the video that had been released,” Obama said. “I don’t know the details of the confirmation. But should this video be authentic, it’s just one more indication of the viciousness and barbarity of this organization.
“And it I think it will redouble the vigilance and determination on the part of a global coalition to make sure that they are degraded and ultimately defeated,” Obama continued, refusing once more to characterize the violence as “Islamic terrorism."
“It also just indicates the degree that whatever ideology they are operating out of, it is bankrupt," the president said.
See President Obama's reaction:
Supporting Obama’s reluctance to characterize the fiery execution as an act of Islamic terrorism, Reuters, meanwhile, reported Muslim clerics widely denounced ISIS militants in Syria, saying such a form of killing was considered an abomination under Islam, no matter the justification.
The Reuters article cited the following:
- Egypt's top Muslim authority, the 1,000-year-old Al-Azhar university revered by Sunni Muslims around the world, issued a statement expressing "deep anger over the lowly terrorist act" by what it called a "Satanic terrorist" group.
- The grand sheik of Al-Azhar, Ahmed al-Tayeb, said the killers themselves deserved to be "killed, crucified or to have their limbs amputated."
- In Qatar, the International Association of Muslim Scholars, headed by prominent cleric Youssef al-Qaradawi and linked to the Muslim Brotherhood that has influence across the region, called the burning of Kasaesbeh a criminal act: "The Association asserts that this extremist organization does not represent Islam in any way and its actions always harm Islam."
- "The prophet, peace be upon him, advised against burning people with fire," Sheik Hussein bin Shuayb, head of the religious affairs department in southern Yemen, told Reuters in Aden.
- Saudi cleric Salman al-Odah wrote on his Twitter account: "Burning is an abominable crime rejected by Islamic law regardless of its causes." He added: "It is rejected whether it falls on an individual or a group or a people. Only God tortures by fire.”
The London Daily Mail quoted Abu Sayaf, a Jordanian Salafist cleric who spent almost 10 years in Jordanian prisons for militant activity, including a plot to attack U.S. troops.
“This weakens the popularity of [ISIS] because we look at Islam as a religion of mercy and tolerance. Even in the heat of battle, a prisoner of war is given good treatment," he said.
In September 2014, Islamic scholars, numbering 126 at the time, signed an “open letter to al-Baghdadi” denouncing ISIS for adhering to medieval theology and ridiculing Baghdadi’s self-proclaimed ISIS caliphate as a “bloody, horrific vanity project.”
ISIS theological roots in Wahhabism
However, other Islamic scholars disagree.
Muhammad Ibn Jarir al-Tabari, a Sunni Muslim scholar who was one of the earliest and most respected historians of Islam, cited a letter written by Abu Bakr, the first caliph to succeed Muhammad following the founder's death in A.D. 632.
Abu Bakr -- noting Muhammad “struck whoever turned his back to him until he came to Islam, willingly or grudgingly” -- promised, regarding anyone who abandoned Islam, to “burn them with fire, slaughter them by any means, and take women and children captive."
Tabari, who lived from A.D. 839-923, wrote of the letter in Volume 10, pp. 55-57 of his History of al-Tabari, “The Conquest of Arabia: The Riddah [Apostasy] Wars A.D. 632-633.”
American Thinker columnist F. W. Burleigh, the author of a Muhammad biography, points to an incident recounted in Islamic tradition that took place in A.D. 630 in Medina in which Muhammad denounced a “mosque of dissidence” and ordered it burned down.
In another incident, prior to the mosque burning, Muhammad ordered a house to be burned down where people had congregated who objected to joining a raid. Most of the occupants escaped, some by jumping from the roof, but the owner, a Jew, was incinerated.
The traditions about Muhammad, Burleigh notes, also contain a number of stories of him threatening to burn the houses filled with people who failed to show up for the obligatory prayers, and he may have actually done so on one occasion.
Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel has argued Baghdadi and ISIS are “a kind of untamed Wahhabism,” the stream of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia, reported David Kirkpatrick, Cairo bureau chief and Middle Eastern correspondent for the New York Times in a Sept. 24, 2014, article.
“For their guiding principles, the leaders of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, are open and clear about their almost exclusive commitment to the Wahhabi movement of Sunni Islam,” Kirkpatrick wrote. “The group circulates images of Wahhabi religious textbooks from Saudi Arabia in the schools it controls. Videos from the group’s territory have shown Wahhabi texts plastered on the sides of an official missionary van.”
Kirkpatrick said al-Qaida "grew out of a radical tradition that viewed Muslim states and societies as having fallen into sinful unbelief, and embraced violence as a tool to redeem them."
“But the Wahhabi tradition embraced the killing of those deemed unbelievers as essential to purifying the community of the faithful,” he said.
Kirkpatrick quoted Haykel saying: “Violence is part of their ideology. For Al Qaeda, violence is a means to an ends; for ISIS, it is an end in itself.”
Execution by burning justified'
Other observers, including Micah Halpern, a frequent analyst on network television and radio regarding the Middle East and Muslim fundamentalism, appeared to agree with ISIS that the execution by burning was justified under Islamic law.
Halpern tried to soften the impact by arguing the Jordanian pilot was worse than a non-believer.
Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh was “a traitor who betrayed ISIS’s conception of Islam,” in that he was “doing the bidding of the heretic”– meaning the West and, in particular, the United States, by "flying and attacking ISIS targets as part of the Jordanian contribution to the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS.”
Others point out the edict ISIS posted on Twitter condemning the Jordanian pilot to death flowed directly from Islamic law, or Shariah. The edict cited Ibn Taymiyya, A.D. 1263-1328, who is considered to be one of the originators of the Hanbali school of Shariah. With Ibn Taymiyya, he's credited with originating the practice of declaring jihad against those “who do not follow the Shariah based on the belief that they were not true Muslims, despite their claims to the faith.”
Referencing Ibn Taymiyya, the passage from the Quran cited to justify the burning to death of the pilot is Sura 4:56: “Indeed, those who disbelieve in Our verses – We will drive them into a Fire. Every time their skins are roasted through We will replace them with other skins so they may taste the punishment. Indeed, Allah is ever Exalted in Might and Wise.”
“Executions in Islam are part of the judicial process for capital crimes,” Halpern wrote. “Today, beheadings are most common capital punishment, but there are other forms of execution in Islam. In general, burning someone alive is reserved for a Muslim who betrayed Islam, one who converts to Christianity.
“Horrifying as it is to us all, this move to burn the Jordanian pilot alive is even more of a message than the decapitations are,” Halpern continued. “And it is more of a message to the Muslims masses than it is to the Western world. The message is clear: ISIS believes you abandoned the true path.”
Halpern concluded with a reference to Obama's initial reaction to the murder of the pilot.
“For ISIS, the ‘viciousness and barbarity,’ to quote President Obama, of the burning has a dual purpose. Not only was it meant to intimidate, it is a recruiting tool!”