The general refrain among leading Islamic scholars across the world is that the Chechen student who recently beheaded French history teacher Samuel Paty has not done a serious crime. According to some scholars, he should not have committed the murder by himself but should have allowed a shari’ah court to award death penalty. In India, too, Islamo-Left-Liberals who were very vocal in the case of murder of George Floyd, 46-year-old US black man — and launched a campaign ‘Muslims lives matter’ on the lines of ‘Black lives matter’ — remained tight-lipped about the decapitation of the French teacher by an Islamic radical.
Talking to a Turkey TV channel, Sheikh Ali Al-Yousuf of the International Union of Muslim Scholars said from the perspective of Islamic jurisprudence, the Chechen teen has “not done any serious crime”. Punishment for insulting Prophet Muhammad is death, he said. “…The sentence should be carried out by a shari’ah court in an Islamic state.
According to Al-Yousuf, Islam is growing in France and elsewhere in Europe because of its ‘moral virtues’. He says: “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.”
Even after mounting onslaught on civilians and institutions, Islamic scholars try to play the victim card. “This is the problem, before we talk about this act [murder of Samuel Paty] – its judgement according to the shari’a 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,” Al-Yousuf said.
Interestingly, a prominent Qatari scholar Abd Al-Aziz Al-Khazraj Al-Ansari has argued that the killing of Samuel Paty was orchestrated by French Intelligence to ‘distort the reputation of Islam’. However, in the same breadth he said “killings and stabbings” are “normal reactions” to insults against Prophet Muhammad. He said that French President Emmanuel Macron should be told that his country’s Freedom of Speech laws are “stupid”.
Imam Hassan El-Houari of the Muslim Theological Council in France has said that Muslims had built France and terrorism in the country is not coming from mosques but French schools.
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