In my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and elsewhere I point out how Islamic legal scholars have justified terrorism, and how jihadists use the Qur'an and Sunnah to recruit and motivate terrorists. For this I have been called "Islamophobic," whatever that means, and many mainstream media outlets on both the Left and the Right will not discuss the book. However, the fact that what I am saying is true is underscored by articles like this one, in which a Kuwaiti Muslim says the same things I have been saying. Will the mainstream media listen to him?
Not that what Al-Nabulsi says is perfect -- but it is extremely revealing. From MEMRI, with thanks to Scaramouche:
In an article in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyasa, Dr. Shaker Al-Nabulsi, a Jordanian intellectual who resides in the U.S., asks why Islamic religious scholars haven't issued a fatwa against bin Laden. [1] The following are excerpts:Terrorism in the Arab World Has Been Encouraged by Islamic Legal Scholars
"The First International Islamic Conference, [that convened] in Amman, Jordan in July 2005, was attended by a large group of Islamic legal scholars and clerics… The conference published a series of routine recommendations whose content has already been put forward at many other such events. The recommendations condemned the blind violence in the name of Islam [that exists] in a number of countries, and called for dialogue and coexistence among the followers of [Islam's] four schools of law and the various Islamic sects. Ultimately, these recommendations are insufficient. They do not point to the wound and do not heal the patient, because this conference lacks the power to implement the recommendations…
"Many of the clerics and the legal scholars who attended the First International Islamic Conference in Amman had themselves published fatwas that incited to murdering civilians, women, children, and the elderly, under the umbrella of 'religious Jihad.' Perhaps the reason for the intensification of terrorism in the Arab world, in the form to which we are witness today, was first and foremost the encouragement it received from Islamic legal scholars, under a mantle of religion that is in most cases false, hijacked, and defective.
If what these legal scholars are teaching is in fact a false, hijacked, and defective form of Islam, it is up to Al-Nabulsi and others of like mind to prove it. So far they have not done so.
If the legal scholars – who have encouraged terrorism by means of these vocal religious fatwas – were acting properly, they would be issuing a fatwa calling to kill bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Al-Zarqawi, and all Al-Qaeda leaders everywhere.
Note that even Al-Nabulsi doesn't seem to have a problem with the prospect of Muslim clerics calling for people to be killed. Even he takes for granted that Islam mandates the death of apostates.
Is It Right To Condemn The West For Its Aggression Against The East And Not To Condemn The Muslim Who Murders His Muslim Or Non-Muslim Brother?"The Al-Qaeda leaders have killed thousands of innocent people – Arabs and non-Arabs, children, women, and the elderly – who have nothing to do with the conflict in the Middle East… Is it [really the conflict that] prevents the legal scholars from issuing fatwas condemning these murderers and permitting killing them, and getting rid of their evil? Or is it that those legal scholars think it sufficient to condemn and to cite slogans, about tolerance, love, and cooperation, and other utopian slogans that in reality are not worth the ink used to write them and the considerable funds necessary to convene the festivals of religious exhibitionism that lack decisive resolutions…
"Doesn't the fact that to date not a single fatwa has been issued calling for killing bin Laden and the other Al-Qaeda leaders involved in terrorist operations in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt… prove that many of the legal scholars who claim to be opposed to the waves of terrorism actually embrace these terrorist operations and secretly welcome them?
Note that by specifying Saudi Arabia and Egypt he is objecting primarily to the killing of fellow Muslims, which is prohibited by Qur'an 4:92.
"Isn't it akin to catastrophe, disintegration, mental annihilation, misguidedness, the absence of human sensibility, religious blindness... for some of the legal scholars to treat terrorism with a double standard, all the while accusing the 'infidels' of treating terrorism with a double standard...?"Terrorism in Doha, for example, is prohibited, and sheikhs demonstrate to denounce and condemn it – while terrorism in Baghdad, Riyadh, Cairo, Sharm Al-Sheikh, Taba, and other places, is [considered] permitted and also restores the desecrated honor of the Islamic nation… Would it be right and fair to condemn the West for its aggression against the East and not to condemn the Muslim who murders his Muslim or non-Muslim brother who committed no crime?
Osama and others would dispute the idea that these non-Muslims they killed had in fact committed no crime. That is what Al-Nabulsi and others should address.
Al-Nabulsi's remarks are better than most, but what we expect now of Muslims is so little, that we are in danger of exaggeratedly praising that which is not so much a forthright condemnation of Jihad, and the entire Believer-Infidel division that runs through all of Islam, as it is a narrow attack on the failure to condemn attacks on fellow Muslims, or on "innocents who have nothing to do with the conflict in the Middle East." One doubts, for example, at Al-Nabulsi would object to attacks on Jews in or out of Israel, or that he would argue that the entire division of the universe between Believer and Infidel, dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb, is illegitimate.
And of course the aggression of Jihad, whether conducted through terrorism or other means, cannot be eliminated through appeals to Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, and al-Nabulsi must now it. The only way out is either to jettison altogether -- as fictions and false hair -- the Sunnah (i.e., Hadith and Sira), and perform some interpretive prestidigitation that will permit the elimination of many passages in the Qur'an. An impossibility.
There is now a lot of money being tossed to "Brave Young Muslim Reformers," some of whom, like Khaled Abou el Fadl, are nothing of the sort, but simply thrusting careerists, apologists for Islam of the most transparent kind -- and given to bouts of hystiera as well (see Khaled Abou El Fadl's reaction to the recent apologist movie on the Crusades, where he predicted attacks on Muslims, "I stake my professional reputation" on this prediction, the hysterical self-promoter -- see the webpage devoted to this self-described "one of the world's leading experts on Islamic law").
A particular offender is the Carnegie Foundation, which under Vartan Gregorian (see his memoir of a Tabriz childhood, where he both reports, but does not understand as someone who has internalized a good deal of the dhimmi mentality, the limits of, his own immediate experience of Islam and of Muslims) has been spreading the money to every Scholar of the House (which google)who says he is busily engaged in "Reforming Islam." How are they reforming Islam? In what way? Are they changing the texts? Are they imitating Rashid Rida, or any of the others who failed completely, in the last century and a half, to "reform" Islam as they thought it should be reformed? Not for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and whatchamacallit, to doubt that the project will be successful? And why? Because it simply has to be, that's all -- I mean, if Islam can't be reformed, then....
Al-Nabulsi's text, and that of a few others who appear in the London Arab press -- by the odd Saudi or two -- simply show that the most advanced Arab Muslims, of whom there may be a some thousands out of a several hundred million, and a few dozen of whom dare write openly -- know that something is terribly wrong, and wish to distance themselves from it all, and wish to bring Muslims to their moral senses.
But when you look closely at what they write, you see that never can they fully confront the tenets and attitudes and atmospherics of Islam in full. And one notices that they never list any of the tens of thousands of terrorist attacks on Israelies and Jews, failing to realize that that in the end is the real test of Islam, of Muslims, and the Jihad: will they abandon the Lesser Jihad against the tiny, and inoffensive state of Israel, which is not -- and they know it perfectly -- out to dominate the MIddle East, but has offered again and again to collaborate in all sorts of ways with its neighbors, and only in despair now is trying to dissociate itself as much as possible from those who support, and will always support, the relentless Jihad against it). The ability to see Infidels, including the Israelis, as just possibly entitled to a sovereign state of their own, and the refusal to re-examine the Arab propaganda about demography in "Palestine," land ownership under the Ottomans, and especially about the reality of that recently-invented "Palestinian people" (so many of whom came from outside, with the defeated army of Abd el-Kader, with the veterans of Mehmet Ali, with the European Muslims transferred by the Ottoman government from the former Muslim-ruled lands in Europe in the 1880s, from Iraq and Egypt and the Emirate of Trans-Jordan in period 1920-1940).
If a small Infidel state that, despite all the Arab and Muslim propaganda, cannot be permitted to exist, then the whole notion of ending the Jihad is shown to be nonsense. And while Jihad can be put on the back burner, for a decade or a century, it cannot be ripped out of Islam. Not even if a hundred thousand Brave YOung Reformers claim to have done so, with foundation money backing them up.
The very best people in the Muslim world in the end conclude, and it is much harder for Arabs to do this than, say, for those who do not have their ethnic identity so entirely wrapped up in Islam, such as Iranians or some Pakistanis -- that Islam itself cannot be reformed and must be abandoned. And so they do, but seldom openly, and never openly in dar al-Islam. But as Locke and Pierre Bayle noted, freedom of individual conscience is the freedom that matters most. This is something that Islam must permit to those born into Islam through no fault of their own -- the freedom to leave Islam.
Only then will something like progress be made. Neither Ibn Warraq, nor Ali Sina, nor Azam Kamguian, nor Irfan Khawaja, nor a thousand or ten thousand other articulate ex-Musims, get anything like the attention -- much less the financial support of foundations -- for their important articulation of what Islam is, and why Muslims need to think, and re-think. Why is this? Why are ex-Muslims, the bravest and clearest-sighted of all those born into Islam, forced to fend for themselves, while only those who stoutly cling to Islam, despite the mental and moral compromises they must make, and the apologetics and falsities they must necessarily swim in, are feted and financed and hailed?
Al-Nabulsi'a article is welcome. As far as it goes. We are grateful for any truth-telling, at this point. But only the full truth, nothing but the truth, about Islam will do. And here a standard, such as the brilliant writings of Ibn Warraq, set the standard.
Accept no substitutes.
"Will the mainstream media listen to him?"
Doubtful. Does the mainstream media have even the slightest awareness of MEMRI?
Excellent point about the criminal insanity of such a thing as a "fatwa" advocating the killing of anyone for 'religious' reasons.
And, if the main stream media picks up anything from this article, it will be to invert that understanding into a way of accepting that Muslim "legal scholars" and "religious leaders" are ALLOWED to order people murdered "to uphold" the Islamic faith.
The MSM will convolute the homicidal absurdity of such a concept as "the death fatwa" to the p.c. multi-cultural message that "Golly gee, isn't it is their 'right' to eliminate people for Allah?"
As Muslims, then, they will be given the ('holy license to kill') free pass (by Reuters, the NYT, et al) to do whatever the "religion of peace" requires- even going so far as calling for the death of people. ("Innocence" will not be mentioned.) Apostates, 'crusaders', etc.
No one in the mass-journalistic trade will simply say that:
"A religion that has, as its part of its fundamental structure, a Murder Incorporated built in, sanctified and sacrosanct, is sheer madness. And such a 'faith' needs to reform this deformity out of it."
Hell will require iceskates before the Big Press of the World gets that message out.
Even arab intellectuals, albeit reluctantly, seem to admit that the majority of Muslims are not exactly what they presented themselves as to the West.
Yet, the leftists, who routinely pride themselves as being progressive and enlightened, fail to realize this simple and obvious truth.
Al-Nabulsi's article has many limitations and if very far from renouncing Islamic terrorism altogether, but it's a heartening development against the background of collective silence of the Muslim world.
Yet, as Hugh has pointed out, we shouldn't get too enthusiastic. Much, much more is needed.
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dolphin, CAGE co-founder.
http://www.acage.org
scaramouoche:
Al-Guardian's foremost dhimmi, Brian Whitaker, actually wrote an attack piece on MEMRI (instigated by Red Ken Livingstone when MEMRI outed Kenny's favourite Muslim cleric, Al-Qaradawi) that Shukri liked to refer to all the time.
Some of the media are quite aware of MEMRI. I also suspect that some government agencies may Check out MEMRI's media page for citings; you'll find some very unexpected ones along with Fox. (I think they just posted a citing of the Palestinian Media Centre relying on MEMRI's translators. Al Jazeerah has also used MEMRI's translations.)
This is not hard for me to understand and this is why. Interacting with Muslims from all walks of life, all parts of the globe that know what the Quran states as the #1 goal are unitied. That end game goal is for an Islamic caliphate to rule the world under shari law ... full stop. IMO this is OBLs goal.
Now while you will find many Muslims that disagree with OBLs methods, you will be hard pressed to find many if any that follow the true tenets of Islam per the Quran be it an Islamic scholar ... to even the peace loving Muslims that is ready to disagree with the goal.
So there you have the dilemma of all Muslims today. There are literally stuck between a rock and a hard place concerning OBL. Many detest his methods, but none can deny his goal in principle.
If a Muslim denies OBLs goal then they run the risk of being labeled "apostate". We all know what that means and no Muslim alive can stand the thought of being labeled apostate.
In the end all Muslims have been forced to choose to abandon the main tenet of Islam or "silently" side with OBL even if they disagree with his methods. For many Muslims both options stink to high heaven and really have no where to turn.
There they stand in the middle of the road caught in the headlights unable to move.
"There they stand in the middle of the road caught in the headlights unable to move."
-- from a posting above
Yes, there are some who know or come close to the unpleasant truth, even may admit part of it to themselves or covertly, to other Muslims, simply cannot jettison Islam. It would mean in many cases physical danger. In others, family disapproval. There are many people who cannot bear the idea of being lonely individuals; they positively crave some kind of supra-identity, and if they leave Islam, they can leave it only if something else can immediately be substituted for it. There are others, particularly Arabs, for whom the idea of Islam is so intertwined with the idea of Arabness, Uruba, that they cannot conceive of giving up on Islam. For if they do, what is left to them, they think, of their own history?
Caught in the headlights indeed. But in the end, most will stick with Islam, defend Islam, lie about Islam to themselves and to others. And we cannot rely on them, nor even on the few who will begin to tell the full truth. We Infidles haven't a clear sense of who is feigning and who is not, and among those who are not, who is with us and who will relapse into "Islam" when some Manchurian-like sound is uttered in the ether. We just don't know. So we must, simply out of the need to protect ourselves, assume the worst.
Hugh-
LOL!
I think your final three words are a motto for confronting Islam, considering its history of conquest (Fez to Jakarta), slaughter (Arabia, 622 A.D., and spreading in every direction under the shadow of the sword for 1350 plus years), iconoclastic outrages (Hagia Sofia to the Bamiyan Buddhas) and absolutist arrogance ("jizya" tax for lesser folk, ad nauseam).
A perfect motto:
ASSUME THE WORST.
(And I don't mean liver-)
Apparently, there was indeed a fatwa against bin Laden:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/03/11/madrid.anniversary/
Apparently, there was indeed a fatwa against bin Laden:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/03/11/madrid.anniversary/