Chapter Fourteen

End Time Martyrdom

While the last chapter dealt with the concentrated hatred and murderous spirit of Islam toward the Jewish people, this chapter deals in a more general sense with the worldwide persecution and martyrdom that will be waged against anyone who is a follower of Jesus or who refuses to become a Muslim during the last-days. 

Beheadings In The Last-Days

In the Book of Revelation, chapter twenty, the Apostle John sees a particular company of people.  John gives us a very brief synopsis of what he sees.  He is specifically describing the future end-time Martyrs:

I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received his mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. Revelation 20:4

I’ve dwelled on this verse many times.  The Bible says that in the last-days, beheading will specifically be the primary method by which people will be martyred.  They will be killed specifically for their “testimony of Jesus and because of the word of God.”  It is a strange picture to try to imagine.  Is the Bible implying a worldwide resurrection of guillotines in every town square?  What exactly is the Bible inferring will occur that will result in a worldwide standard of using beheading specifically, as a means of executing Christians?  As I have tried to envision the nature of the end-times and what they will look like, I have often wondered about this verse.  There are other passages that are very similar to this one.  They also speak of a future persecution and a global trend of executing Christians for their faith in Jesus:

Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me.  Matthew 24:9

Here Jesus warns His disciples that they will be hated and ultimately put to death as a result of their identification with Him.  But then there is a prophetic expansion on this prediction.  Jesus says that “you will be hated by all nations because of me.”  Jesus specifically predicted a global element to this future persecution against Christians.  This next verse gives us even further insight:

All this I have told you so that you will not go astray.  They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God.  They will do such things because they have not known the Father or me.  I have told you this, so that when the time comes you will remember that I warned you.  John 16:1-4

In this passage from the Gospel of John, Jesus is initially speaking to the disciples outside of a strictly end-time context.  He first warns the disciples that in the days ahead they would see his followers put out of the synagogues.  This prophecy came to its fullest expression after what became known as the Bar Kochba rebellion in 132-135 A.D.  It was during the Bar Kochba rebellion that the final separation of church and synagogue took place.  Bar Kochba was a false Jewish Messiah.  He was supported and endorsed by the highest level of the rabbinic authority at the time, the renowned Rabbi Akiva.  As a result of Akiva’s support, Bar Kochba was authenticated as Messiah in the eyes of the Jewish people.  When Bar Kochba led the Jews in a rebellion against Rome, any Jew who did not participate was viewed as a traitor to the Jewish nation.  The Jews who were followers of Jesus however, who before this time, still regularly participated in the synagogue services, could not support a rebellion led by someone whom they knew to be a false Messiah.  As a result the Jewish followers of Jesus were expelled from the synagogues en masse and Jesus’ prophecy was fulfilled in the second century. 

But in the second part of this verse, Jesus is speaking of the end-times.  “In Fact”, he goes on to say, “the days will come when your persecutors will do far more than merely expel you from a synagogue; they will literally kill you.”  But the most bewildering and intriguing aspect of this verse is the next portion of Jesus’ statement.  He says that those who kill you will literally think that in doing so, they are offering a service to God.  It is this portion of the verse that is key.  How could someone in today’s world literally think that God demands the killing of other human beings simply because they believe differently?  It’s such a completely foreign concept to most modern western minds.  It is not, however, a foreign concept to history.  Both Islam and Christianity – both Catholic and Protestants, are guilty of this very thing, murdering those who are perceived to be heretics from the only true religion.  Jihad, the Crusades, the Inquisitions – all fit the bill of murder for and in the name of God.  One thing is for sure, an absolutely necessary ingredient in any such bloody exchange would have to be a firm conviction that God is on one’s side and that He commands such executions.  It is impossible to imagine any belief system or philosophy on the earth that could carry out such a thing other than a well-established world religion.  While totalitarian regimes are certainly capable of such a thing, this verse specifically says that the ones who carry out these executions will believe themselves to be serving God in doing so.  No, the system that carries this out will be a religious system that views itself as the earthly steward of some form of global divine government.  It must view itself as God’s only organization or community on the earth.  Only such a scenario can account for the actions that we read about in these verses.

In summary then, when we compare these three verses we get a very specific picture of what end-time persecution and martyrdom will look like.  Firstly, it will be global.  Secondly, it will necessitate a belief system that views itself as having a divinely appointed governmental role on the earth.  Thirdly, it will involve the specific method of beheading as its primary method of execution.  So we have a global religion that will view itself as a divinely appointed system on the earth authorized by God to behead those who refuse to join.  As we are about to see, in terms of religious systems that exist in the earth today, only the religion of Islam fulfills these requirements.

Beheadings in the News

At the time of this writing, in late 2004, there is in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and a few other countries, a new story, now just about weekly of foreigners and Christians being beheaded by Islamic radicals.  As such there has been a debate raging about whether or not this practice is indeed “Islamic” or if it is merely the barbaric practice of a few radicals who are violating the true principals of Islam.  Among the public statements intended to be picked up by the western media are the usual statements denouncing of such incidents as having anything to do with “true Islam.”  In most cases, the western media gobbles these disavowals up and reprints them without much question.  But if we examine not only Islamic tradition and history, but also the “word on the street” feelings of those Muslims who make their opinion known everyday, on Internet message and chat groups, we find a much different reality.  Islamic message boards all over the Internet have been debating the legitimacy or non-legitimacy of such actions since they have become front page news stories.  An article from CBS News entitled, Saudia Arabia’s Beheading Culture, dated June 27, 2004, also picked up on some of this Internet “chatter”:

And on Islamic Internet forums, mostly used by radicals, beheading has been a popular topic in recent weeks, with many participants describing it as the "easiest" way to kill an American or a Saudi from the ruling family.¹

The only mistake that CBS made is to assume that most of the participants who use such forums are indeed “radicals.”  I have participated in several such Islamic “communities” and have befriended many Muslims through such groups.  Many in these forums presently live in the USA and Canada and many are converts from Christianity.  While the writer of the CBS article assumes that because of the barbaric nature of such discussions that the individuals are all thus “radicals,” I have found many of them to simply be individuals who take their faith as a Muslim seriously, even as I take my faith as a Christian seriously.  While some of the members of these discussion groups seem to be disgusted and ashamed by the recent rise of beheadings, the overarching majority seem to be far more focused on doctrinal issues such as whether the beheadings were done properly or if the specific victims were considered enemies or were innocent parties etc.  Sam Hamod, who is the former director of the Islamic Center in Washington D.C., when given the opportunity to chime in on this issue, in an article featured in the Washington Times used the moment not to condemn the beheadings, but to make the point that the men committing the beheadings in Iraq and elsewhere are doing it all wrong:

“You can't do it like the idiots on TV. The right thing to do is slit the person's throat, not cut off the entire head.” ²

Beheading In Islam: Muhammad’s Example

Beheading in Islam is not a new phenomenon by any means.  Due to the utter disgust of many throughout the West with regard to this practice of late by radical Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere, many moderate Muslims and Muslim apologists have repeatedly been making the claim that beheading is not an officially sanctioned Islamic practice.  They claim it defies the basic tenants of Islam.  These claims are made to create a better image of Islam in the western eye.  Unfortunately, these claims are either made out of ignorance of Islam’s history or are made with an active intent to deceive.  Indeed, as we are about to see, beheading is the very heritage of Islam.  Beheading is not only commanded as a specific method of killing ones enemies in the Quran, but as we will see, it was also a favored method of killing by Muhammad and many of his followers. 

When Muhammad began his career of violence and aggression, his band of Muslim warriors was still very small.  Caravans traveling back and forth from Mecca and Damascus became Muhammad’s favorite soft targets.  Because the inhabitants of Mecca depended on these caravans for their life they were more than a bit disturbed after several attacks by Muhammad and his gang of marauders.  Finally, men from the tribe of Quraysh came from Mecca to attack Muhammad and his men.  This battle, which came to be famously known as the Battle of Badr, saw Muhammad and his fledgling army gain a surprise victory over the Quraysh.  Among the people who were slain was Abba Hakam. 

Aba Hakam was severely wounded but still alive when Abdullah, the servant of Muhammad, ran up, put his foot on Aba Hakam’s neck, got a hold of his beard and started insulting the fatally wounded man whom his own people had named “the father of wisdom.”  Abdullah cut off Abba Hakam’s head and carried it to his master.  "The head of the enemy of Allah!" exclaimed Muhammad joyously; ---- "Allah! There is no other god but he!" - "Yea There is no other!" responded Abdullah, as he cast the severed head at the Prophet’s feet. "It is more acceptable to me;" cried Muhammad, hardly able to contain his joy, "than the choicest camel in all Arabia.” ³  (emphasis mine)

Sadly the blood lust of Muhammad and his followers only increased from here.  In 627 A.D. Muhammad himself oversaw what can only honestly be called a mass slaughter.  Muhammad and his army laid a siege around the Jewish village of Qurayzah.  After twenty-five days, the village surrendered, hoping that Muhammad would be merciful to them.  Instead Muhammad had his soldiers dig several trenches and forced between six to nine hundred men to march into them.  At the hands of Muhammad’s soldiers, they were all beheaded.  The trenches became mass graves.  From Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul, Islam’s earliest and most well received biography of Muhammad we read the gruesome account:

Then they (Qurayza) surrendered and the apostle confined them in Medina...  Then the apostle went out to the market of Medina (which is still its market today) and dug trenches in it.  Then he sent for them and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought out to him in batches… They were 600 or 700 in all, though some put the figures as high as 800 or 900… This went on until the apostle made an end to them.  ⁴

Apparently, after this great slaughter, something was awakened in Muhammad.  Those 600-900 men from Qurayza who were beheaded were not enough.  Soon after this incident, Muhammad had 400 more Jews beheaded.  Muhammad was allied with two groups of men, the Khazraj and the Aus.  The Khazraj were in charge of beheading the four hundred Jews but the Aus were standing by on the sidelines.  When Muhammad looked and saw that the faces of the Khazraj were taking pleasure in beheading all the men and the Aus were standing on the sidelines, he ordered that the last twelve beheadings be carried out by the Aus:

Abu ‘Ubayda told me on the authority of Abu ‘Amir the Medinain, when the apostle (Muhammad) got the better of the sons of Qurayza he seized about four hundred men from the Jews who had been allies of Aus against Khazraj, and ordered that they should be beheaded.  Accordingly Khazraj began to to cut off their heads with great satisfaction.  The apostle saw that the faces of the Khazraj showed their pleasure, but there was no such indication on the part of Aus, and…when he saw that there were only twelve of them left he gave them over to Aus, assigning one Jew to every two of Aus, saying, “Let so-and-so strike him and so-and-so finish him off.” ⁵

Later, another campaign of beheading took place under Muhammad as he re-entered the city of Mecca with his army of ten thousand he called to the warriors in his army from Medina and asked them, “Do you see the soldiers from Quraysh (from Mecca)?  Go and slaughter them.”  Mark A. Gabriel explains the meaning of the word that Muhammad used for slaughter in Arabic:

The Arabic word for slaughter presents the picture of a farmer harvesting his crop with a scythe.  In other words, Muhammad was telling them, ‘Cut their heads from their bodies as you would cut fruit from the branch of a tree.’ ⁶

So this is where it all began, with Muhammad.  But it’s certainly not where it ended.  Remember that whatever Muhammad says or does is considered just as authoritative and as inspired as the very Quran itself.  It is the actions of Muhammad that dictate the model for living that Allah has ordained as his will for all Muslims:

If you love Allah, then follow me (Muhammad).  -Sura 3:31 (Shakir)

Ye have indeed in the Apostle of Allah a beautiful pattern of (conduct) for anyone whose hope is in Allah and the Final Day. -Sura 33:21.

By slaying the men of these Jewish villages this way, Muhammad set the example of what Allah has ordained and even commanded for all faithful Muslims to follow. 

Beheading Among Muhammad’s Followers

Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s best friend and successor, became the first “rightly guided” Caliph of Islam after Muhammad’s death.  Abu Bakr’s general was Khalid bin al-Walid al-Makhzumi who also fought under the leadership of Muhammad.  Under Muhammad, Khalid fought so effectively that he earned the title, The Sword of Allah. 

Upon Abu Bakr’s orders, in 633-634 A.D., Khalid extended an invitation to the people of Arabia to accept Islam.  This “invitation” however, was actually nothing more than an overt threat of war and death to those who refused to convert and submit to the rule of Islam.  The actual invitation read as follows:

In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.  From Khalid bin al-Walid to the governors of Persia.  Embrace Islam so that you may be safe.  If not, make a covenant with me and pay the Jizyah tax.  Otherwise, I have brought you a people who love death just as you love drinking wine. ⁷

After this “invitation” to Islam, many refused to convert to Islam.  Among those who refused were a group of Persians and Christians from Ullays on the Euphrates River.  Khalid attacked them in 633 A.D.  The battle was fierce and so Khalid made a vow to Allah during the battle that if he could defeat them that he would make the canal that surrounded their village literally run with their blood.  He commanded that all who were defeated by taken alive.  There were so many captives that it actually took a day and a half to behead all of the men.  The blood however, coagulated and Khalid’s troops were forced to eventually release water into the canal in order that it would run red with the blood of the slain lest Khalids vow be left unfulfilled.  Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Jarir At-Tabari, the early Islamic historian and theologian recorded this event:

Khalid said, “O Allah, if you deliver their shoulders to us, I will obligate myself to You not to leave any one of them whom we can overcome until I make their canal run with their blood.”  Then Allah defeated them for the Muslims and gave their shoulders to them.  Khalid then commanded to his herald to proclaim to his men, “Capture! Capture! Do not kill any except he who continues to resist.”  As a result the calvary brought prisoners in droves, driving them along.  Khalid had detailed certain men to cut off their heads in the canal.  He did that to them for a day and a night.  They pursued them the next day and the day after, until they reached the Nahrayn and the like of that distance in every direction from Ullays.  And Khalid cut off their heads. ⁸

Some of Khalid’s men proclaimed to him:

“even if you were to kill all the population of the earth, their blood would still not run… Therefore send water over it, so that you may fulfill your oath.”  Khalid had blocked the water from the canal.  Now Khalid brought the water back, so that it flowed with spilled blood.  Owing to this it has been called Blood Canal to this day. ⁹

Amir Taheri, an Iranian born journalist, in an article from the New York Post, May 14, 2004 entitled “Chopping Heads”, outlines several other incidents throughout Islam’s history of the practice of beheading:

In 680, the Prophet's favorite grandson, Hussein bin Ali, had his head chopped off in Karbala, central Iraq, by the soldiers of the Caliph Yazid. The severed head was put on a silver platter and sent to Damascus, Yazid's capital, before being sent further to Cairo for inspection by the Governor of Egypt. The Caliph's soldiers also cut off the heads of all of Hussein's 71 male companions, including the one-year-old baby boy Ali-Asghar. ¹⁰

Thus the pattern had been established and now the principal that Muhammad had modeled now came back and touched his own family.  Eventually stories of beheading came to fill Islam’s history.  Andrew Bostom, editor of The Legacy of Jihad points out that in the late fifteen century,

Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, who is revered as a paragon of Muslim tolerance by modern revisionist historians, recorded the following in his autobiographical “Baburnama,” about infidel prisoners of a jihad campaign:  "Those who were brought in alive [having surrendered] were ordered beheaded, after which a tower of skulls was erected in the camp." ¹¹

Skipping forward to a slightly more modern era, Taheri continues:

In 1842 the Afghani Muslims overtook the British garrison in Kabul and beheaded over 2000 men, women and children.  The heads were placed on sticks around the city as decorations. ¹²

The practice continued during the 1980’s, in Afghanistan, where an estimated 3,000 Soviet troops were beheaded by the Afghani warriors.  The practice of beheading was also a common practice throughout the Iranian revolution:

In 1992, the mullahs sent a "specialist" to cut off the head of Shapour Bakhtiar, the shah's last prime minister, in a suburb of Paris. When the news broke, Hashemi Rafsanjani, then president of the Islamic Republic, publicly thanked Allah for having allowed "the severing of the head of the snake." ¹³

Taheri even makes reference to one Algerian “specialist” named Momo le nain, who was recruited by an Islamic group known as the GIA specifically for the purpose of chopping off heads:

In 1996 in Ben-Talha, a suburb of the capital Algiers, Momo cut off a record 86 heads in one night, including the heads of more than a dozen children. In recognition of his exemplary act of piety, the GIA sent him to Mecca for pilgrimage. Last time we checked, Momo was still at large somewhere in Algeria. ¹⁴

Taheri likewise relates the situation in Pakistan where:

Rival Sunni and Shite groups have made a habit of sending chopped off heads of each other’s activists by special delivery.  By one estimate, over 400 heads have been chopped off and mailed since 1990. ¹⁵

And today, we see the power of beheading on the Indonesian Island of Borneo, where Muslims have been using beheading as means to drive out the Christian majority.  Nearly half of the Christians have fled the island. 

And beyond all of these very incriminating examples there are also the government sanctioned beheadings that take place weekly in Saudi Arabia after Friday prayers just outside the Mosques:

The Saudi government beheaded 52 men and one woman last year for crimes including murder, homosexuality, armed robbery and drug trafficking… A condemned convict is brought into the courtyard, hands tied, and forced to bow before an executioner, who swings a huge sword amid cries from onlookers of "Allahu Akbar!", Arabic for "God is great."  ¹⁶

Allahu Akbar was also the phrase being screamed by the murderers of Nicholas Berg, the Jewish-American contractor, and Kim-Sun-il, the Korean translator and evangelical Christian, whose dream of one day being a missionary to Muslims was indeed both fulfilled and brought to an end in the very same moment…

So while it is clear what the history of Islam teaches, we also need to look at what the scriptures and scholars of Islam have to say about this subject.

The Value Of A Non-Muslim Life

Whenever a Muslim “extremist” carries out a horrifying act in the name of Islam, most Muslims that I know are very quick to state that, “That is not Islam!  Islam is not to be judged by the behavior of a few, but needs to be studied to see what it really teaches.”  Fair enough.  So the question then is: What does Islam really teach about the killing of non-Muslims? 

The first thing that should be pointed out is that according to Islamic law, Muslims are for all practical purposes, allowed to kill non-Muslims.  This is based on the law of Qisas.  Qisas is essentially the law of reciprocity.  It is the Islamic version of an “eye for an eye.”  Qisas for instance states that if a Muslim murders another Muslim, then that Muslim will likewise be executed.  Amazingly though, this law does not apply to a Muslim who murders a non-Muslim.  This teaching is found in a Hadith from Sahih Bukhari:

Narrated Ash-Sha'bi: Abu Juhaifa said, "I asked Ali, 'What is (written) in this sheet of paper?' Ali replied, it deals with The Diyya (compensatory blood money paid by the killer to the relatives of the victim), the ransom for the releasing of the captives from the hands of the enemies, and the law that no Muslim should be killed in Qisas (equality in punishment) for the killing of (a disbeliever). ¹⁷ (emphasis mine)