Word: al-zarqawi
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...Al-Zarqawi's letter was a clear sign of the extent to which religious zealotry has come to drive, or at least to rationalize, the actions of the insurgents in Iraq. Since April, the rebels have executed 23 hostages there. Eight of the victims have been decapitated, including at least one of the 12 Nepalese laborers whose slain bodies were shown on a website last week. Like al-Zarqawi, the killers have often claimed religious sanction. As reported in the New York Times, a videotape of the execution in Fallujah last month of Muhammad Fawazi, an Egyptian believed...
...very videotape with which he advertised his beheading of American communications-tower repairman Nick Berg in May, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the most wanted al-Qaeda terrorist in Iraq, appended a theological message. Berg's murder, the masked man intoned, was sanctioned by Islam's holiest texts. "Has the time not come for you to lift the sword, which the master of the Messengers [Muhammad] was sent with?" al-Zarqawi asked. "The Prophet ... has ordered to cut off the heads of some of the prisoners of Badr ... He is our example...
...excuse al-Zarqawi-style atrocity? Well, one verse in the Koran condones beheading, but in the heat of battle. Some accounts of the Prophet Muhammad's life, called hadiths, record the execution--by what method is debated--of a tribe that had lived among Muslims and then betrayed them. Al-Zarqawi's specific bid to sacralize Berg's slaughter rests on an allusion to Muhammad's great victory on the battlefield of Badr. According to some hadiths, Muhammad was left wondering what to do with the resulting prisoners. This, the texts claimed, was the context for God's Koranic statement...
...professor of Western and Islamic law at UCLA, that reading was discounted long ago. He says the vast majority of classical jurists subscribed to a more intuitively obvious version, whereby God's words prompted Muhammad to free his captives. They saw the "off with their heads" reading as insupportable. "Al-Zarqawi," says El Fadl, "searches for the trash that everyone threw out centuries ago and declares the trash to be Islam...
...says El Fadl. "But the extent to which these people enter into questions of Islamic principles is questionable." Since religious study was discouraged for decades under Saddam Hussein, many of the younger insurgents are educating themselves as they go along. If they accept as teachers theorists of terrorism like al-Zarqawi, the Koran may continue to be used to sanction atrocities no one could ever have imagined...