I heard or read that Israel is dousing the bodies of terrorists in pig’s blood in order to prevent future attacks. Apparently, Muslims believe that anyone with pig’s blood on their skin prior to burial will not be allowed in to heaven. I also heard that the Russians are doing something similar (perhaps wrapping bodies with pig entrails?) with the Chechens.
Can anyone provide a cite that corroborates this? I think that it’s a great idea if it works. But is anyone really doing it, and does it have any effect?
According to this Snopes article, this practice was first ascribed to General John J. Pershing, in his campaign against rebels in the Philippines in 1909.
They also write: “Palestinian Muslims reacted with scorn to the idea, saying the soul went to paradise and was unaffected by any taint to the body. The keys to heaven are not in the hands of settlers,” said Sheikh Hassan Youssef, for Hamas, whose military wing has sent dozens of suicide bombers into Israel. Islamic reference books say the body of a martyr who dies for the faith is so pure that it does not need to be washed before burial, in contrast to the usual Muslim practice."
They list the validity of this report as undetermined as of January 2002.
I’d really like to know where you heard this. In this election year, there’s a lot of hate-fueled nonsense out there. Desecrating the dead is just so off the chart that it’s nearly guaranteed to be a lie. Without getting entirely carried away, I’d like to say I doubt this stuff happened. :dubious:
Forgive me, but I just can’t remember. I’m certainly not making it up. In any case, once someone is dead, rational people realize that what’s left is just a body. It’s no longer life, and thus if it prevents others from getting hurt, why not do it?
The “Pershing” story is all over the Internet, offered as a “suggestion” for how to deal with terrorists. It’s not too big a jump from “here’s what we should do” to “here’s what they’re doing”.
What bodies?
These are suicide bombers, who carry enough explosives under their clothes to blow up all the innocent people around them and the building they’re in. There won’t be enough of their body left to put in a shoebox!
So this seems pretty obviously false from the get-go.
I think the OP needs to be a bit less gullible about things that he’s “heard or read”.
This has been discussed before and as far as anyone can determine it has no validity. While such a folk belief may exist somewhere, it is not part of Muslim canon that a dead body annointed with pig blood by an enemy would bar a otherwise merited trip to heaven. If that worked it would have been seized upon millenia ago as a wartime tactic.
The terrorist Mohamed Atta (may he burn in hell) had some fairly silly wishes in his will, which seems to indicate he at least believed that how his body was handled in some way effected you in the afterlife. e.g. no pregnant women, no menustrating women - actually make that no women of any kind what so ever. Also, for some strange reason, he had some strict notions on how is body should be handled and washed - as if there was gonna be anything left?
Yeah, like someone said, you have to work at defiling an atomized corpse.
There are in fact proscribed funeral rites in Islam, but far as I know it just translates into paying the proper respect to the deceased. I haven’t seen it written anywhere that failing to perform them properly or even at all materially alters the afterlife experience in any way.
But again, there is no accounting for folk beliefs. All sorts of weird things can get picked up as cultural accretions and Islam has been far from immune from acquiring them.
For the record, I had only seen the OP before I wrote my reply. A series of unrelated things happened in that interval, and I was distracted :smack: from the first two posts.
FTR, I did hear a news story about this a few months ago, specifically there were considerations of putting pork on buses to ward off suicide bombers. I believe the person who suggested it was viewed as a bit, um, eccentric though. As far as I know, it hasn’t been done so far. Unfortunately, I’ve searched all over, but I can’t find the story again, so maybe it was never true and retracted or something.
Just how likely is it that someone who is enough of a zealot that he can look away from the enormity of the crime (and the Moslem ban on suicide) is going to be deterred by the thought of what happens to his body afterwards ?
These are people who in their minds turn the crime of blowing up yourself and a bunch of innocents into a religious act, I’m sure they’ll be able to rationalize away the presence of pork. Religious people generally expect to be judged on their own acts - what the infidel barbarians do to the body of a self-declared martyr - who is by definition pretty much powerless to prevent it - is between the barbarians and Allah.
It sounds like a complete misunderstanding of the martyr mindset.
