Brutality must not be answered with brutality

The world's top Sunni religious authority shocked many when he pronounced on the brutality of the Islamic State group.

Al-Azhar University's grand imam, Ahmed al-Tayyeb, said that members of IS who burned a Jordanian pilot to death should be beheaded, crucified or have their limbs cut off.

Tayyeb's argument stems from the literal interpretation of a divine pronouncement dating back 14 centuries:

Killing people in the name of religion defies logic. It is a manifestation of the inability of some to be a part of humanity.

"Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against God and His Messenger... is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment."

But this is a terrible equation that only suggests to the world that Sunni Muslims, extremist or moderate, are as brutal as one another: There is either the Islamic State, or there is al-Azhar.

It is not logical for scholars to argue that we should emulate what the Prophet Muhammad may have done in the early days, in self-defence, when his followers were few and weak.

Rather, they need to send a message of mercy from the highest pulpit and declare an end to killing, mutilation, and terror in the name of religion.

We must ask, what god would accept his name to be invoked to create all these charred bodies, limbs, and physical torture?

Which god would accept for children and women to be slaughtered for his sake?

What we need is a collective effort to emerge from the caves of primitive vengeance to humanity, instead of competing over the most terrible ways to kill.

Killing people in the name of religion defies logic. It is a manifestation of the inability of some to be a part, rather than an island, of humanity.

This is an edited translation of the original Arabic.