Word: islamics
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...Mohammed's mind, one soul has been brought back from the brink, the one that matters most to him--his son. Small battles in the fight for Islam's future matter too. In the Islamic world now, too many stand at the same divide, between fanaticism and normality. Three years after Sept. 11, the questions are still the same: How many will make it back, as Omar did? And how many...
...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...
President Bush consistently describes the terrorists and insurgents he battles as deviant hijackers of Islam, while they have just as avidly tried to prove they are upholding the teachings of the faith's holy texts. In fact, the insurgency has found considerable support among Islamic religious authorities, especially those who see the U.S. presence in Iraq as occupation rather than liberation. They cite Koranic verses that exhort Muslims to resist, such as, "Slay them ... and drive them out of the places whence they drove...
...does Islam also 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...
...according to Khaled Abou El Fadl, a 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...