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On the face of it, Muhammad Sa’ad Al-Beshi has got it made. A proud father of seven and already a grandfather at 42 years old, he earns a respectable salary from the Saudi government. He is highly acclaimed and professionally fulfilled. He maintains a warm relationship with his family, leads a good social life and has a son ready to follow in his footsteps. However you look at it, Al-Beshi is an all-round success story.
And still, not many people would want to trade places with him.
Al-Beshi is the chief executioner of Saudi Arabia. While the world witnesses the stomach-churning beheadings of hostages in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, such as American citizens Nick Berg and Paul Marshall Johnson, Al-Beshi, far from being labeled a terrorist, sometimes decapitates as many as seven people a day.
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Muhammad Sa’ad Al-Beshi (Arab News)
“I sleep very well,” Al-Beshi said in an interview with the Saudi daily Okaz, adding that his social life and family ties have suffered no drawbacks on account of his unusual profession. Al-Beshi is paid per killing and the government also provides him with the execution tool – the sword – worth around $5,300.
Viewers were aghast when Islamist websites displayed the executions and severed heads of decapitated hostages, but few realize that in Saudi Arabia, beheading is a common and legitimate method of implementing the death penalty.
Saudi Arabia is one of the only countries that still practices beheadings as a method of capital punishment, according to Amnesty International, although there have been reports of similar-type executions in Yemen, Iran and in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s reign.
At least six people have been executed in Saudi Arabia since the beginning of 2004, Amnesty claims, including a woman from Sri Lanka who was reportedly executed on July 12.
Some of the crimes that warrant the death penalty in Saudi Arabia are robbery, apostasy (renunciation of one’s faith), drug trafficking, adultery and murder.
The fragmented figures available suggest that the number of beheadings in Saudi Arabia has dropped considerably over the past few years. According to Amnesty, at least 123 people were executed in Saudi Arabia in 2000, 79 in 2001, 48 in 2002 and at least 50 in 2003.
An Amnesty International spokeswoman said that to the best of their knowledge, in Saudi Arabia all those executed over the past four years were beheaded. Women in Saudi Arabia are allowed to be spared the sword and shot instead.
The numbers are roughly estimated and do not provide an accurate picture of the extent of beheadings in the kingdom, mainly due to the lack of transparency on the matter. Still, the little information there is suggests that executions, mostly beheadings, are losing popularity.
The recent beheadings of hostages in Saudi Arabia and Iraq have given rise to speculation that the method is rooted in Islam. However, the fact that the terror groups currently in the limelight are radical Islamists does not necessarily imply beheadings and Islam are intertwined.
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Nick Berg, before his decapitation by terrorists
Dr. Mawil Izzi Dien, a lecturer in Islamic studies at the University of Wales, Lampeter, said capital punishment is mentioned several times in the Quran, the holiest of Muslim scriptures, “but to the best of my knowledge,” he added, “beheadings are not mentioned in the Quran.”
In medieval times beheadings were common practice in many cultures. Izzi Dien said this was more a question of practicality than of ideology or legitimacy of action. The sword was the commonplace weapon at the time and gunfire had not yet been invented. Beheadings were swift, easy, convenient and widely practiced. In fact, two of Henry VIII’s six wives suffered an untimely death by decapitation.
While many countries in the world have abolished capital punishment completely or incorporated less gruesome methods of execution, Saudi Arabia has “not really entered into the civilized world,” said Dr. Hayat Alvi, an assistant professor in the political science department of the American University in Cairo. The kingdom has an anachronistic culture, she said, and many customs from the pre-Islamic era, before the seventh century, have prevailed and merged with post-Islamic culture. Saudis have not reconciled their beliefs and practices with the requirements of the modern world, she said.
Saudi Arabia is an extremely conservative theocracy and its national religious ideology is called Wahhabism, which is a strict, literal interpretation of Islamic law. Wahhabi interpretations are applied in many aspects of life in Saudi Arabia, including that of the penal system and capital punishment, Alvi said.
Yet Wahhabism does not represent mainstream Islam and is wholly rejected by other sects in Islam such as Shi’ism, Alvi stressed. “The majority of Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims in the world today completely oppose and reject the medieval practices of the sort of corporal and capital punishments that Saudi Arabia, the Taliban, and some obscure Islamic governments or groups have employed in their respective attempts at applying Islamic law (Shari’a) to their societies,” she said.
In the case of terrorists decapitating hostages, Alvi said that religion is “very misused” in terms of justifying their actions.
Beheadings practiced by terrorists do not necessarily stem from a Muslim ideology, she implied, but rather convey a message of political anguish. “There is a lot of discontent within the kingdom,” Alvi said, which is manifest in both radical Al-Qa’ida circles or as a general objection by the public to the American intervention in the region.
Some groups, she said, are expressing their discontent by abducting people, especially Westerners, and beheading them. Their message is not only disagreement with the American involvement in the region, she said, but also with the American connection with the Saudi ruling class.
Though beheadings bear a more cultural and historical fingerprint than a religious one, it may be no coincidence that the custom has prevailed in a strictly Muslim country such as Saudi Arabia.
An important notion in Islamic law is that a culprit should be severely punished so that society can look and learn from it, Izzi Dien said.
In this case, beheadings are not just an application of a punishment but also an instrument of deterrence, intended to ultimately benefit society as a whole and prevent the crime from recurring.
The beheadings are usually carried out in public. Al-Beshi, the executioner, said he was nervous as many people were watching his first beheading, but he has since overcome stage fright.
“The idea of Islam is that society should be protected from the individual culprit, even if it means making an error and even if it may look gruesome,” Izzi Dien said.
Clearly, human rights groups maintain that other methods of execution are no less painful, brutal or pointless than beheadings. Many believe that modern execution methods serve the interests of the executioner’s conscience, since the culprit’s suffering is less visible.
According to Amnesty International, nearly all countries in the Middle East retain the death penalty either by law or in practice. Turkey recently abolished the death penalty for ordinary crimes only. Israel also falls under this category and last implemented the death penalty in 1962 when it hanged convicted Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann.