What is jihad? How does Islam define apostasy? What are the rights of women in Islam?

1. WHAT IS JIHAD? UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS DOES ISLAM SANCTION THE USE OF VIOLENCE? WHAT WOULD YOU TELL SUICIDE BOMBERS WHO INVOKE ISLAM TO JUSTIFY THEIR ACTIONS?

In the name of God, the Compassionate and Merciful

Jihad is an Arabic word meaning ‘struggle’ or ‘effort’. In religious teaching, it denotes any struggle against the lower, selfish tendencies of the ego. One dimension of this may be to struggle against one’s own selfishness and cowardice in order to defend one’s people. One form of this was indicated by the Blessed Prophet when he said: ‘the best form of jihad is to speak a true word to a tyrannical ruler’. In doing so one risks one’s life, but is serving the weak and the oppressed; the Prophet therefore describes it as a form of jihad.

While non-retaliation against a personal injury is frequently a virtue (see the Holy Qur’an, chapter 41 verse 34), Islam believes that human communities have the right to collective self-defense, since non-resistance to aggression would result in a world dominated by tyrants (see Holy Qur’an, 22:40). Under some circumstances, Muslim scholars will allow oppressed peoples to rebel against their oppressors. They might, therefore, classify the American War of Independence as a form of jihad, broadly understood. When Bosnia was faced with ethnic cleansing in 1992, the Muslim authorities there authorized the use of force to defend the country’s Muslim minority. The alternative would have been mass murder and mass rape, and therefore jihad was lawful. Furthermore, some Muslim scholars will permit a non-defensive ‘idealist’ war to establish justice and freedom in a neighboring country. This is analogous, perhaps, to the decision of the United Kingdom to declare war on Germany on September 3, 1939, in response to the German invasion of Poland. There are more recent analogies as well, including very recent instances in which Western powers have used force to overthrow tyrants such as Saddam Hussein.

The poet Rumi explains the ethical principle of jihad as follows:

“Knowledge and wealth and office and rank and fortune are a mischief in the hands of the evil-natured. Therefore the Jihad was made obligatory on true believers for this purpose, namely, that they might take the spear-point from the hand of the madman.”

Fundamentally, as understood by orthodox Islamic jurists (as opposed to radical Islamists, who reject the classical position), jihad theory closely resembles some versions of Just War theory as this has been developed in several Christian churches since the time of St. Augustine. For some good debates about the resemblance see John Kelsay and James Turner Johnson (eds.), “Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions” (New York, Westport and London, 1991).

Suicide bombing is an innovated practice that has no basis in Islamic law. Particularly when targeted against innocent non-combatants it is a fundamental violation of Islam’s understanding of justice.

‘No soul is guilty of the sins of another.’ (Holy Qur’an, chapter 6 verse 163)

‘Do not kill yourselves.’ (Holy Qur’an, chapter 4 verse 29)

For more, see my essay ‘Bombing without Moonlight’ and the more technical Sharia discussion by Shaykh Muhammad Afifi al-Akiti).

2. HOW DOES ISLAM DEFINE APOSTASY? IS IT PERMISSIBLE FOR A MUSLIM TO CONVERT TO ANOTHER FAITH? HOW CAN LAWS AGAINST APOSTASY AND BLASPHEMY BE RECONCILED WITH THE KORANIC INJUNCTION OF “NO COMPULSION IN RELIGION”?

Traditional human communities believe that truth leads to salvation, and error to damnation. It is probable that very many religious people in a variety of denominations still believe this. Historically, religiously-faithful princes have therefore seen it as necessary to use the coercive power of the state to forbid apostasy. One of the most powerful and persistent manifestations of this understanding in history was the Inquisition, which was definitively abolished in 1834. Protestant countries also respected this drastic principle; in fact, the first converts to Islam in Britain were impaled on stakes. In a Hindu context, ‘apostasy’ was often classified as violation of caste rules and boundaries, and similarly drastic consequences could follow. After the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1253, Buddhists who converted to Islam were routinely put to death.

The four canonical schools of Sunni Islamic law, and also most pre-modern Shi’a jurists, recommend similarly drastic penalties, although the judge is enjoined to ‘look for ambiguities’ in order to avert the death penalty wherever possible.

The Ottoman Caliphate, the supreme representative of Sunni Islam, formally abolished this penalty in the aftermath of the so-called Tanzimat reforms launched in 1839. The Shaykh al-Islam, the supreme head of the religious courts and colleges, ratified this major shift in traditional legal doctrine. It was pointed out that there is no verse in the Qur’an that lays down a punishment for apostasy (although chapter 5 verse 54 and chapter 2 verse 217 predict a punishment in the next world). It was also pointed out that the ambiguities in the hadith (the sayings of the Prophet) suggest that apostasy is only an offense when combined with the crime of treason. These ambiguities led some medieval Muslims, long before the advent of modernisation, to reject the majority view. Prominent among them one may name al-Nakha’i (d.713), al-Thawri (d.772), al-Sarakhsi (d. 1090), al-Baji (d. 1081), and al-Sha’rani (d.1565). The debate triggered by the Ottoman reform was continued when al-Azhar University in Cairo, the supreme religious authority in the Arab world, delivered a formal fatwa (religious edict) in 1958, which confirmed the abolition of the classical law in this area.

Among radical Salafis and Wahhabis who do not accept the verdicts of the Ottoman or the Azhar scholars, it is generally believed that the majority medieval view should still be enforced.

The best discussion of the controversy is the book by Mohammed Hashim Kamali, “Freedom of Expression in Islam” (Cambridge, 1997).

3. WHAT ARE THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN IN ISLAM? HOW DOES ISLAM’S VIEW OF MALE-FEMALE EQUALITY DIFFER FROM THE WESTERN VIEW?

This question somewhat essentializes Islam and ‘the West’. There is a huge diversity of Muslim opinion here, both ancient and modern; and ‘the Western view’ really does not exist, since villagers in Venezuela, for instance are Westerners, and so are many ultra-orthodox Jews, and conservative Catholics, and radical Californian feminists; and while the views of all these groups are morally coherent, they are not part of a single ‘Western view’. Thankfully, Islam and the West are both diverse. And of course they overlap: many people, including myself, consider themselves to be both Western and Muslim.

Virtually all pre-modern ethical, legal and social systems accepted firm assurances about the respective nature of the two sexes. Women were taken to be nurturers and homemakers, while men were to be earners and warriors. There are clear biological reasons why ancient societies should have favored such a division of labor, and the current sharp debate over the ‘different wiring’ of the male and female brain may clarify this, although it is unlikely to be resolved soon (see, for instance, Ann and Bill Moir, “Why Men Don’t Iron: The Fascinating and Unalterable Differences between Men and Women” [London, 2003]). Whichever way the scientific debate goes, it is evident that our bodies influence our minds, and even our souls, and we can accept this without assuming that one gender is therefore superior to the other.

Islam is a religion that takes our rootedness in our bodies seriously. We pray with their bodies as well as with our hearts. Turning the body to face Mecca encourages the soul to do the same. Childbearing must have a deep spiritual impact. So Muslims believe that men and women are spiritually different. However the indispensable practices of the religion, including the daily prayers, the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and the fasting month of Ramadan, are incumbent on both sexes. For the ancient world, this was a remarkable circumstance, and Muslims are obliged to see it as a sign that women and men are both spiritual beings, with similar spiritual duties (see the Holy Qur’an, chapter 33 verse 35).

Some Christian denominations do not accept the validity of women priests. Islam, too, does not recognize the validity of services conducted by women (unless there are no men in the congregation). However this does not exclude women from positions of religious leadership. Thousands of medieval Muslim scholars were women (see Ruth Roded, “Women in Islamic Biographical Collections” [Boulder and London, 1994]). They would teach, preach, and give religious verdicts in the mosque. Many others became saints (Camille Helminski, “Women of Sufism” [New York, 2003]).

The lively Muslim feminist movement today likes to point out that since Islam does not call God ‘Father’, and does not believe that God was incarnated in a male body, that Muslims can consider that they are worshipping a gender-neutral deity. This, together with many other factors, ensures the continuing popularity of Islam amongst women. In my own community in the UK, around eighty percent of recent converts have been women. For the U.S. see the remarkable and often moving book by Carol Anway, “Daughters of Another Path: Experiences of American Women Choosing Islam” [Lee’s Summit, MO: sixth edition 2002]).

Peace be with you, and the mercy of God.

Abdal Hakim Murad

Link

Rabia Shah, 20. Stanmore (North West London)

The image of the police has deteriorated over the years; it may be due to the lack of patrol officers, flaws within the system or simply because what they refer to as ‘protecting the people’ maybe seen as injustice in the eyes of others. Their aim has been to ‘make London a safer place’ but how much progress has been seen? The police force has now been set targets to seek out and identify any potential terrorist plans or activities, but it has now become hunt for prey. Muslims have now been stereotyped and it seems to be that more Muslims are now stopped, questioned or perhaps even searched according to their appearance. (Read More…)

Of course to the victims of that massacre on that campus in Virginia and to those who loved and knew them, it wouldn’t have mattered one way or another what faith the killer followed, which nationality he belonged to or what ideology, if any, he subscribed to.

However, now that the victims have been identified and their stories told, the video tape and message from the killer shown and psychologists, psycho-analysists, criminologists and an array of other experts have all had their say, I’ve noted how no questions were asked in respect to the Cho Seung-hui’s religion or ideology and how no official demand was made for an apology by his former friends and associates, co-religionists, fellow South Koreans or anyone else who ever came into contact with him in the past. See this BBC report, for example.

As a result, I’m led to believe that we shouldn’t expect any raids on the homes of those who had his contact details stored on their mobile phones or had any dealings with him in any way, shape or form. I’m also led to believe that his native South Korea will not be handed a demand to surrender those who one day taught him at school or played with him on the streets of where he grew up in a poor and deprived suburb of Seoul, lest international pressure be brought, sanctions imposed and military action threatened. I also understand that the shop where he managed to get his hands on the gun that claimed so many innocent lives, will not be shut down, nor will the proprietor be charged with any offence of being somehow linked to the killings.

I’m glad none of that will happen. It would do nothing to make us any clearer as to why Seung-hui did what he did, and would certainly do nothing to avenge the victims of his murderous spree. If anything, it might even undermine the universal shock that echoed upon hearing the breaking news, and would even have some elements here or there glorify his actions and wish for more of the same. Worse, it would prevent us from actually seeing the reality of the problem and subsequently preventing future similar incidents from ever occurring.

The same thought crossed my mind after Michael Stone, a convicted serial murderer and notorious terrorist, stormed the parliament buildings in Belfast, the heart of democracy in Northern Ireland, in November last year armed with a gun and an explosive device, and yelled the rallying cry: “No sell-out. No surrender” as he was apprehended by a security guard. Once again, I thought that at least the leaders of the church that Mr Stone so zealously followed would have been asked to issue a full apology and an explanation as to how the Christian faith could have influenced Stone, and possibly have the curriculums taught at their schools revised and changed to eliminate all teachings that may have brought about such evil hatred towards others, who essentially share the same faith as his own. Again, no such demand was made. Not even a hint of it.

Which just goes to explain how perplexed Muslims are when they are quizzed about their faith, how they live their lives and how they bring up their children, when someone who happens to follow the same religion as they and 1.3 billion others around the world, commits a crime. Indeed most are perplexed as to why a criminal’s religion immediately becomes relevant should he or she be a Muslim, while we do not know nor care as to who and how Ian Huntley, Fred West or Harold Shipman among a long list of western, white, middle-aged men worshipped, if at all. Nor should we. A crime is a crime, and barbarity has no faith, nationality, creed or colour.

When we target the entire group to whom the criminal belongs, we lose the momentum created by the universal and unified shock and disgust felt towards the crime, as well as the sympathies expressed towards the victims.

We also feed the fringe element that thrives on such barbarity, and offer them fuel and impetus to recruit under the pretext that everyone is a target and no matter what one does, they will never be in the clear.

Among the many lessons that one hopes will be learned from last week’s tragedy, one is that we will begin to see through the spectacles of the universal values of humanity, rather than those tinted according to ideology, colour, race and creed, mixed with a huge dollop of ignorance.

Anas al-Tikriti

Comment is Free

“Terrorism has no religion. It is a social and criminal phenomenon caused by various reasons. Islam is based on plurality rather than individuality. It demands harmonization and integration.”

WATCH HERE

]]> http://www.therevival.co.uk/wp-site/648/feed 13 http://www.therevival.co.uk/wp-site/668 http://www.therevival.co.uk/wp-site/668#comments Wed, 30 Aug 2006 20:37:12 +0000 MuslimSister http://www.therevival.co.uk/?p=668 Easy! Check him out…he must be the fittest boy I’ve ever seen… lets sit closer to get a better view … Gwaan check him out, but don’t be too obvious…

Sound familiar? Its one of the most common topic of conversations in most schools and colleges, “We’re only looking, it’s minor” is the defensive response of most. However the question arises “Is it really not that much of a big deal?”

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By Alveena Salim

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By Irfan Khan

Reading, listening or watching the latest news headlines it seems to me that there is always yet another brand that I as a Muslim can fall into. Apart from fundamentalism, terrorism, Islamism (which genius came up with that one?!) etc.

I can also fall in to the wider category of ‘Moderate’ or ‘Extremist’. The media has attached so many labels to Muslims that I myself am beginning to wonder what type of Muslim I am.

Am I not just a Muslim? Are not all Muslims the same and don’t we believe in the same message and read the same Quran? (Read More…)

The Radical Middle Way project was designed to give young people a different view of their religion.

Within three weeks of the 7 July bombings, the British government set up a series of “Preventing Extremism Together” workshops with 100 British Muslims. Mostly young and from all walks of life, their job was to provide insight into why a small minority of Muslims veer over the edge into fundamentalism, while the majority do not.

Economic deprivation, second-generation tensions, social isolation from the mainstream had all played a part and all got their due.

But what came through emphatically from the advisers was that extremists, no matter how warped and misguided their interpretation of Islam, perceive themselves as devoutly religious.

Indeed, the final report concluded: “The problem is not primarily rooted in socio-economic deprivation: it is based on a global ideology motivated by political grievances and justified by a mistaken interpretation of Islam.”

And the only way to combat the ideology is to take on its arguments and knock them down flat, says Fareena Alam, the 27-year-old managing editor of trend-setting Q-News, the U.K.’s largest Muslim magazine, who was one of the 100 advisers.

“If these young people are motivated by faith, and the idiots who tell them to kill in the name of the faith, then we need to use religion to get at them,” she says from London. “We can’t run away from the fact that religion is important to these young people. So, we must counter extremism with more religion, not less.”

Which is precisely what the British government, with the help of Q-News and three other young-Muslim groups, decided to do in setting up the Radical Middle Way project. “Middle Way” because balance is a primary value in traditional Islam; “radical,” well, to attract teens.

The project involves a group of international Islamic scholars with credibility among young people travelling across Britain to give theological counter-arguments against extremist interpretations of the faith.

“We told government, let’s not reinvent the wheel here,” Alam says. In other words, let Q-News and cohorts run the show. The government agreed.

With public funds, Q-News books the venues — deliberately not mosques, but concert halls or auditoriums — and flies in speakers from around the world, including Yemen, Germany and Canada.

Since it started in December, the “Imams Tour,” as it’s dubbed, has been a huge success. More than 25,000 curious young Muslims have turned out to listen to, or argue with, scholars whose names are venerated in the Islamic world. Attendance is free.

When the highly respected Abdallah bin Bayyah from Mauritania walked on stage at a Middle Way event in London, awestruck teenagers craned to capture him on their camera-phones as if he were a rock star.

But the biggest draw, perhaps, has been the charismatic young American convert, Hamza Yusuf. The former Mark Hanson of Walla Walla, Washington state, understands the problems of integrating as a Muslim into the non-Muslim West and that, Alam says, is key.

“Most mosques and imams don’t have a clue what’s going on with young people and fewer kids go to them for guidance. So, the vacuum gets filled in kebab shops or bookstores or on strange sites on the Internet.”

But there is always the person-to-person exposure, she adds. Someone slightly older becomes a “mentor,” all too happy to supply a quick theological fix to young people enraged by what’s happening to Muslims in the Middle East.

The fix? Born-again fundamentalism — a “pure,” literalist Islam — that teaches rejection of national loyalty and the embrace of the black-and-white militancy.

Alam isn’t surprised the phenomenon has spread to Canada: “Extremists live in a media-savvy world and they learn from each other. Your kids there were not immune. The 7/7 bombers here, they were angry. `Our people are being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.’ They wanted to help them. They wanted to be men.”

The logic of helping by blowing up London’s transit system or anything else doesn’t simply elude reason, says Jamal Badawi, an Egyptian-born Canadian scholar — it flatly contravenes and betrays the traditional faith.

Badawi, imam to an 18,000-member Muslim community in Halifax, Canada and professor of religious studies at St. Mary’s University, was the speaker at a Middle Way event in April. His message to the sellout crowd was clear-cut: “Terrorists have a totally perverted interpretation of the faith.”

Koranic references, he says, “are taken out of context to justify terrorism, just as biblical texts are warped by Christian fundamentalists to justify bombing abortion clinics.”

Extremist ideology holds that true Muslims cannot be loyal to their country and to their faith, Badawi says from Halifax.

“That’s erroneous. Normative Islam believes in peaceful co-existence, in being `justly balanced.’ It rejects extremism, whether of excess or neglect.”

Fundamentalists who try to stop fellow Muslims from contributing to the culture and politics of their new, non-Islamic country — as one of the Mississauga accused, Qayyum Jamal, reportedly did during the last federal election — couldn’t be more wrong “and must be countered,” he says.

Badawi is not deaf, however, to the frustrations of the young, a point his Middle Way audience undoubtedly appreciated.

“Extremism didn’t come out of the thin air,” he says. “The deaths of 100,000 Iraqis does arouse resentment, which can turn into blind hate. A feeling of anger is fine. But what is not justified is taking violent action.”

Source: Lynda Hurst, Toronto Star (Canada), 10 June 2006

Related link: Radical Middleway