Murder in the Name of Allah — Page 82
Murder in the Name of Allah. Maududi had to seek recourse in a wish which the Holy Prophets is said to have expressed during his dying moments, that Musailmah should be done away with. Had there been such a wish, it is impossible for us to believe that the Holy Prophet's first successor, Hazrat Abu Bakr, would have ignored it and not sent an expedition in compliance with the wish of the Holy Prophets. Why did Hazrat Abu Bakr wait until the time when. Musailmah himself took the offensive and openly rebelled against the. Muslims? We find that Musailmah mustered a force of 40,000) warriors of Banu Hanifa alone when he fought Khalid b. Walid. Musailmah initiated hostilities and moved against Medina. It was only then that. Hazrat Abu Bakr gave orders to march against him on account of his rebellion and his gruesome murder of Habeeb bin Zaid. " 6 c) Another incident cited is that of Tulaiha, another pretender to prophethood. Again, he was not just a pretender but had murdered Ukasha b. Mohsin and Thabit b. Aqram Ansari. Before Khalid b. Walid commenced battle with him, he sent an emissary to Tulaiha to agree peace terms and avoid bloodshed. The advocates of capital punishment overlook the fact that if there had been capital punishment for apostasy, there was no point in sending an emissary offering forgiveness to Tulaiha. d) A similar case is that of Aswad Anasi who raised the standard of rebellion with his apostasy. He killed the Muslim governor of Yemen, 'Shahr b. Bazan, forcibly married his widow and made himself ruler of. Yemen. When the Holy Prophet learned of his rebellion, he sent a letter to Muaz b. Jabal and the Muslims to oppose Aswad Anasi, who was subsequently killed in a skirmish with the Muslims. (News of his death arrived one day after the demise of the Holy Prophetsa. ) e) Similarly, Laqbeet b. Malik Azdi became an apostate and claimed to be a prophet. He expelled Jafar and Abad who had been appointed as functionaries in Oman. 8 He, like all these claimants to prophethood, had no concern with religion. He had his own political axe to grind. His search for political domination was through open rebellion against the Islamic state he lived in, so the question of apostasy is irrelevant here. Let us suppose for a moment that all these people had not recanted their faith but had merely rebelled against the Muslim state. The state would have had to take the step of quelling the rebellion; for the crime of creating disorder in the land, the Holy Quran prescribes capital punishment. That punishment is not for apostasy. f) The advocates of capital punishment for apostacy cite also the case of. Umm Qarfah, a woman who became an apostate during the time of 82