Usama Hasan of the UK’s Quilliam Foundation gives the impression in this article that Ibn Taymiyya was a moderate. Hasan fails to mention that Ibn Taymiyya also said: “Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.” And: “To fight in defence of religion and belief is a collective duty; there is no other duty after belief than fighting the enemy who is corrupting the life and the religion. There are no preconditions for this duty and the enemy should be fought with one’s best abilities.”
Ibn Taymiyya was one of Osama bin Laden’s favorite Islamic scholars; Osama quoted him repeatedly in his 1996 fatwa declaring jihad against the United States. And here is Usama Hasan invoking him to explain how he has supposedly “deradicalized” several jihadis and would “deradicalize” Shamima Begum. But what if your pupils start reading more Ibn Taymiyya, Mr. Hasan? Have you read Ibn Taymiyya, Mr. Hasan? It is hard to believe that you haven’t, given your work to “deradicalize” jihadis: it would only make sense for you to be familiar with how they become “radicalized” in the first place, and that process has not infrequently involved Ibn Taymiyya’s writings. So don’t you think that invoking Ibn Taymiyya to explain how you would turn a jihadi away from jihad is a bit…cynical and deceptive?
“How would I deradicalise Shamima Begum? With Islamic scholarship,” by Usama Hasan, Guardian, February 19, 2019:
How do we deradicalise young, indoctrinated people like Shamima Begum? As part of their ideology, takfiri terrorist groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaida justify their aggression towards the west by creating a divide between Muslims and non-Muslims….
During my work in 2018, I attempted to help several young radicalised men, including a terrorism convict and a terrorism suspect, to deradicalise and accept and appreciate their British citizenship after seeing how it is supported by Islamic values. My work involved discussing various concepts for them to study.
According to ninth-century Islamic jurisprudence, the world was divided into two – the lands of Islam (dar al-islam) for Muslims, and the lands of disbelief (dar al-kufr) for non-Muslims. Within dar al-kufr, lands were distinguished between lands of war (dar al-harb), and lands of peace-treaty (dar al-sulh).
However, this binary worldview is medieval and no longer a fit for a modern world. While terrorist theologians believe the default state of international relations is based on warfare with the non-Muslim world, modern Islamic international relations are based on peace. Even in the 14th century, the Salafi scholar Ibn Taymiyya issued the Mardin fatwa. Mardin, in modern-day Turkey, was a Muslim-majority town that had been conquered by the pagan Mongols. When asked whether this land – a Muslim population with non-Muslim rulers – constituted dar al-Islam or dar al-kufr, Taymiyya reasoned that it was neither. He introduced the concept of dar murakkab: compound or composite land, of different religions. This fatwa is crucial as it opened the door to Muslims accepting the complex social fabric of our modern, multicultural nation-states.
According to leading 20th-century jurists such as Muhammad Abu Zahra, Wahba al-Zuhayli and Abdullah bin Bayyah, all Muslim-majority countries have subscribed to the United Nations, and according to the Qur’an (5:1) all Muslims are obliged to honour their agreements. All Muslims must therefore honour agreements made to international bodies such as the UN. All modern societies are regarded as belonging to dar al-muwatanah (lands of citizenship).
In my deradicalisation efforts over the past year, a key step was to help those young men understand that, even according to medieval formulations, Britain is not a “land of war” but a land of peace-treaty or covenant, or at least a “compound” or “composite” land of different religions. Some of the young men initially thought that Britain was a “land of war”, with terrorist attacks here being justified by British wars abroad….