In recent months, to general
horror, the Islamic State (in Iraq and Syria) has carried out many beheadings
and one immolation. So, too, have
others loosely or closely affiliated with it, most recently of 21 Egyptian
Christians in Libya. These events
have provoked significant debate and widespread condemnation on many
levels. Some have argued that
there is nothing Islamic in these actions despite the claim by the perpetrators
that theirs is the Islamic State.
Others have argued that whether these acts are Islamic or not they are
far from unique. American pilots,
we are reminded, burned Vietnamese soldiers and civilians to death with napalm
while white Americans tortured and immolated African-Americans by the thousands
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Unsurprisingly comparing
the Islamic State to the post-Reconstruction Confederacy is rhetorically satisfying
but not at all illuminating. How, the implicit argument proceeds, can you
criticize people for doing what your own forebears did in the not very distant
past? A comparison that could
provide insight is transformed into a mechanism of demoralization. The question that is worth asking is
precisely why should the leaders of the self-proclaimed Islamic State choose
this particular method of execution?
People can be killed by gunfire or exposure and the Islamic State has
used both. Why employ a method
that, like the butchery of animals, requires so intimate a connection between
executioner and victim? Like
lynching, it deploys practices and language that resonate positively and
negatively with a larger population and creates powerful emotional bonds among
both those who perform the acts and those who observe.
Pilots on bombing
raids famously have no connection to those they kill. Gunfire can be close but it is usually mechanical and quick. Lynching, like the recent executions,
required a particularly close physical connection between the murderer and the
victim. This was not a
technological necessity but a requirement for creating boundaries of fear and
loathing within and between communities.
The arguments swirling
around the terrifying executions carried out by members of the Islamic State
re-enact the conundrum of Christianity and lynching. Both now and in the past many Christians vigorously asserted
that there was nothing remotely Christian in lynching. And yet accounts of
lynching are clear: those who undertook it claimed they were acting in accord
with the needs of a Christian community and lynching’s most widely recognized
practice was a distorted version of Christianity’s central image: a man hanging
from a tree.
There have been many
explanations and excuses for lynching. Theodore Bilbo, who served Mississippi
as both governor and US Senator, advocated lynching as the spontaneous justice
of the white Anglo-Saxon men for the supposed misdeeds of African Americans. Toward the end of the 20th
century it became common in academic writing to explain lynching as a form of
terror undertaken largely for rational reasons. With the abolition of slavery and the necessity of ensuring
that African American labor remained cheap, lynching provided an inexpensive
method of terrifying African Americans into economic submission. Lynching was a crude but
effective way to ensure the social control necessary for the production of
agricultural commodities by unskilled labor in the American South just as
whipping, branding, and other forms of torture had in the antebellum period.
An economic
explanation is entirely plausible for much of the violence in the American
south between 1865 and 1955, but it leaves unexamined the specific form that the
violence took. Lynching was
accomplished with impunity but often with little publicity. A significant fraction however was the highly
publicized activity of an entire community. These lynchings were far from spontaneous. They were carried out in a particularly
orderly, even if emotionally highly-charged, fashion.
In 1998 the Harvard
sociologist Orlando Patterson published a provocative analysis of lynching in a
book titled Rituals of Blood. Patterson
recounts and accepts earlier explanations of lynching as a form of social
control highly responsive to the social, economic and
demographic features of the American South. Drawing on earlier work that classified four types of
lynching (small-scale terrorism, private grievances, semi-legal posses, and
community-wide mobs), Patterson proposed that 35-40 percent were what he termed
sacrificial killings. To
understand the meaning and cultural import of these lynchings, he argues, it is
necessary to see them as forms of human sacrifice. It was a practice that drew heavily on themes of Christian
devotion and was highly resonant within the Christian society in which it
occurred.
Reviewing the
anthropological literature on human sacrifice, Patterson notes that it has been
among humanity’s most sacred rituals and that it played a crucial role in consolidating
a compact of fellowship among the sacrificers. He proposes six defining characteristics of human sacrifice:
highly ritualized drama, performance in a sacred place, fire, the tethering of
the victim, the demonization (or sacralization) of the victim, the disposal of
the body. Patterson’s
characteristics are drawn from the anthropological literature but they also
respond to the particular features of American lynching in which victims were
typically hanged, then burned, and in which pieces of flesh and photographs
were often deployed as mementos or in the literal meaning of the word,
souvenirs.
The decapitations carried
out by the Islamic State are indeed quite similar to the kind of lynching
Patterson refers to as sacrificial killing. The immolation of Muadh Kasasbeh more completely mirrors
Patterson’s paradigm, but it also allows us to see that crucial elements of
contemporary human sacrifice are the creation of a particular set of ritual
elements performed in a ritual space sanctified by previous sacrifices, for
victims who are allegedly both evil and impure.
As in the post-Civil
War South, the Islamic State uses murder for many purposes. One such use is summary justice. There
are accounts and even videos of numbers of captive Iraqi or Syrian soldiers,
police, or simply men of military age being murdered by gunshots to the head. There are also accounts elsewhere of communal
summary justice that strongly resembles lynching. On June 15, 2013 writing in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Misry
al-Yawm, Islam Diyab reported that there had been 25 cases of accused criminals
being executed primarily in villages in the previous six months. These unfortunate men (whose guilt is
undetermined) were beaten to death and their bodies exhibited. Whatever agonies they suffered in the
final hours or minutes of their lives, however, were unrecorded and
unceremonious. Unconscionable as these murders were,
they were not carefully staged or professionally filmed.
The killing of foreign aid workers,
reporters, and now 21 Egyptian Christians as well as a Jordanian air force
officer is different precisely in the creation of a clear ritual which removes
the victim from everyday secular life and forces him to enter the realm of
sacrificial space. There is a
brief period in which the victim, invariably clothed in an orange jump suit, is
made to walk with his captors from a point of origin to where he will be killed. Once there the executioner makes a
short statement proclaiming the reason for the killing. The reason is not the criminal behavior by
the captive but an event in which he did not participate for which his death is
either retribution or expiation. With the exception of Kasasbeh the executioner then uses a
knife to cut the victim’s throat and there is a final scene of the head lying
on or next to the torso of the body.
Frequently the execution party shouts “God is Great” as the head is
severed. Nothing about these events is random. The prisoner never appears to display any emotion at
all—neither crying, screaming, or even attempting to escape from the blade. Recent news accounts of Kasasbeh’s death
indicate he was drugged but it is by no means clear if this is common.
These beheadings have
been compared to those of Saudi Arabia but they are clearly different. A filmed account of an execution in
Saudi Arabia shows a woman beseeching the executioner not to kill her as she
vainly thrashes on the ground and tries to escape. That execution itself takes place in what appears to be a
parking lot although many occur in city squares. Grisly, terrifying and inhumane as the execution is,
it is clearly not a ritual. It is
a messy and banal murder of a frightened woman who proclaims her
innocence. The filming itself,
like all images of executions in Saudi Arabia, was made surreptitiously and
like other public executions in Saudi Arabia the location assumes no sanctity
even if human blood is shed there.
Whatever the Saudi executions are meant to be, they are not intended to
create the heightened state in victim, executioner or observer of the rituals
being created by the Islamic State.
Nor is any record made to exhibit the power of the state.
These IS executions
are performed for the camera. The
executioner proclaims the rationale behind the event and places the ultimate
blame for the deaths on the presumed enemies of Islam—the United States, Britain,
Japan, Jordan, and most recently the Roman Church. Sometimes the victim makes a
confessional statement which is, again, not a confession of criminal behavior
but an indictment of a home government.
Such statements may be echoes of previous statements in which the
political authorities are accused of various moral failings, including a
refusal to rescue the soon-to-be-killed victim.
The rituals
surrounding the murders have developed over time. As Yuval Neria and his co-authors pointed out in a 2005
article in the journal Religion (“The
Al Qaeda 9/11 instructions: study in the construction of religious martyrdom”),
the murders committed by the hijackers on 9/11 were conceived as acts of
slaughter. Since the decapitation
of Daniel Pearl such acts have become more stylized, formally developed and
intended as public ritual. A state
that claims religious authority is carrying them out.
Here at least we can
see one aspect of these ritual murders that differs significantly from lynching
given the religious background of the murderers. Patterson notes that trees play a significant role because
Jesus was sacrificed on a wooden stake or cross. For American Christians therefore rituals engaging wood were
culturally relevant and meaningful.
Although the Qur’an mentions crucifixion as a punishment for certain
crimes, the practice has little contemporary resonance in Islamic thought or
practice.
What does have
enormous religious significance for Muslims and Jews alike, however, is ritual
slaughter as a form of sacrifice.
For Muslims and Jews (unlike Christians), flesh is only acceptable as
food if the animal has been slaughtered in an appropriate way: by rapidly
slitting the throat. It is this
particular form of slaughter that makes an animal ritually available for
consumption. There are other rules: the head is not severed until the animal is
dead; generally the animal should not see the knife; and the animal should not
be aware that it is about to die.
Lynching was an obscene parody of the sacrifice that Christians believe
lies at the heart of their religion; the decapitations by the Islamic State are
also a parody of the daily slaughter of animals for human consumption. Does it also
address something at the heart of the religion as well? It does.
The “binding of Isaac”
is well-known to Jews and Christians from the Torah. The same story appears more briefly in the Qur’an where it
may also refer to Ishmael rather than Isaac. The crucial point is that Abraham is initially commanded to
slaughter his son. Abraham agrees
but ultimately is relieved by God of this task after which human sacrifice
ceases to be a religious practice.
The rituals surrounding the slaughter of animals for food retain a link,
by analogy, to older practices of animal sacrifice. The Arabic verb (dhabaha)
deployed in the Qur’an is still used for butchering of animals.
Why, if this form of
execution is a form of human sacrifice, has it become so popular with people
who ostensibly (as was the case with American whites in the south) do not
believe in it? These events have
been described as advertisements that seek to attract more recruits to the
Islamic State as well as attempts to terrorize the local population. Both of these may well be true, but
there are, it seems to me, other aspects as well. First, these executions have certainly terrorized foreign
aid workers and reporters who now give areas of Syria and Iraq a wide
berth.
Second, and far more important,
they strengthen the sense of community of those who participate in them. Patterson argued that human sacrifice,
like enslavement, is something done to outsiders. Slaughtering people quite literally transforms them into
animals. By deliberately slitting
the throats of their victims, the agents of the Islamic State are transforming
them into objects void of moral standing.
The murders themselves transgress established Islamic (and Jewish) norms
of animal slaughter. These
require the butcher to instantly sever the arteries so that the victim feels no
pain and has no awareness of imminent death. Unlike the national community or the
community of Muslims or of humanity, the community of the Islamic State is not
defined by common human form, good works, language, or even nominally shared
religion. It is defined only
by loyalty to the state and its own ideology.
Like lynchings or indeed any form
of highly ritualized killings they transform observers into participants who
have engaged in behavior that is at once highly charged emotionally and widely
understood elsewhere as criminal.
There is, it appears, no way to go backward for those who have
undertaken such rituals which are, like lynchings in the American South,
terrifying parodies of sacred behavior.
That the concepts animating this behavior appear, to outsiders, as
something of a pastiche or mash-up of historical events, religious texts, and
apocalyptic cinema does not make them any less useful as tools for
obedience. To the contrary, those
who have adopted such practices and the beliefs that legitimate them have cut
off any path back to the societies they have left behind.
Third, the making of the videos has
the effect of turning viewers into potential members of the community of ritual
killers. No one in the video,
obviously, stands up to stop it and those who watch cannot should they wish to.
This is therefore, for the moment
at least, a literally monstrous second coming of the Islamic state in which, as
William Butler Yeats wrote in a different context nearly 100 years ago, “the
best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” It is a moment in which the
participants on the ground become members of a community bonded by the ritual
shedding of blood while the passivity of viewers reinforces feelings of fear,
anger and disorientation.
NOTE: "Sacrificing Humans" is co-published by Nisralnasr and Jadaliyya.
