February 17, 2015 | Policy Brief

Qatari Fatwa Justified Burning of Jordanian Pilot

February 17, 2015 | Policy Brief

Qatari Fatwa Justified Burning of Jordanian Pilot

Qatar may be an active participant in the coalition campaign against the Islamic State (IS), but it also appears have provided religious justification for one of the Islamic State’s most brutal atrocities to date: the recent immolation of Jordanian pilot Moaz Kasasbeh.

In 2006 and 2009, Islamic legal experts at the Fatwa Center, an institution run by Qatar’s Ministry of Endowments and Islamic affairs, issued Islamic legal rulings (fatwas) that condoned the act of burning individuals to death and for torture as a form of punishment. These rulings, along with many others, were housed at the Fatwa Center’s online portal: IslamWeb. Shortly after IS burned Kasasbeh to death last month, as news outlets throughout the Middle East reported, the two fatwas were removed from the IslamWeb site.

One of the two Qatari fatwas may have served as a model for the Islamic State’s own proclamation on burning. Both the 2006 Qatari fatwa and the IS fatwa utilize the same legal interpretations and justifications, even citing the same hadiths (prophetic sayings) to buttress their claims.

Screenshots of the 2006 Qatari fatwa indicate that the Center’s legal experts responsible for this ruling were directly supervised by “Dr. Abdallah al-Faqih.” Al-Faqih was a prominent legal expert at the Qatari Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs who ran its Fatwa Center for several years starting in at least 2005.

In other words, the Qatari fatwas that justify the burning to death of an individual as compatible with Islamic law (shari’a) were state-sponsored. Unless powerful regional actors like Qatar do more to stem the flow of incitement from their own backyards, Islamic extremist ideologies will continue to flourish throughout the region. Oren Adaki is a research analyst and Arabic specialist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where David Andrew Weinberg is a senior fellow.

Issues:

Jordan