“There’s really no such thing as just Sharia, it’s not one monolithic Continuum – Sharia is understood in thousands of different ways over the 1,500 years in which multiple and competing schools of law have tried to construct some kind of civic penal and family law code that would abide by Islamic values and principles, it’s understood in many different ways…” — Reza Aslan
Not really: Muhammad said: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him” (Bukhari 9.84.57). The death penalty for apostasy is part of Islamic law according to all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence.
Some might arguing that fighting for Assad doesn’t make these soldiers apostates according to Islamic law, but since Assad is an Alawite, the jihadists have a strong case: Islamic law forbids a Muslim to obey an Infidel ruler who is supposedly impeding Islam in some way. In any case, not in dispute is the death penalty for apostasy itself, however much Islamic spokemen in the West disingenuously deny it.
“Islamist rebels execute 11 Syrian soldiers for ‘massacres,'” from Reuters, May 16 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
BEIRUT: Fighters of the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front in Syria executed 11 men they accused of taking part in massacres by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, a video published on Thursday showed.
A man whose face was covered in a black balaclava shot each man in the back of the head as they kneeled, blindfolded and lined up in a row in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor.
“The sharia court for the eastern region in Deir al-Zor has sentenced to death these apostate soldiers that committed massacres against our brothers and families in Syria,” the executioner said on the video.
Islamist militants with black flags shouted “God is great” as each man was shot. The executioner returned to some victims, firing more bullets into them to make sure they were dead.
The video is the second in two days to show such executions by fighters who say they are from Al-Qaeda-linked groups.
A video posted online on Wednesday from the northern province of Raqqa, which is controlled by Islamist rebels, showed three blindfolded men sitting on the curb of a central roundabout before being shot in the head with a pistol.
A man speaking in the video said the executions were revenge for killings in the coastal town of Banias two weeks ago. Photos and videos of the alleged Banias massacre showed dozens of mutilated bodies, many of them children, lying in the streets.
Note that here again we see Islamic jihadists explain their killings as revenge. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev claimed that his Boston jihad murders were revenge; Islamic jihadists who fired mortars into Israel claimed they were doing it for revenge as well. This is because Islamic supremacists are apparently incapable of ever taking responsibility for anything they do; it’s always someone else’s fault. But more importantly, it’s because in the absence of a caliph, the only jihad that is permissible according to Islamic law is defensive. Only the caliph, according to Sunni Muslim jurisprudence, can lawfully wage offensive jihad against non-Muslim states. So every jihad until the caliphate is restored has to be cast as defensive. This leads the jihadists to retail endless lists of grievances and alleged Infidel atrocities they’re supposedly avenging, and foolish non-Muslim analysts to think that if they just redress the grievances and throw money at the jihadis, the jihad will go away. It won’t. There will just be new grievances.