Religious scholar denounces IS acts

Manama

There is a consensus (ijma) between the Muslim jurists and scholars that the rape of a captive girl is not allowed in Islam under any circumstances, says religious scholar Shaikh Abu Saad.

He was speaking to the DT News in the backdrop of a Yazidi girl, Zeinat’s special interview with CNN in which she said, “Islamic State claims the Quran justifies taking non-Muslim women and girls captive, and permits their rape.” 

Zeinat also said that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi raped Kayla Mueller, the American humanitarian aid worker and threatened Zeinat and other girls that they too would be compelled for sex with him. He had reportedly taken Zeinat and eight other girls from a slave market to his home in Raqqa, Syria where he used to keep them like concubines.

The religious scholar said that Islam does not permit “what Baghdadi did to the captive girls.” He said that it had nothing to do with Islam. “It is total ignorance and rubbish. Concubinage has become obsolete with the abolition of slavery,” he added.

He said that slavery was an idea of the older days of ignorance. Islam adopted an evolutionary approach to abolish it and asked the Muslims to free their slaves in the form of “Kaffarat”. 

“It is a belief that whoever frees a slave will go to paradise. And when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, abolishing slavery, the Muslims jurists welcomed it and recognized it.”

“No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms,” states the UN declaration.

IS militants have allegedly kidnapped, raped, tortured and massacred thousands of Yazidis and the UN has accused them of committing genocide against Yazidis.