The last week’s incident (October 16) where a high school teacher named Samuel Paty in Paris was beheaded by an Islamic fanatic for showing cartoons of prophet Mohammed to his students, has left the French people shocked.
The 18-year-old Muslim youth, a refugee from Chechnya, Russia had not only beheaded the teacher but also uploaded the gory pictures on Twitter, before being shot dead by the French police. Since then, French President Emmanuel Macron has described the incident as a terrorist attack. However, recently, an Islamic scholar went on to normalise this harrowing act by saying that the Muslim teen had not committed any serious crime.
In an interview to a Turkish TV channel, Sheikh Ali Al-Yousuf of the International Union of Muslim Scholars recently said that from the perspective of Islamic jurisprudence, the Chechen teen had “not done any serious crime”. According to the Islamic scholar, the teen did not do anything that offensive that he should be punished for according to the sharia law.
‘The only punishment for insulting the Prophet is death’
According to Al-Yousuf, the only punishment for insulting the Prophet is death. The only fault of the Muslin teen was that he carried out the punishment by himself. According to sharia, the punishment should be carried out by the Islamic State, said the Islamic scholar.
“As I told you, if it is proven that the person who did this is a Chechen Muslim, and he did this out of anger because of the violation of the Prophet Muhammad’s honor, and if he indeed was a Muslim who did this in defense of the Islamic shari’a, then we let Allah be his judge. He may have carried out the punishment mandated by Islamic jurisprudence”.
The Islamic fundamentalist talking to the Turkey TV channel said that people should instead focus on the reason that forced the teen to do what he did. Normalising the crime committed by the 18-year-old teen, Al-Yousuf said that it was the growing ‘Islamophobia’ in France and elsewhere in the world which was prompting such extreme reactions, like in the case of the French teacher.
Blames ‘Islamophobia’
“Anyone who follows what is happening in France – the attacks against Islam and Muslims, and especially what we have seen lately – will see that there is an obvious media, political, cultural, and ideological campaign against Islam, Muslims, and the Prophet Muhammad, against every Muslim individual, as well as Muslim symbols, like the hijab. All this is crystal clear – it is called Islamophobia.
The Muslim scholar said that since Islam was the second-largest religion in France, and the number one religion in Europe, people in the West are insecure and think it must be attacked, They do not want Islam to advance in those places, opined Al-Yousuf.
“I would like to say that in light of all these actions, we must take a look at those who incite and distort and those who attack our Prophet Muhammad, in a country that claims to be secular and democratic, a country that claims to respect human rights, religions, opinions, and ideas. I do not know what kind of respect this is with this cursing, insulting, and attacking of Islamic symbols. This is the problem. Before we talk about this act (the murder of Samuel Paty), its judgement according to the sharia and our opinion about it… We must firmly focus on all the hostile and disgraceful actions that have been directed against Muslims for many years, actions supported by the government and extremists in France and elsewhere that were meant to distort Islam’s image in the West,” he furthered.
‘Decapitation is the punishment of blasphemers’, Islamists in Pakistan after the Charlie Hebdo incident
This reaction from the fundamentalist, however, does not come as a surprise. The reprinting of the cartoons on Mohammad by Charlie Hebdo had also attracted similar reactions from Islamists worldwide. Last month, Pakistan witnessed protests by tens of thousands of Muslims, soon after Charlie Hebdo decided to reprint cartoons mocking Prophet Mohammad, which prompted Islamic terrorists to launch a terror attack against them in 2015. “Death to France” was chanted and the protesters called for a boycott of French products. Protestors had put out posters which read: “Decapitation is the punishment of blasphemers.”
Indian Islamists had marched demanding decapitation of Kamlesh Tiwari
Back in 2015, lakhs of Islamists in India, openly supported by Islamist organisations, religious leaders and politicians, had marched on the streets demanding the beheading of Kamlesh Tiwari, a former Hindu Maha Sabha leader who had commented on the sexuality of Mohammad. Tiwari was charged under the NSA by the then state government in UP and jailed for several months. In 2019, some Islamists had entered into his office and stabbed, shot him to death, fulfilling the long-standing demand by Islamists that anyone who ‘insults’ their prophet should be beheaded.
