They’re following in the footsteps of the Romans, the French revolutionaries, and Mohammed himself.
There are many ways to kill a human being, but few are as flamboyant as beheading. In his Civil Wars, for instance, the Roman historian Appian recounts the beheading of Gaius Trebonius — and, more important, its aftermath:
Since Trebonius had participated in the murder of Caesar by detaining Antony in conversation at the door of the senate-house while the others killed him, the soldiers and camp-followers fell upon the rest of his body with fury and treated it with every kind of indignity. They rolled his head from one to another in sport along the city pavements like a ball till it was completely crushed.
The Romans were a brutal folk, but in the annals of human-on-human violence, similar incidents are not uncommon. There is John the Baptist’s head on Herod’s platter, and Blackbeard’s head roped to Maynard’s bowsprit. The guillotine may have purported to make beheading humane, but les révolutionnaires still rejoiced in the blood of Marie Antoinette.
Still, although one can find state-sanctioned beheadings in “civilized” nations into the 20th century — France last employed the guillotine in 1939 — beheading has assumed a much-deserved taboo. Call it moral progress if you like: In the West, we no longer accept as permissible rending a human being in twain.
Which is what Islamic State jihadists were counting on when they beheaded American journalist James Foley this week. Foley was kidnapped in Syria in 2012, and little was known of his whereabouts until the appearance of a video purporting to show his decapitation. The video is reminiscent of others we have seen in recent years: The murders of Daniel Pearl in 2002, and Nick Berg and Paul Marshall Johnson Jr. in 2004, all American citizens, were similarly broadcast.
Scholars of Islam debate whether the Koran actually sanctions beheading. Whether it does or not, what is clear is that sword-wielding jihadists of the Islamic State type believe that it does. And, the word of Allah aside, Islamic history provides plenty of precedent. In the late 19th century, Mahdists — Islamic millenarians — beheaded foes in British-administered Sudan. Nearly a millennium before, the Muslim conqueror Yusuf ibn Tashfin and his troops cut off the heads of the 24,000 Castilians they had killed in the Battle of Sagrajas in 1086, and then they piled up the rest of the bodies “to make a sort of minaret for the muezzins who, standing on the piles of headless cadavers, sang the praises of Allah,” wrote historian Paul Fregosi. Tashfin then sent packages of heads to every major city in North Africa and Spain. But the practice of beheading goes further back, to the Prophet Muhammad himself, who reportedly ordered the execution of 700 Jewish men in Medina on charges of conspiring against him.