Does the Koran Condone Killing?

On the 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."

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 by his killers to have been aiding the Americans, shows an insurgent standing over Fawazi, quoting verses from the Koran. "He who will abide by the Koran will prosper, he who offends against it will get the sword," the man says, just before two others force Fawazi to the ground and sever his head.

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 you out."

But 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 for God's Koranic statement "As to prisoners of war, we have not sent you as an oppressor of the land." One 10th century gloss further asserted that the Prophet took God's word to mean he should kill the captives so as not to continue to be a prisoner holder, and that is probably the proof text al-Zarqawi had in mind.

But 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."