War, killing and execution in Islam: 5 facts

“Whoever kills a person other than for murder or corruption in the land, it is as if he had killed all of mankind, and whoever saves a life, it is as if he had saved all of mankind.”^[2] The rule is stated for the Children of Israel and affirmed for all. It follows the story of the two sons of Adam, one of whom killed the other. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) called murder among the gravest sins, and said that bloodshed will be the first matter judged between people on the Day of Resurrection.^[3]

The strongest objection is the verse that follows. It sets severe penalties for those who “wage war against God and His Messenger and strive to spread corruption in the land”, including execution and crucifixion, and the phrase “corruption in the land” looks open-ended.^[4] The jurists defined it narrowly as armed banditry and violent insurgency against public order, called hirāba, required proof, and noted that the very next verse excuses anyone who repents before being captured. Applying the clause to peaceful dissent or to unbelief is not what the jurists did.

“When you meet those who disbelieve in battle, strike their necks, until you have subdued them.”^[5] Commentators read it as the language of combat, as in any army’s order. Its next words regulate captives: release or ransom. Reports in Sahih al-Bukhari say the Prophet forbade mutilating the dead and killing women and children.^[6]

Other verses limit the command. “Fight in the way of God those who fight you, but do not transgress”, and “God does not forbid you to deal kindly and justly with those who have not fought you over religion or driven you out of your homes.”^[7] The verse on fighting is addressed to an army already at war.

The sharpest form of the objection cites 9:5, often called the “sword verse”, which tells the Muslims to fight the polytheists wherever they find them. Some classical commentators treated it as cancelling the gentler verses. Many others read it in its setting: it follows a treaty that the polytheists had broken, it excepts those who kept their treaties, and the verse after it orders protection for anyone who seeks safe conduct.^[8]

Abu Bakr’s instructions to an army heading to Syria are recorded: do not kill a woman, a child or an old man, do not cut down fruit trees, do not destroy inhabited places, do not kill a sheep or a camel except for food, and leave the monks in their cells.^[9] These are among the earliest recorded rules of conduct of this kind, and the jurists built on them. The Prophet had given his commanders a similar charge: do not steal from the spoils, do not betray, do not mutilate, and do not kill children.^[10]

In the eighth century the jurist Muhammad al-Shaybani wrote a long treatise on the law of war and peace between states, the Siyar, which later jurists treated as foundational.^[11] Faruqi’s glossary defines jihād as “self-exertion in the cause of God, including peaceful as well as violent means”, and the rules apply to the second.^[12]

A fair account has to add that classical jurists also allowed the caliph to launch wars to extend the territory of Islam, and divided the world into a house of Islam and a house of war. That division is a product of the jurists’ own work and is not a Quranic term. Many modern scholars restrict legitimate fighting to defence, and they give the same texts as the reason.

Ismail al Faruqi sets out the principle behind those rules. Religious conviction is a personal matter, so coercion (ikrāh, “compulsion”) and subversion (fitnah, “sedition”) are punishable crimes.^[13] Force, he argues, has three legitimate uses only: to put down rebellion, to restore rights that one community has taken from another, and to defend the order itself against its enemies.^[14] In Essential Writings he adds, “No other use of power is legitimate”, and describes jihad as “defensive war”, a religious duty that falls on Muslims alone, with non-Muslims free to volunteer but never to be conscripted.^[20] That is his own statement of the doctrine. Classical jurists also debated campaigns beyond defence, so his definition is narrower than some of theirs.

Islamic law bans killing non-combatants, so genocide is forbidden whoever commits it. The killing of Armenians in 1915–16 was carried out by the Ottoman government of a secular nationalist party, and many Muslim families sheltered Armenians at risk to themselves. Some Ottoman officials refused the orders and were removed from their posts.^[15]

Muslims have been victims too, as at Srebrenica in 1995, where Bosnian Serb forces killed around eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys. International courts have ruled it a genocide.^[16] The standard in each case is the same: the Quran’s ban on killing a soul without right, and the early rulings that protect women, children, the old and the clergy.

The honest objection is that Muslim rulers and armies have also committed mass killing, and that religion is sometimes invoked for it. The Iraqi government’s Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1988 is an example. The Islamic answer to that does not make an exception for its own side. The rule stands, and those who break it are condemned by it.

In 2014, 126 Muslim scholars and leaders from around the world signed an open letter to the leader of ISIS refuting its use of beheading, enslavement and the declaration of other Muslims as unbelievers as contrary to Islamic law.^[17] The letter goes through the classical sources point by point, which answers the charge that the group was simply applying the texts. It states that the group had ignored the conditions that the jurists set for every ruling it claimed to follow.

The Amman Message of 2004 had already affirmed the legitimacy of the main schools and forbidden the declaration of Muslims as unbelievers.^[18] In 2016 the Marrakesh Declaration, signed by scholars and ministers from many countries, affirmed the rights of religious minorities in Muslim-majority lands.^[19] A critic can say that statements of this kind come after the atrocities and that some who carry them out claim the same texts. The condemnations still show where the weight of scholarship lies, and it lies against them.