Reflections On Rizana’s Public Beheading In Saudi Arabia After Friday Prayers And Spectators Allowed To Enjoy Thoroughly

By Izeth Hussain

The Koran is regarded as the primary source of the Sharia. But out of its six thousand verses only six hundred deal with legal obligations, most of them to do with religious matters such as prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage. And only eighty verses deal with strictly secular legal matters, concerning women, marriage, and laws of inheritance. The second source of the Sharia are the hadiths, the sayings and deeds of the Prophet, of which there are many thousands. Six books of hadiths are accepted as canonical by Muslims, the most important of which is the compilation of Bukhari. My copy of Bukhari goes into nine volumes, most of them consisting of over four hundred and fifty pages.

It seems to be a widespread notion that however tragic and horrifying Rizana Nafeek’s fate might be, we cannot in the last resort object to the Saudis having their own laws and applying them in the manner they think fit. That view seems sound on the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states. But it carries a large assumption. It is that the Saudi manner of applying its laws will be consistent with internationally accepted standards. No one has any business to assume anything of the sort considering Saudi Arabia’s horrendous record in human rights.

It is internationally accepted that murder must be punished and punished severely, but the death sentence is frowned upon widely today. As for the death sentence being carried out by beheading – at one time a universal practice – it is no longer in vogue today. But what happens in Saudi Arabia is that the victim is beheaded in a public square after the Friday Jumma prayers and spectators are allowed to enjoy themselves thoroughly. What is more, in the tragic case of Rizana, a film was made of the grisly proceedings, which is now available on the internet. We can be certain that the almost universal reaction will be that the Saudi regime is intolerably barbaric. We know of course that public executions were universal at one time, including in the most advanced states. But that was at a time when there was no police force and the power of the state was not ubiquitous enough to enable the state to punish crime everywhere. So punishment had to be exemplary, setting an example to deter further crime, and therefore it had to be public and also cruel. Saudi Arabia’s reversion to medieval practices for which the rationale no longer exists is today rightly regarded as barbaric.

Can we expect a regime that glories in a practice almost universally regarded as barbaric, and has so horrendous a record on human rights, to apply the law in a manner consistent with internationally accepted standards? May be sometimes, may be even frequently, but not always surely. In Rizana’s case, according to the information available, the manner in which she was tried and convicted showed contempt for internationally accepted standards. She complained that her confession was extorted under duress. There is nothing to show that that complaint was investigated properly. Her translator was an Indian Malayalee whose knowledge of Tamil may have been defective. Evidently our Embassy in Riyadh was not notified so that it could discharge its consular responsibilities by providing a reliable translator etc, a very serious lapse on the part of the Saudi authorities. I will not go into further details which are by now known to the public. Instead I will focus on the sheer utter total implausibility of the case made out against Rizana.

In cases of murder, as distinct from unintended killings which are categorized as homicide, it is all-important to establish a credible motive. Rizana was there for a very brief period – just a few weeks – and it strains credulity far too much to make us believe that in that very brief period she had developed such hatred of her employers as to drive her to murder. There was no record of ill-treatment by her employers, or of quarrels between them. Now after the execution, the Saudi authorities claim for the first time that the lady of the house had scolded her that morning, and she had therefore "plotted" – the term used in the official statement – the murder. No one whose rational faculty has not been seriously impaired can possibly accept that as establishing a credible motive. Furthermore, it is known that in murder cases the murderer does everything humanly possible to escape detection. In this case we are asked to believe that Rizana screamed while committing the murder, attracting the attention of the other children who consequently testified against her. I won’t go on citing further details as that would be superfluous. Obviously the charge of murder is total tosh.

We can of course expect the Saudi authorities to claim that the Rizana case was handled strictly according to the Sharia, the Divine Law of Islam. As Saudi Arabia was the land of the Prophet, non-Muslims who know little or nothing about Islam and the Islamic world may well be disposed to believe that Islam is really a barbaric religion and that Muslims are, under a thin veneer of civilization, barbarians at the core. I must make some clarifications about the Sharia to dispel that misconception. The Koran is regarded as the primary source of the Sharia. But out of its six thousand verses only six hundred deal with legal obligations, most of them to do with religious matters such as prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage. And only eighty verses deal with strictly secular legal matters, concerning women, marriage, and laws of inheritance. The second source of the Sharia are the hadiths, the sayings and deeds of the Prophet, of which there are many thousands. Six books of hadiths are accepted as canonical by Muslims, the most important of which is the compilation of Bukhari. My copy of Bukhari goes into nine volumes, most of them consisting of over four hundred and fifty pages.

Obviously, it had to be expected that more than one system of the Sharia would arise. About two centuries after the death of the Prophet four schools of the Divine Law came to be accepted in the Islamic world. Liberal Muslims who became important in the Islamic world from the late nineteenth century onwards question the very notion of the Divine Law. If God had intended to set down an immutable legal system valid for all time and in all places, He would have done so in the Koran, instead of leaving it to Muslim legists to construct four legal systems centuries after the death of the Prophet. Today some would see the four schools of the Divine Law in terms of ideology in the Marxist sense – that is, their significance in relation to the world of power. I have in mind Mohammed Arkoun, a Professor in the Sorbonne, who wrote: "Orthodoxy – in its Sunni or Shia version – is no more than the official religion resulting from the collaboration of the majority of the ulema with the state." It is an interesting subject that I cannot pursue here. What I want to do here is to emphasize that the Saudi pretention that Rizana was beheaded in strict accordance with the Sharia should be taken with a huge pinch of salt. I strongly suspect that the Saudi authorities have a pre-Islamic mind-set and that Rizana was beheaded strictly in accordance with pre-Islamic Judaic law: a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye, or – since its money that makes the world go round – the payment of compensation.

Fintan O’Toole: Time to lift veil on Saudi Arabia’s hijacking of Islam

Saudi Arabia has spent $100 billion in recent decades spreading an extremist ideology

Fintan O'Toole

A Muslim protester holds a placard reading “Islam” and another one holds one reading “For peace and against terrorism” during a demonstration outside Atocha Station in Madrid against the recent Paris Charlie Hebdo attacks . 

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Imagine an attempt to ban the veneration of the Prophet Muhammad. Go further and imagine a plan to level his tomb in Medina, the second holiest site in Islam, dig up his remains and rebury them in a secret, unmarked grave. Go further again and imagine the actual, systematic destruction, in the early years of Islam, of the tombs of the major figures, including the prophet’s closest relatives.

What lunatic would even imagine going to these extreme lengths to provoke, insult and enrage Muslims? Well, the House of Saud, rulers of Saudi Arabia and guardians of the extremist ideology that fuels much of today’s Islamist terrorism, wouldn’t just imagine them. It does them.

In all the official rhetoric about freedom of speech in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, it is notable that there are two words that apparently must not be spoken: Saudi Arabia. Yet it is impossible to understand what is happening now without grasping the fact that the mentality of the killers is not a weird aberration. It is shaped by an official cult propagated by a government western states are anxious to appease at almost any cost. Saudi Arabia has spent about $100 billion in recent decades spreading an extremist ideology, a hybrid of Wahhabism and Salafism, two versions of an Islam supposedly “purified” of its “foreign” influences.

Saudi largesse

These are not ancient traditions. Wahhabism was born in the 18th century, Salafism in the 19th. And they are not “Islam” – Salafis and Wahhabis make up 3 per cent of Muslims. One of the more bizarre aspects of this ideology is that it involves attacks on things most Muslims regard as sacred. When western liberals wring their hands about giving offence to Muslims by depicting or representing the prophet, they miss the most important point. Cartoons in Charlie Hebdo are vastly less offensive to most Muslims than the destruction of early Islamic tombs by the Saudis. But of course self-appointed defenders of Islamic sensitivities, funded by Saudi largesse, won’t tell you that.

In the last 20 years or so, the Saudis have destroyed hundreds of holy sites in Mecca to clear ground for the construction of hotels and shopping malls and around the Grand Mosque. Much of this is about money, of course, but the destruction is sanctioned by Wahhabi ideology and Saudi history. The Wahhabi sect regarded the veneration of sacred tombs as heretical.

The Wahhabis destroyed dozens of holy tombs in Mecca and Medina when they conquered those cities in 1806 and even attempted to level the prophet’s tomb. They did the same when they reconquered the cities in 1925. This mania continues: just last year, a senior Saudi cleric prepared a detailed plan for the dismantling of the prophet’s tomb. The followers of this ideology have continued to destroy sacred Islamic sites and tombs in Pakistan, Libya, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.

Muslim outrage

How do most Muslims feel about this? Outraged of course. A large survey in 2012 of opinion among Muslims in western Europe, west Africa and Malaysiafound 75 per cent of respondents believed the veneration of the graves of Muslim “saints” (ziyarah) was essential or desirable.

For the vast majority of Muslims the running story of sacrilege and provocation is not a few cartoons in secularist European newspapers, it is the Saudi iconoclastic assault on veneration of the prophet.

And yet we never hear about this when the question of “insulting” the prophet or disrespecting the sacred traditions of Islam is raised in Europe. Why? Money. The Saudis have vast amounts of it and use it to fund mosques, schools and Islamic cultural centres all over Europe. A hundred billion dollars buys you a lot of silence. And that silence engenders one of the great hypocrisies of our times: a cartoon of the prophet is a provocation that deserves death but the destruction of his tomb is a religious duty.

This hypocrisy is underwritten by a tacit understanding among western governments: don’t mention the Saudis. The house of Saud runs a vicious tyranny that, among other things, treats women as badly as apartheid South Africa treated blacks. While the Charlie Hebdo killers were going about their ultimate acts of censorship, the Saudi government was savagely lashing the blogger Raif Badawi for daring to promote public debate in his blog.

But the Saudis are “our” Islamist extremists and they’re sending us lots of cheap oil right now. So when we talk about not insulting Muslims, we ignore what most Muslims regard as most offensive. And when we talk about confronting the nihilistic bigotry of extremist Islamism, we ignore the government that is pumping it into our societies through its promotion of a cult that most Muslims reject. It is long past time for democracies to take offence.

Executing Rizana Nafeek is Sheer Saudi barbarism; Absolutely nothing to do with Islam and Shariah

By Latheef Farook

Sailan Muslim

Islam requires mother should” breast feed” the child for two years. In this case mother   failed in her duty to feed her baby as requested by Hoy Quran.  

The execution of housemaid Rizana Nafeek who languished in Death Row, in one of the most inhuman environment, in a Saudi prison for almost seven years is nothing but sheer barbarism of the American, British and Zionist   installed tribal Saudis –    the most oppressive regime in the planet. 

This has nothing to do with Islam or Shariah. This is the mockery of Islam by a regime which collaborated with America and its European allies to invade and destroy Muslim countries from Afghanistan and Iraq and Somalia to many more.  

Saudi Arabia is course the land of Islam.   However the brutal and autocratic regime is a treacherous one which has no rights to speak of Islam and Shariah in view of its unislamic nature of the extremely corrupted and degenerated Saudi family which owns this land as their family property.  

Unfortunate Rizana hails from a poverty stricken family in Muthur.  

Though a minor she went to Saudi Arabia at the age of around 17 to work as maid and earn a pittance to tide over her family’s economic difficulties. She reached Saudi Arabia on 1 April 2005 on a passport, in which her date of birth, 24 February 1988, was reported to have changed by her employment agent to 2 February, 1982. 

On arrival in Saudi Arabia  she worked in the house of Naif Jiziyan Khalaf Al Otaibi whose wife had a four month old baby boy. She was assigned to cooking, washing and looking after the infant. She maintained good rapport with all in the house and there was no problem to speak of. 

The tragedy struck around 12.30 PM on 22 May 2005 while she was bottle-feeding     noticed that milk was oozing through mouth and nose of the infant. She tried to sooth   by striking infant’s throat, neck and face. She was panicked when she saw the infant’s eyelids closed and shouted for help. This clearly reveals the question of choking while feeding does not arise. 

Clarifying milk oozing out through nose and mouth doctors explained that there could have been a "Stop” when the milk does not go into the stomach, but oozes out. It can be also assumed that when the milk oozed out, the child might have already passed away.   

Around  1.30 PM   the mother of the infant came home. On seeing the infant she went into rage and assaulted Rizana with slippers and hands and took the infant away. Blood started oozing from Rizana’s nose. 

On 25 May police arrested Rizana accusing her of murdering the infant. In the police station she was severely beaten with belt demanding a statement that she strangled the infant and electrocuted. Obtaining such a forced statement is complete violation of Shariah law.  There was no one to talk to leave alone a word of comfort. Frightened Rizana placed her signature on the written paper given to her by the police.  

According to reports, police failed to conduct a postmortem to establish the cause of the death of the infant. This is a serious lapse. It is not known whether Saudi law firm Khateb Al-Shammary which represented Rizan took up the issue of the "postmortem".

Later Rizana vehemently denied all allegations against her and retracted her confession when she stated in the court on 3rd February 2007 that her original confession was obtained by the Police under duress. According to reports the person, Keralite, who took down her alleged confession, was not a competent interpreter .He was a sheep herder and was no longer in the country.

On 16 June 2007 the High Court sentenced Rizana to death by beheading simply based on the police report obtained under duress. This verdict, in complete violation of Shariaw laws, was upheld by the so called Supreme Court on October 2010.

In sentencing her to death the High Court and the Supreme Court have overlooked the most important fact –   the absence of a postmortem report – the scientific evidence of the cause of death. Under such circumstance the question is whether Saudi Arabia which is not governed by  Shariah  laws can try Rizana under Shariah laws with so much of flaws in its legal system.

Today’s Saudi Arabia was created by Jews and Britain in the aftermath of the World War 1 and  Riyadh based tribal chief Abdul Aziz Ibn Al Saud was placed in power in return for  his support to  topple Turkey’s Ottoman –one of the greatest Muslim empires in Islamic history. Since then it has been governed by Al Saud tribe –under tribal system which has nothing to do with Islam.

Over the years the Jews and Britain turned the tribe into royal family which is alien to Islam. In Islam there is no royal family as such. Thus the system of government, administration of justice, economic structure, and distribution of wealth, overall society and all other aspects of life have been based on mediaeval tribalism and not based on Islam. Under such system power, positions, wealth and almost everything remain the hereditary right of ruling family which is above law. This in itself is complete violation of Islam.  People as a whole are treated as virtual slaves.

Known for their stinking corruption, shameful lifestyle displaying God given wealth, suppression of  freedom given by Islam to all including women, their collaboration with Jewish controlled US led European Christian West’s    evil agendas against Islam and Muslims, financing Jewish
 wars against Islam and Muslims, depositing the wealth given by Allah in the   West, failure to help the Muslims worldwide ,  creating conflicts  among Muslims  and so  many other factors made the ruling family a source of embarrassment to Islam and worldwide Muslims  despise them.

Arbitrary arrests, detention and torture have been common and Shariah laws were merely exploited to advance their tyranny fully backed by   United Stated, Europe and Israel.

Now the question is whether such an oppressive regime can try Rizana under Shariah law. In fact even in employing Rizana as a maid  violates Shariah laws  as   Islam permits women to take up jobs under certain conditions which were openly flouted by the Saudi authorities and Rizana’s sponsor himself.

In his letter to Jeddah based English language daily “ arab news” Engineer Ismail Marikkar from Sri Lanka raised following pertinent questions; 

I was simply shocked and as a Muslim ashamed when I read the death sentence on   Rizana. It is a miscarriage of justice. I appeal to the judicial authorities to refer this case to the Permanent Committee of Higher Scholars for review and a final decision. He asked; 

1. Is it not a requirement in Islam for the mother to "breast-feed" the child and the period is two years? Did this mother fulfill her duty? It is a right of the child as stated in Quran;  “And the mothers are to suckle their infants for two years, for those who wish to complete the suckling”(Surah Baqarah 2:233). The mother has failed in her duty to the baby.
   
2. How could she entrust the care of her little child to a young uneducated "teenager" from a foreign country, and a very remote area, where they do not even see feeding bottles?  The mother always fed the child.
   
3. Some have expressed the opinion that Rizana has not expressed remorse or asked for pardon.

Well that it is in itself a clear indication that this was not intentional murder. Just tell me why this girl a few days after arriving, kills a child entrusted to her care, unless she was "insane", in which case she is not guilty. Rizana was made to sign a confession under duress, which is not acceptable under any law.shariah is very clear on this.

Well the death sentence is the punishment, but there is also the option of paying blood money.But Allah says it would be good to pardon. The death of this child in this manner at this time is the "Qadr" of Allah. This is a fundamental of our faith. This child can never be brought to life by killing the maid. They are refusing blood money. Well they want revenge. To forgive is an attribute of Allah. In fact there is a hadith about the reward awaiting those who forgave for the sake of Allah.

My advice is to forgive and be patient. These are virtuous acts earning divine reward.

This principle is intrinsically related to the maxim observed by the Divine Law in both civil and criminal cases: that innocence and freedom from accountability is to be assumed unless proven otherwise. Allah’s Messenger (may the peace and blessings of Allâh be upon him) made this clear when he said:“Do not carry out the prescribed punishments when there is doubt.”

Describing Rizana’s conviction as an abomination and demanding she should be released immediately and offered an apology. F. A. Munas, M.D. from United States   had this to say;

“As most objective people would agree, Rizana was unlikely to have murdered the infant. What motive would she have? Rizana had no time to develop any antipathy for her employer’s family. The infant seems to have died of natural causes such as SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) or an unfortunate occurrence during feeding due to a possible congenital swallowing malformation. These conditions are not uncommon in that age group. No autopsy of the deceased infant was ever conducted by the Saudi authorities. By any reckoning the benefit of a doubt should go to the accused.

“The outrageous murder conviction and the pending public execution by beheading of   Rizana Nafeek by Saudi Arabian authorities is an affront to humans the world over. The brutality of this action is quite mind-boggling. As a matter of commonsense, it is utterly hypocritical for the Saudi government to sign an international agreement not to execute individuals who were minors when the alleged capital offense was committed, and then renege on the pledge by citing"Shariah rules."

“It would be outrageous if Rizana Nafeek were to be executed as it appears that she was herself a child at the time; and there are real concerns about the fairness of her trial,” Amnesty International’s Middle East director Malcolm Smart said. On 14 June 2011 one of the parents was kind enough to pardon Rizana. However both Parents need pardon if Rizana is to be acquitted.

On the other hand do the Saudi  Shariah needs six years to sentence a girl to death on the basis of a statement obtained under duress. Imagine the mental frame  of a young girl for the  past seven years in an unknown country and that too in a jail, awaiting to be beheaded. The mere thought of awaiting this death in a lonely cell is certainly enough to cripple even the strongest of man. So think about the plight of Rizana who may be dying minute after minute past six years. Is this Islam? This is mockery of Islam and Shariah!

Isn’t it time that Muslims worldwide think of liberating Islamic holy land from the medieval Saudi family tyranny?