A Slate article reports:
Following the recent beheadings of Americans and other foreigners in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, the U.S. press turned to various experts to identify a precedent in the Quran or Islamic history for this kind of gory murder. “Beheadings are not mentioned in the Koran at all,” Imam Muhammad Adam El-Sheikh, co-founder and chief cleric at the Dar Al Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va., told USA Today. Yvonne Haddad, a professor at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University agreed, telling New York Newsday, “There is absolutely nothing in Islam that justifies cutting off a person’s head.”
If reporters bothered to open up a copy of the Quran, say, N.J. Dawood’s Penguin Classics translation, they’d find at least two relevant passages:
God revealed His will to the angels, saying: “I shall be with you. Give courage to the believers. I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads, strike off the very tips of their fingers.” (Sura 8, Verse 12)
“When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield strike off their heads.” (Sura 47, Verse 4)
The piece correctly points out that this may not reflect the views of mainstream Islam today. (The Bible says that eating shellfish is an abomination, but that’s not the view of mainstream Christians today.) But it also correctly points out that the quotes the newspapers passed along were inaccurate, and that newspapers should be less credulous on such matters.
Comments are closed.