A macabre true-life story and its roots in the Religion of Peace.

Is every bizarre and/or savage anecdote committed by Muslims related to Islam? Consider the following story of a man who “decapitated” the penis of his wife’s alleged rapist before ordering her to prepare it for their dinner:

[T]he bizarre tale begins in September, on the wedding night of 30-year-old Rudi Efendi and his new bride, Nuriah, in the Indonesian province of Lampung. When Efendi discovered that Nuriah was not a virgin, he demanded an explanation—and was told that she had been sexually assaulted by a man she dated.

Efendi ordered his wife to contact the alleged rapist and set up a meeting. But when the ex arrived, he found only Efendi, who proceeded to stab him to death and set him on fire—first taking care to chop off and collect his man parts.

“I was so outraged,” Efendi told reporters last month, that the only way “to cure my heartache” was to eat the victim’s genitals—which he ordered his 20-year-old wife to cook for him. He also insisted that she sit down and eat along with him.

Although the man who did this is of Muslim background (as evinced by his name and Indonesia’s status as the world’s most populous Muslim nation), one would normally conclude that such behavior—if not the killing and burning, then surely the penis eating—has nothing to do with Islam.

Yet there is that curious statement that he made: mutilating his enemy and eating his genitalia was the only way “to cure my heartache.”

As it happens, utterly mutilating and humiliating one’s enemy as a way to “heal one’s heart” is derived straight from Koran 9:14-15. “Fight them, Allah will punish them by your hands and bring them to disgrace, and assist you against them and heal the hearts of a believing people, and remove the rage of their hearts.”

To understand the significance of any passage from the Koran, one must turn to the _sira_ and _hadith_—the biography and anecdotes of Muhammad, respectively—for context.

Koran 9:14-15 deals with the mockery, murder, and mutilation of ‘Amr bin Hisham, a pagan Arab chieftain dubbed “Abu Jahl” (“Father of Ignorance”) by Muhammad for his staunch opposition to Islam.

After ‘Amr was mortally wounded during the Battle of Badr, Abdullah ibn Mas‘ud, a close companion of Muhammad, saw the “infidel” chieftain collapsed on the ground and went to him. Among other abuses, Muhammad’s friend grabbed and pulled ‘Amr’s beard and stood on the dying man’s chest.

According to _Al-Bidaya wa Al-Nihaya_ (“The Beginning and the End”), Ibn Kathir’s authoritative history of Islam, (and a controversial staple at Al Azhar University): “After that, he [Abdullah] slit his [‘Amr’s] head off and bore it till he placed it between the hands of the Prophet. Thus did Allah heal the hearts of the believers with it (emphasis added).”

Moreover, according to al-Alusi’s tafsir, or exegesis of Koran 9: 15-16, Abdullah dragged the decapitated head on the ground with a rope on his way to Muhammad: “Then [the angel] Gabriel, peace be upon him, came laughing and saying, ‘O prophet, you got an ear and an ear—and the head between for a bonus!’”

The logic here is that the only way for wronged and thus infuriated Muslims to regain their composure is that they see their enemies utterly crushed—mutilated, humiliated, and decapitated. Then their enraged hearts can be at ease and “healed”:

Fight them, Allah will punish them by your hands and bring them to disgrace, and assist you against them and heal the hearts of a believing people, and remove the rage of their hearts (Koran 9:14-15).

How much of this passage and its exegeses informed the actions of the wronged Indonesian man who utterly crushed—mutilated, humiliated, and decapitated (at least the private member of) his enemy, only to justify his actions by telling reporters that “the only way ‘to cure my heartache’ was to eat the victim’s genitals”?

Even if one concludes that the parallels are purely coincidental, the fact remains: other modern day Muslims refer to this passage to justify the gory mutilation of their enemies.

For example, the Islamic State published several pictures of slaughtered, beheaded, and mutilated “infidels,” with the caption “healing for hearts” written in the verbatim Arabic that appears in Koran 9:14-15 (see Arabic caption in bottom left hand corner of picture below).

Based, then, on the treatment of ‘Amr bin Hisham as recorded in Islam’s core texts—Koran, hadith, sira, and tafsirs—all sadistic acts being carried out by the Islamic State and other Muslims were in fact committed by the earliest Muslims and all to the complete approval of Muhammad.

One wonders: If Muhammad (and apparently the “angel” Gabriel) found it humorous that ‘Amr’s head was hacked off, mutilated, and dragged in the dirt, would they object to a wronged husband who decapitates and devours the penis of his wife’s alleged rapist?

This question may be somewhat redundant to those knowledgeable of Islam’s arcane history—including that the prophet Muhammad reportedly insulted his enemies by telling them to “bite your father’s penis,” and early Muslim heroes cooked and devoured portions of their enemies.