12 May 2004 Strong Najasa

The video is grainy, but in this war of images it does not have to be perfect. Fox News published he video-grab.

They did not include the web address of the Islamist site that posted the streaming video. I’m sure the prurient interest would have crashed their server. Fox helpfully gave us the moment before the murder, the man seated in an orange jumpsuit.

“My name is Nick Berg, my father’s name is Michael, my mother’s name is Susan. I have a brother and sister, David and Sarah. I live in Philadelphia.”

Behind David is a line of five men. One of them read from a manifesto, and then David is pulled to him and the Daniel Pearl thing is done to him with a large knife.

There is something Halal about these killings and it helped me understand a peculiar bit of news on Sunday.The report was that a body of a Westerner had been found near a Baghdad overpass, and that the authorities did not know who he was.

Now we know why they didn’t know.  Nick’s body had no head.

On the video, the group of executioners shouted “God is Great!”

That seemed to be consistent with terror, but I wondered about it. It seems impure somehow, or maybe it was pure.

I had to hit the books. Perhaps there is more to it. In the video, the executioner holds David’s severed head out before the camera. It is quite possible that the man is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

He has been a busy boy this last month. He may have chartered the Madrid train bombings, and his plots against the security service headquarters in hometown Amman and Ba’ath targets in Damascus were just barely foiled.

He is a walking dead-man, and not just because he has murdered Americans. He has been sentenced to death in abstentia by a Jordanian court.

Zarqawi is a Bedouin, of the Beni Hassan tribe, and there is a grainy passport picture of him on the wanted posters. He can pass virtually anywhere in the Middle East without notice. The U.S. is offering $10 million for his head, though not literally. That is up $5 million from the original amount. The authorities doubled it after a seventeen-page letter was intercepted from him on the way to Osama to explain how he was going to expel the infidels from Iraq.

The beheading thing, particularly the video aspect, is monstrous to the West. The video part is not addressed in the  Nobel Qu’ran. The technology was changed since  the Final Messenger of Allah to humanity got the text of the last Message from God to guide the affairs of the world.

Its honored predecessors, the Torah, Psalms, and Gospels were all specifically superceded, like Department of Defense regulations. I suppose the key to the execution is whether it is intended to be pure in sacrifice, or unpure.

There is quite a controversy about that, and the Noble Qu’ran goes into some detail to clean up the specific points. There are two types of uncleanliness (najasa): “strong” (ghaliza) and “light” (khafifa).

Strong najasa include wine, flowing blood, the flesh of a dead animal unlawful for consumption, and those things which emit from the human body and nullify one’s wudu, That is the state of grace, or cleanliness, which must precede prayer or the reading of the Qu’ran.

Things that spoil the wudu include flowing blood, semen, menses, postnatal blood and a full mouthful of  vomit.

Vomit that is less than a mouthful, or blood that does not flow, is considered pure
 
In order to avoid najasa, cows, sheep, goats, deer, moose, chickens, ducks, game birds, etc, must be Zabihah (ritually killed) in order to be suitable for consumption.

The procedure is quite simple, and can conducted by any godly person of The Book, Muslim or not. The animal should be put down on the ground and its throat should be slit with a very sharp knife to make sure that the main blood vessels are cut. While cutting, (without severing), the person must pronounce the name of Allah or recite a blessing which contains the name of Allah, such as “Bismillah Allah-u-Akbar.”

They say that when the women and children of the British garrison at Cawnpore were to be murdered and packed down the well during the great Indian Mutiny, the Sepoy revolutionaries called for men who were familiar with the Halal rite.

I think there are things we don’t fully understand in this. I would have to talk to someone learned in the Book to appreciate the nuance of the murder.

It seems to be happening on a lot of levels. There is subtlety in this savagery.

Or perhaps it is not important to understand it at all.

Perhaps it is enough to know we are dealing with true believers on all sides.

That meets my criteria for strong najasa.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra