Just when you thought Islam couldn’t be more repellent.

Copulating with Corpses: The Taliban Exposed
The necrophilic inclinations of Afghanistan’s new masters.

According to an August 22 report, a female Afghan refugee to India just “revealed that the Taliban has sex with dead bodies.” While discussing how the terrorist group thrives on raping women, she asserted that “They rape dead bodies too. They don’t care whether the person is dead or alive… Can you imagine this?”

The report continues: “The practice of having sex with corpses is called necrophilia. She revealed that Taliban either picked up [dead?] women or shot them. Muskan revealed that a woman was picked up by the Taliban only yesterday.”

What to make of this macabre revelation? No doubt, many will point to it as “proof” that the Taliban’s Islam was, as the apologists of Islam had long claimed, always skin deep—a veneer to legitimize their otherwise illegitimate and corrupt rule. After all, if they were “students [of Islam]”—the very definition of taliban—they more than the average Afghan would know that Islam forbids such a disgusting practice.  Right?

Alas, the opposite is true.  Just as pedophilia with boys (Afghanistan’s bacha bazi or “dancing boys”) has Islamic backing, so too does necrophilia, by way of Muslim scriptures, commentaries, and fatwas (Islamic decrees).

It begins, as usual, with the prophet of Islam: Muhammad. According to a bizarre hadith (a recorded tradition concerning his sayings and doings) that exists in six of Islam’s classical reference texts (including the important Kanz al-‘Umal  and al-Hujja fi Biyan al-Mahujja), Muhammad once took off his shirt, placed it on a dead woman, and then descended into her grave to “lay with her.”

As they hurled dirt atop the corpse and Muhammad, the grave diggers exclaimed, “O Prophet, we see you doing a thing you never did with anyone else,” to which he responded: “I dressed her in my shirt so that she may be dressed in heavenly robes, and I lay with her in her grave so that the pressures of the grave [also known as Islam’s torments of the grave] may be alleviated from her.”

One can interpret this, and there certainly is no reason to insist that Muhammad was actually copulating with the corpse. There are, however, some hurdles:

First, the two Arabic words (ataja‘ ma‘ha اضطجع معها) which I translate above as “lay with her,” are also used in Arabic to mean “intercourse.” This is similar to the English idiom, “to lay with her,” which can literally mean nothing more than laying down with a woman, but often is an indirect reference to sex. More than a few Muslim clerics have made this linguistic observation.

Second, Sunni Islam’s four orthodox schools of jurisprudence (or madhahib al- fiqh)—namely, al-Hanafi, al-Hanbali, al-Maliki, and al-Shafi‘i—implicitly permit necrophilia. None of them actually addresses it on its own; rather, they give it a nod whenever it comes up in the context of other topics. Thus, in the section on adultery, the Maliki teaching is that “If a husband enters his dead wife—any which way, from front or behind—there is no penalty for him” (Sharh Mukhtasar al-Khalil fi al-fiqh al-Maliki).

Regardless of all the above, it is not for the non-Muslim—certainly not for me—to tell Muslims what their texts are really saying and teaching. That is the job of their ulema: scholars and clerics devoted to learning the deep truths of Islam. Thus, the real question remains: do modern day ulema permit necrophilia?

The lamentable answer is yes. For instance, in 2011 a leading Moroccan cleric and founding member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, Sheikh Abdul Bari Zamzami, issued a fatwa permitting the Muslim husband to copulate with his dead wife. He prefaced his decree by saying that, although he does not necessarily approve of this act, it is not for him to ban what Islam permits. As proof, he cited the aforementioned rulings of Islam’s schools of jurisprudence.

Yeah, let’s bring thousands MORE of these twisted troglodytes on over to the States for a little more o’ that Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy stuff. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? More at the link, for those who are stronger of stomach than I.