Rights of Prisoners of War

Islam declared human life sacred and issued strict commands for its respect, preservation and protection. Islam regulated the conduct of armed conflict and subjected it to certain defined legal norms in a manner that had never happened in history particularly in the pre-Islamic Arabia. Based on holy Quran and Prophetic traditions and other permissible methods the Muslim jurists accumulated the wealth of precedent to regulate the warfare at a time when its contemporaries paid no heed to these rules. Humanitarian considerations were built into the concept of permissible war itself. Under Islamic humanitarian law, women, children, and other non-combatants were recognized as a separate category of persons entitled to various degrees of immunity from attack, a development which may be seen as the birth of the “civilian. This book highlight that the Islam teaching resolved the problem of how prisoners of war were to be treated in most enlightened fashion in an era when prisoners could be executed at will.