Today the Muslim world is torn apart by countless wars, in addition to foreign involvement wars are waged by Muslims themselves against their fellow co-believers.
Needless to say that any military conflict is no solution in any dispute. Such “scenarios” do not simply imply the loss of life by members of armed forces, but all too often civilians are getting caught in gunfire. In this context, in addition to urging different forces to seek a peaceful resolution of their disputes, it is imperative to remind those Muslims how the Sharia perceives their actions. The importance of such a reminder cannot be overstressed in today’s context, since certain groups like the so-called “Islamic state.” have stated their intentions of cleansing the world of infidels on behalf of the Sharia.
According to the Shariah murdering a person is a grave offence, since the value of human life is praised on numerous occasions in the Koran. But to this day no society can claim that it has consigned manslaughter to oblivion. It gets even more scary as neighbor kills neighbor and brother backstabs brother. Today Muslims are waging wars against their own kin with a total disregard of the norms of the Koran. While the Book is pretty explicit in this domain: “But whoever kills a believer intentionally – his recompense is Hell, wherein he will abide eternally, and Allah has become angry with him and has cursed him and has prepared for him a great punishment “(4:93).
However, in recent years the East became plagued by organizations that brand their followers as “the only true Muslim believers”. Many of those have been transformed into terrorist organizations, such as Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula that subsequently joined the “Islamic State” and the notorious Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The possibility of creation of such organizations was foreseen by the Messenger of Allah, and the warning he passed to ancestors is written in the Hadith (collections of the reports of the teachings, deeds and sayings of the Islamic prophet Muhammad ). One of the largest collections of Hadith are the works of Muslim Ibn al-Hajjaj (821-875 AD) titled Sahih Muslim, along with the works of Imam Muhammad al-Bukhari (810-870 AD) titled Sahih Al-Bukhari. According to the hadith 1066 of al-Hajjaj and the hadith 1436 (3611) of al-Bukhari, the Messenger of Allah said: “There would arise at the end of the age a people who would be young in age and immature in thought, but they would talk (in such a manner) as if their words are the best among the creatures. They would recite the Qur’an, but it would not go beyond their throats, and they would pass through the religion as an arrow goes through the prey. So when you meet them, kill them, for in their killing you would get a reward with Allah on the Day of Judgement.”
Back in the day those words concerned the Kharijites, but recently this hadith has become relevant once again due to the fact ISIL claims that its actions are governed by the Koran, even though its members didn’t even make an attempt to grasp the basic notion that that there’s only one truth and that it belongs to God. Another Muslim scholar Ismail ibn Kathir (1301-1373 AD) has condemned the ideas expressed by the Kharijites in his book Ibn Kathir’s Al-Bidāya wa-n-nihāya (the beginning and the end) (10/584): “If the Khawarij ever gained power, they would corrupt the entire earth, Iraq, and Syria. They would not leave a boy or a girl or a man or a woman, for in their view the people have become so corrupt that they cannot be reformed except by mass killing.”
Those are precisely the doings that we can witness today on the territories occupied by ISIL. But at this point the Islamic world seems pretty determined to defend its sacred believes from the heresy of ISIL.
No Muslim that remains faithful to Islam would allow a murder of a man, regardless of the fact that the latter can be non-Muslim, since from the point of view of Islam a person may take the path of true faith at any point in his life, even on the verge of his death. For the “the believers are only the ones who have believed in Allah and His Messenger and then doubt not but strive with their properties and their lives in the cause of Allah . It is those who are the truthful.“(49:15).
Muslims are allowed to fight infidels in only one case, when those infidels are invaders that try to defy their religious customs, traditions, morals – “So do not obey the disbelievers, and strive against them with the Qur’an a great striving.” (25:52).
The Koran protects all the people who took the path of one God, as well as places of worship. After all, we should not forget that until the twentieth century no temple, church, place of prayer was desecrated or ruined in the whole Arab world. Ensuring protection of such places has always been considered by Islam as the basis of faith and love. “And were it not that Allah checks the people, some by means of others, there would have been demolished monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques in which the name of Allah is much mentioned. And Allah will surely support those who support Him. Indeed, Allah is Powerful and Exalted in Might.” (22:40).
It would be only logical to conclude this article by hadiths 10 and 11 of Imam Muhammad al-Bukhari , according to which the Prophet said that “a Muslim is the one who avoids harming Muslims with his tongue and hands “, and therefore Islam is better in understood by those “who avoids harming the Muslims with his tongue and hands .” That is why in case of a conflict a true Muslim will protect the world for the benefit of the Muslim Ummah and the people of the Book.
Ekaterina Ryzhkova, PhD in Law, Associate Professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations of the RF, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.