Council of Islamic Ideology Chairman Mohammad Khan Sheerani has pinned the blame on America for the addition of jihad to the Pakistan school syllabus, claiming that verses on jihad were added at US behest.
He ignored the history of jihad conquest and spoke calculated nonsense when repeatedly questioned by journalists about jihad, stating:
“If I want to protect my faith, waging a jihad would entail fighting evil by not following that path…the Holy Quran and Islam provided a complete code of life and could not be understood in bits and pieces….The verses regarding jihad were mostly revealed in Madina, and after the Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) had established the first Islamic state….to guide Muslims regarding the protection of their state from invaders, not to [advocate] spreading anarchy elsewhere. We must remember that the Islamic state of Madina was founded without violence.”
Really? The Islamic state of Medina was precisely founded on violence and forced Sharia upon Christians, Jews and other infidels. It was where Mohammad became a warlord, “fighting in the cause of Allah,” which resulted in the spread of Islam by the sword. This continued on an “epic scale” following Mohammad’s death, leading to the conquest of about “50% of the Christian world — the eastern Mediterranean lands, the Middle East, and North Africa–and gradually extinguished most of the Christian testimony in those lands”.
Medina was also where the reward of paradise and heavenly virgins for martyrdom began to be preached, and the Quran’s “heaven for men” became a “garden paradise where every male sensual pleasure is catered to by nubile nymphs — just as every sensual pleasure of Muhammad, as the voluptuous sheik of a harem, was indulged.”
Was the U.S. playing realpolitik in such a short-sighted way as to urge the teaching of jihad during the Cold War? It’s a remote possibility that they may have done this in some specific and limited context, but never in school curricula urging jihad against the whole non-Muslim world. And it doesn’t negate the Islamic imperatives for jihad that Sheerani ignores. Further exposing Sheerani’s lies about the motivations for the change in the syllabus and his views about Medina and jihad, on August 3, the Press Trust of India reported:
“An Islamic religious body in Pakistan today demanded the government to include Quranic verses about importance of jihad in the proposed school curriculum.
The Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) raised serious concerns over not including verses about jihad in the proposed syllabi for public educational institutions.
The CII chairman Maulana Muhammad Khan Sheerani said that that the Federal Education and Professional Training Ministry should include the verses about importance of jihad in curriculum.”
As Jihad Watch reported about the subject on August 3, despite Sheerani’s extraordinary efforts to cover up the truth: “484 verses of jihad are mentioned in the Quran but they were deliberately not included in the syllabus so students could not be taught about it.” The post went on to list some of the verses they want taught.
“CII chief says verses on jihad added to syllabus at US behest”, Daily Times, August 5, 2016:
ISLAMABAD: Quranic verses related to jihad were added to the syllabus of Pakistan to appease the Americans, who wanted recruits for their war against communism, Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) Chairman Maulana Mohammad Khan Sheerani said on Thursday.
He also stopped short of terming the Tehreek-i-Taliban’s (TTP) fight against the state as an attempt to “spread anarchy”, saying that trying to force one’s wishes on the masses could not be classified as jihad. Hailing from the Jamiat Ulemae Islam-F (JUIF), Maulana Sheerani is also a Member of the National Assembly (MNA).
Speaking to the journalists after a three-day CII meeting, he also talked about the proposal to teach the Holy Quran in schools. He said that it was essential to teach students ethics and social norms, as envisaged in the Holy Quran. He said that United States wanted to ‘rent manpower’ for Afghan war and stopped short of calling Taliban ‘anarchists.’
But when asked about the exclusion of verses related to jihad in the syllabus, he said that the emphasis on such verses was a recent phenomenon, claiming that these were included in the course because the US needed ‘rented manpower’. “Look at older books, even in the seminaries, they used to promote ethics, social sciences and stories related to cultural norms and Islamic traditions,” he said.
On a question related to the actions of militant groups including the TTP, Maulana Sheerani recited a Quranic verse that translates to, “There is no compulsion in religion”. While he did not explicitly term the TTP ‘terrorists’, he said that individuals had the right to choose whatever path they liked, explaining, “Almighty Allah has given individuals enough sense to understand the consequences of what they do.”
JUIF chief Maulana Fazalur Rehman and several other party leaders, including Maulana Sheerani himself, have faced militant action including suicide attacks, which were later claimed by the TTP. Explaining the concept of jihad, he said that there were two aspects to it. One was related to faith and ideology and another to the material side. “But both aspects were contingent of the concept of protection,” he said.
“If I want to protect my faith, waging a jihad would entail fighting evil by not following that path,” he said, adding that the material side of jihad involved hard work. “[Just like one can] fight poverty by working hard and not through snatching others’ money or land,” the CII chairman said, adding, “But if somebody tries to implement their wishes by force and pressure, that is not jihad, but fasad (anarchy), which is not right”.
When asked about the verses dealing with jihad, he said that the Holy Quran and Islam provided a complete code of life and could not be understood in bits and pieces. “The verses regarding jihad were mostly revealed in Madina, and after the Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) had established the first Islamic state,” Maulana Sheerani said, adding, “These were to guide Muslims regarding the protection of their state from invaders, not to [advocate] spreading anarchy elsewhere. We must remember that the Islamic state of Madina was founded without violence.”.