| FrontPageMag.com | By Robert Spencer | By Hugh Fitzgerald | Books | Dhimmi Watch | Islam 101 | Qur'an Blog | Raymond Ibrahim | Robert Spencer |  |
|
|
|||||||||||
|
|
Speaking of the assertion that Islam is a Religion of Peace, which all good Brown University students know is axiomatically true, despite the cascades of Qur'an verses and claims of Islamic purity that shower upon us on a regular basis courtesy Osama bin Laden and his ideological kin, here is some evidence of the fact. In this installment of my Blogging the Qur’an series, I discuss the first thirty verses of Sura 8, “Booty,” in which Muhammad confronts the forces of the pagan Quraysh at Badr and...turns the other cheek! Exhorts his followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them! And begins a Gandhi-esque nonviolent protest!
Sura 8, Al-Anfal — “Booty,” or “The Spoils of War” — dates from the second year of the Medinan period, the second part of Muhammad’s prophetic career. It was revealed not long after the Battle of Badr, the first great victory of the Muslims over their chief rivals of the time, the pagan Quraysh tribe. The title of this sura is better known than most, since Saddam Hussein used Al-Anfal as the name for his genocidal 1988 campaigns against the Kurds, in which between 50,000 and 100,000 people were murdered.
At Badr, the Quraysh came out to meet Muhammad’s three hundred men with a force nearly a thousand strong. Muhammad had provoked the battle by sending his men out to raid a Quraysh caravan, telling them: “This is the caravan of Quraysh carrying their property, so march forth to intercept it, Allah might make it as war spoils for you.” As the battle loomed, according to Muhammad’s earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, the Islamic prophet strode among his troops and issued a momentous promise — one that has given heart to Muslim warriors throughout the ages: “By God in whose hand is the soul of Muhammad, no man will be slain this day fighting against them with steadfast courage advancing not retreating but God will cause him to enter Paradise.” One of the Muslim warriors, ‘Umayr bin al-Humam, exclaimed: “Fine, Fine! Is there nothing between me and my entering Paradise save to be killed by these men?” He flung away some dates that he had been eating, rushed into the thick of the battle, and fought until he was killed.
The Quraysh were routed. Some Muslim traditions say that Muhammad himself participated in the fighting; others that it was more likely that he exhorted his followers from the sidelines. In any event, it was an occasion for him to avenge years of frustration, resentment, and hatred toward his people who had rejected him. One of his followers later recalled a curse Muhammad had pronounced on the leaders of the Quraysh: “The Prophet said, ‘O Allah! Destroy the chiefs of Quraish, O Allah! Destroy Abu Jahl bin Hisham, ‘Utba bin Rabi’a, Shaiba bin Rabi’a, ‘Uqba bin Abi Mu’ait, ‘Umaiya bin Khalaf (or Ubai bin Kalaf).’” All these men were captured or killed during the battle of Badr. Ibn Ishaq says that one Quraysh leader named in this curse, ‘Uqba, pleaded for his life: “But who will look after my children, O Muhammad?” In the confrontation, ‘Uqba had thrown camel dung, blood, and intestines on the Prophet of Islam, to the great merriment of the Quraysh chieftans, while Muhammad prostrated himself in prayer. Muhammad had pronounced a curse on them, and now it was being fulfilled. Who would care for ‘Uqba’s children? “Hell,” Muhammad declared, and ordered ‘Uqba killed.
The victory at Badr was the turning point for the Muslims. It became the stuff of legend, a cornerstone of the new religion. And Allah rewarded those to whom he had granted victory. Verses 1-4 praise the true believers, who follow the Islamic rules concerning prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, and address for the first time the question of the spoils of war from Badr. There was great booty for the victors — so much, in fact, that it became a bone of contention. Muhammad was receiving questions about the disposal of the booty, and Allah tells the Muslims that that is entirely up to Muhammad (v. 1). This was in accord with a special privilege that Allah had granted to Muhammad. Muhammad explained: “I have been given five (things) which were not given to any amongst the Prophets before me.” These included the fact that “Allah made me victorious by awe (by His frightening my enemies)” and “the booty has been made Halal (lawful) to me (and was not made so to anyone else).”
Verses 5-17 refer to various incidents that took place before and during the battle, emphasizing that Allah commands warfare and protects the believers in it. The true believers were willing to go out of their homes to wage jihad warfare, although some disliked doing so and disputed with Muhammad about having to do so (vv. 5-6). This echoes 2:216: “Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you.” Allah’s promise of “one of the two enemy parties” (v. 7) means, according to Ibn Kathir, that the Muslims would attain victory by either “confiscating the caravan or defeating the Quraysh army.”
Allah announced that a thousand angels joined the Muslims to smite the Quraysh (v. 9), and that he had “inspired the angels (with the message): ‘I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them’” (v. 12). The Tafsir Al-Jalalayn explains: “that is, [smite] the extremities of their hands and feet: thus, when one of them went to strike an disbeliever’s head, it would roll off before his sword reached it.” V. 12 became one of the chief justifications for the Islamic practice — then and now — of beheading hostages and war captives. At the beheading of American hostage Nicholas Berg in May 2004, for example, the now-dead Iraqi jihad leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi invoked the great battle: “Is it not time for you [Muslims] to take the path of jihad and carry the sword of the Prophet of prophets?…The Prophet, the most merciful, ordered [his army] to strike the necks of some prisoners in [the battle of] Badr and to kill them….And he set a good example for us.”
Allah sent angels against the Quraysh “because they contended against Allah and His Messenger: If any contend against Allah and His Messenger, Allah is strict in punishment” (v. 13). The Muslims must always advance, never turning their backs on the enemy, unless they do so as a stratagem of war (vv. 15-16). Allah tells Muhammad that the Muslims were merely passive instruments at Badr. At one point, according to Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad threw pebbles toward the Quraysh, exclaiming: “Foul be those faces!” But it was Allah who killed the Quraysh and even Allah who threw the pebbles, “in order that He might test the believers by a gracious trial from Himself: for Allah is He Who heareth and knoweth (all things)” (v. 17).
Verses 18-19 address the unbelievers, warning the Quraysh not to attempt another attack, telling them they will again be defeated no matter how much more numerous they are than the Muslims. Verses 20-30 then address the Muslims again, exhorting them to faith and reminding them how Allah gave them victory at Badr despite the enemy’s superior numbers (v. 26). The unbelievers may plot and plan, but “Allah is the best of plotters” (v. 30).
(Here you can find links to all the earlier "Blogging the Qur'an" segments. Here is a good Arabic Qur’an, with English translations available; here are two popular Muslim translations, those of Abdullah Yusuf Ali and Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall, along with a third by M. H. Shakir. Here is another popular translation, that of Muhammad Asad. And here is an omnibus of ten Qur’an translations.)
Posted by Robert at October 29, 2007 8:49 AM
Print this entry
| Email this entry
| Digg this
| del.icio.us
|
"By God in whose hand is the soul of Muhammad, no man will be slain this day fighting against them with steadfast courage advancing not retreating but God will cause him to enter Paradise"
Come on out of those caves, Binny boy and fight like a real muslim man is supposed to.
Posted by: j_not_a![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/nav-commenters.gif)
at October 29, 2007 9:21 AM
"In any event, it was an occasion for him to avenge years of frustration, resentment, and hatred toward his people who had rejected him".
Substitute Hitler's name for Mo's and you get some of the mindset that brought us WW2. Hard to believe that all these centuries of jihad come in part from one guy getting revenge. A human drive that the Destroyers have turned into something divine has caused untold misery for some 1400 years. If this doesn't explain why Islamania is so pathetic then nothing will.
Posted by: ISLAMSFORLOSERS at October 29, 2007 10:29 AM
I've never seen open registration at Hot Air or I'd have mentioned it there. Did you notice the edit someone made to the hadith about Mohammed's five special rules?
They changed "terror" to "awe." "I have been made victorious with awe." I've noticed the word "terror" is vanishing from the Quran and ahadith at USC.
Posted by: Beagle at October 29, 2007 10:44 AM
Isn't it suspicious that Allah gave Mo this special privilege to divide the loot? In most all contemporary cults, the leader always has special privileges that the followers cannot question. Islam is a cult.
Posted by: Pelayo at October 29, 2007 11:08 AM
Beagle:
The same impression crosed my mind recently upon a visit to the USC site. I wonder if there's any reliable way of determining if the text there is being "adjusted" or "sanitized." It would be a great service if some institution maintained an accurate version of the hadith. I was thinking that lies within the Library of Congress's mandate, but I must admit to wondering whether the objectivity of even that institution has been compromised.
There is a crying, if not shrieking, need to keep an accurate translation of the Qur'an and hadith as Moslems themselves read it and study it. This is a religion in which lying, especially to wary outsiders, is sanctioned. That fact alone should cause all non-Moslems to strengthen their guard.
Posted by: Chatillon at October 29, 2007 11:20 AM
OK, I've been confused about this - hopefully someone can answer my question.
The "Defensive" verses in the Q - what about those, when Mohammed in fact fought Offensively all the time! Are the "Defensive" verses not to be believed, are they abrogated, WHAT? Help! --Darcy
Posted by: darcy at October 29, 2007 11:29 AM
>Sura 8, Al-Anfal — “Booty,” or “The Spoils of
>War”
I recognize "Al-Anfal or Spoils of War" to be Saddam Hussein and Chemical Ali's name for the campaign to nerve-gas Kurdish civilians, women and children in Northern Iraq.
Saddam was supposedly a secular Stalinist but he named his anti-Kurdish campaign after a verse from the Koran. That does not suprise me in the least.
at October 29, 2007 11:40 AM
CTYankee
Saddam became more and more overtly religious - in the jihad sense - as time went on. By the end he had fedayeen, a Quran printed in blood, and dozens of photo ops kneeling and praying. He could see the sahwa Islamia taking off all over the world.
But of course Islam is really a religion of peace and social justice... Saddam would have nothing to do with religion as a secular socialist... Yadda, yadda, yadda...
/lies
Posted by: Beagle at October 29, 2007 12:18 PM
Beagle wrote:
“I've never seen open registration at Hot Air or I'd have mentioned it there. Did you notice the edit someone made to the hadith about Mohammed's five special rules?
They changed "terror" to "awe." "I have been made victorious with awe." I've noticed the word "terror" is vanishing from the Quran and ahadith at USC. “
Sir:
It is matter of the semantics in the original text. The verbiage used in the saying of Muhammad is “Nuşerita bir-roªbbi” which can be indeed translated as “I was made victorious through [awe/ fright]”. The implication being that victory was granted to him by Allah who had supernaturally instilled fear in the infidels and not through any direct action or intimidation by Mohammed or his followers as you might have supposed. The word used for terrorism in modern Arabic is Irhab which is a derivative of the verb root rahba, to terrorize. In Surat Al-Anfal, verse 60, a conjunct of the verb to terrorize is found as Allah instructs his followers to prepare for them (the infidels) the upmost of their power, including steeds of war, in order to terrorize the enemies of Allah and their enemies, “Aªdoo lahum maa istaţaªtum min qoowa ya min rabaaţ al-khail torhboon bih ªadew Allaha wa adewakum”.
at October 29, 2007 12:42 PM
Beagle wrote:
“I've never seen open registration at Hot Air or I'd have mentioned it there. Did you notice the edit someone made to the hadith about Mohammed's five special rules?
They changed "terror" to "awe." "I have been made victorious with awe." I've noticed the word "terror" is vanishing from the Quran and ahadith at USC. “
Sir:
It is matter of the semantics in the original text. The verbiage used in the saying of Muhammad is “Nuşerita bir-roªbbi” which can be indeed translated as “I was made victorious through [awe/ fright]”. The implication being that victory was granted to him by Allah who had supernaturally instilled fear in the infidels and not through any direct action or intimidation by Mohammed or his followers as you might have supposed. The word used for terrorism in modern Arabic is Irhab which is a derivative of the verb root rahba, to terrorize. In Surat Al-Anfal, verse 60, a conjunct of the verb to terrorize is found as Allah instructs his followers to prepare for them (the infidels) the upmost of their power, including steeds of war, in order to terrorize the enemies of Allah and their enemies, “Aªdoo lahum maa istaţaªtum min qoowa ya min rabaaţ al-khail torhboon bih ªadew Allaha wa adewakum”.
at October 29, 2007 12:42 PM
That's nice have_mercy. That has nothing to do with whether the texts are being edited for deceptive purposes now that people are watching.
Posted by: Beagle at October 29, 2007 12:58 PM
The "Defensive" verses in the Q - what about those, when Mohammed in fact fought Offensively all the time! Are the "Defensive" verses not to be believed, are they abrogated, WHAT? Help! --Darcy
Posted by: darcy at October 29, 2007 11:29 AM
Defensive for that bunch meant the times Mo wasn't actually fighting-eating, counting war booty, marrying 6 year olds, sleeping with the slaves, etc. Since he wasn't actully killing someone at those times he must have been condsidered on the "defensive" by Islamaniac logic.
at October 29, 2007 1:32 PM
Just checked 8:12 at the USC site -- Yusuf Ali and Shakir render it as "I will instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers" and "I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve," respectively. Pickthall's version uses "fear" instead of "terror."
Posted by: Papa Whiskey at October 29, 2007 2:52 PM
Beagle:
I gave you an answer in line with my understanding of the Arabic lexicon and Islamic sources. There is indeed widespread deception on the part of dishonest translators with an apologist agenda. However, I assure you that there is a lexical distinction between the Arabic words used for terror and awe in the Islamic source texts. “I was made victorious through terror” does sound more menacing than “I was made victorious through awe”, but we can not take the translation that best suits us as Muslim apologists routinely do.
Al-Anfal verse 60 spells out as clear as day the divinely mandated obligation of Muslims to terrorize the infidels. There are numerous such examples of menacing verses that the loss of the mistranslated “I was made victorious through terror” as an example of the homicidal and terroristic nature of Islam is hardly a drop in the bucket.
at October 31, 2007 5:32 PM
Papa Whiskey:
Pickthall is one the very worst as you might expect from a western convert with an agenda speaking to a mostly western non-Muslim audience. Yossef Ali seems to have been targeting Muslim English-speakers, and that is why his work is more accurate. However, he embellishes the text with parenthesized additions to serve his apologist aims.
The funny thing is that the Quran is written in a dead language that modern speakers do not fully understand. In fact, the exact meaning of a significant portion of the text is not readily known. Many of the commentators on the Quran were Persians non-native speakers or Arabs who lived in the urban centers created by Islamic conquests that spoke an Arabic that was to a degree linguistically and spatially remote from the dialects of Quranic Arabic.
Also, portions of the Quran were composed in a style described by some contemporaries of Muhammad as “Saja al-kuhan” or oracle prose, a jabbering of unintelligible rhyming words that ancient pagan Arab priests used as replies to those coming to ask the Gods for guidance.
However, the author/authors of the Quran were at their most sober and direct when the composed the verses that inspire the Jihad, leaving no doubt as to their meaning. The doctrinal, and so it follows, lexical importance of the jihad-related vocabulary has allowed it to survive unchanged. The average upperclassman in elementary school can perfectly understand Jihad verses without a dictionary.
at October 31, 2007 6:20 PM
Comments are turned off and archived for this entry.
(Note: The Comments section is provided in the interests of free speech only. It is mostly unmoderated, but comments that are off-topic, offensive, slanderous, or otherwise annoying stand a chance of being deleted. The fact that any comment remains on the site IN NO WAY constitutes an endorsement by Jihad Watch or Dhimmi Watch, or by Robert Spencer or any other Jihad Watch or Dhimmi Watch writer, of any view expressed, fact alleged, or link provided in that comment.)