Jihad and Terrorism .......
In a case of “wrong or misleading heading”, a survey on suicide-bombing by a Karachi Urdu newspaper has confused the press. It has wrongly concluded that our leading ulema have renounced suicide-bombing. This is what an online academic magazine has concluded: “Clerics from all schools of thought have declared suicide attacks un-Islamic and forbidden them under the Sharia; they said killing a non-Muslim without a legitimate cause was against the Islamic way of life”.
But the truth is that the meaning of what these clerics said is quite different from that which has been attributed to them. For instance, Maulana Amir Hamza of Jamaatud Dawa is quoted as saying that a suicide attack is an act of terrorism and that someone who kills himself to kill others also accounts for the sins of those killed. But he also added (found on website) that “no suicide attack is justified in a country which has Islam as the state religion, ruled by a Muslim ruler and is not under occupation by infidels”. This means that Iraq is excluded from this definition because it is occupied by infidels. In other words, Maulana Hamza would justify suicide bombing in Iraq against the occupying infidel.
This also means that suicide-bombing is not okay in Pakistan — because Islam is the state religion, the country is not occupied by infidels and General Musharraf is a Muslim ruler — but okay in a non-Muslim country like the United Kingdom, for instance. The scholar is clearly worried about Muslim suicide-bombers killing innocent Muslims. But what may become moot at any time is whether even Pakistan can qualify as an Islamic state and whether General Musharraf can be denounced as a bad Muslim for allying with an infidel like the USA.
The second cleric included in the survey is Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, formerly of the JUI, who actually allows suicide-bombing while alluding to Palestine!
Then there is a former minister and Sunni cleric, Dr Mehmood Ahmad Ghazi, who says that suicide-bombing is wrong but he too imposes the condition of the Islamic state, implying that it may be okay to kill innocent people in a non-Muslim state. Dr Anis of Jama’at-e Islami says he can’t be sure if suicide-bombing is wrong, but he too refers to Palestine without noting that Al Fatah condemns suicide-bombing while Hamas actually does it.
Our morose-looking Barelvi mufti, Munibur Rehman, says nothing new, as expected, but also maintains that suicide bombing in an Islamic state is not legitimate. This implies that one may suicide-bomb innocent non-Muslims and even target a non-Muslim state with impunity. Thank God, the shia scholar, Allama Qamber Abbas Naqvi, says that even a non-Muslim can’t be killed in this manner.
Therefore a re-reading of the views of these gentlemen leads to the conclusion that they have outlawed suicide-bombing only in very specific conditions and not generally at all.
In fact our clerics have confirmed that Al Qaeda, which began the trend on 9/11, can go on doing it. It is not clear if killing the Shias in Iraq is wrong because the ulema did not explain if they thought Iraq was being ruled by Muslims. It is quite possible that they may eventually disqualify Iraq as an Islamic state because the Americans are in occupation there. All of them cunningly ducked the question whether Al Qaeda’s killing of the Shias of Iraq — and the killing of innocent Sunnis by thugs like Muqtada al Sadr — was okay.
Tragically, they all allowed suicide, expressly forbidden by the Quran, under the condition of jihad. They also abstained from explaining what jihad was: war initiated by the Islamic state or by private parties posing as pious entities pursuing amr and nahi? In short, was jihad an ‘official’ function or a private one? They also did not adjudicate the global trend of dubbing private jihad as terrorism. Can the Muslims pursue private wars in the face of international law that recognises legitimate war only when it is conducted by a state?
What were the clerics driving at? If they wanted to outlaw suicide-bombing in Pakistan, why did they refer to Palestine where suicide-bombing is done to kill innocent people as legitimate collateral damage? The survey is the most hair-brained piece of work done by a publication whose rightwing religious views are well known. The problem really is that we are killing ourselves through suicide-bombers and the bombers are treated as martyrs on the videocassettes they leave behind.
The clerics should have touched on the trend of killing the Shias through suicide-bombing. The truth is that most of the casualties of suicide-bombing in Pakistan have been innocent men, women and children of the Shia community. Why weren’t the clerics interested in outlawing the fatwas of apostatisation (takfir)? It is the fatwa of takfir under which the Shias and at times the Barelvis are killed. The suicide boy who killed Allama Hasan Turabi last year said on film that he was going to Paradise for his deed!
Above all, our clerics have failed to rise to the level of common humanity by not condemning (barring the Shia scholar) suicide-bombing that kills innocent non-Muslims in non-Muslim states. The faith they pretend to profess believes in justice no matter how tough the circumstances. The Prophet (PBUH) did not exempt himself from humanity when he was besieged and endangered by his non-Muslim enemies. *
Love-hating the Americans
Another funny survey done by an American university has found that 86 percent of Pakistanis believe that terrorist attacks on civilians are never justified, while only 46 percent of Americans hold the same view. As many as 24 percent of the Americans say that such attacks are “sometimes justified”. At the same time, public opinion surveys in the United States and Europe show that nearly half of Westerners associate Islam with violence and Muslims with terrorism. There is more surprise in store. More than 20 surveys in Muslim countries find that even those who support terrorist attacks and Osama Bin Laden approve of the specific American actions in their own countries. Seventy percent of Bin Laden supporters in Indonesia and 79 percent in Pakistan said they thought more favourably of the United States as a result of American humanitarian assistance in their countries.
What should the world make of this? Already the Muslims love to hate America but love to live there above all other countries; and will happily vacate their own countries if invited to settle in America. With this kind of internal split when they live in the West their cleft personality sticks out a mile. This refers to only those Muslims who have stopped integrating in the West as expats. Other religious groups have no problem living in the West. Sympathy for Osama bin Laden is a part of this strange psychological bisection, even though the terrorist has clearly inflicted more suffering on Muslims than on the Christians and Jews he had targeted. *
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