Radical Islamism and Jihad
The battle against the coronavirus is as important as the struggle
against Israel, an online post by the Palestinian Mujahideen Brigades said Wednesday.
They are one of many groups in the Middle East who claim to have swapped their
AK-47s for disinfectant during the global pandemic….
“May God punish China with death, as they had brought death to Muslims.”
“As China beats Uyghur Muslims, coronavirus is now beating China.” “The virus
is God’s army that destroys the kafir (infidels)..”…
Expectedly, the euphoria around the self-proclaimed US success in
signing the deal has faced a major jolt even before the ink was dry. The text
of the four-point agreement declares, “the United States is committed to start
immediately to work with all relevant sides on a plan to expeditiously release
upto 5,000 prisoners of the Taliban…
The differences between different Deobandis provide favourable
circumstances for the Pakistani state to get a grip. Disappointingly, the
authorities chose not to face down the Maulana, but instead decided to appease
him....
In other places in the Islamic world, still more serious consequences
have followed accusations of blasphemy. In Pakistan, Asia Bibi was sentenced to
death in 2010 for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad......
A possible catastrophe was averted by the Maldivian SFs when they, along
with the “five biggest countries in the world,” foiled an IS plan to blow up an
airline mid-air using an Improvised Explosive Device…
The clergy is required to counter
the exclusivist Jihadi theology of violence and supremacism which is primarily
based on the traditional Islamic theology of consensus of all schools of
thought. This has to be done through a counter-narrative based on a new
inclusivist theology of peace and pluralism. But to do that the clergy will
have to work towards evolving a new theology that is different from the
traditional theology taught in madrasas. It is this age-old theology that is
used by Jihadis to propagate their message.
It cannot be stressed enough that
the reason Jihadis have been able to capture the imagination of thousands of
our youth the world over is that they are not saying anything new. They are
simply showing a way to practice what the ulema (religious scholars) have been
preaching. The Jihadi narrative is the traditional Islamic theological
narrative of Islam domination over all other religious beliefs, and eradication
of what it considers the biggest crimes humanity can commit, particularly shirk,
polytheism or idol worship, and kufr, rejection of the prophethood of
Hazrat Mohammad (pbuh). All the most eminent scholars of Islam from Imam
Ghazali (11th-12th century) to Imam Ibn-e-Taimiya (13th-14th
century), Mujaddid Alf-e-Saani Sheikh Sirhindi (16th-17th
century), Shah Waliullah Muhaddis Dehlavi (18th century) have shown
a vision of political Islam that was finally given a more definite form in the
20th century by Maulana Syed Abul A’la Maududi, Hassan al-Banna, and
Syed Qutb. The Jihadi ideologues of the 21st century may be
stressing some parts of this traditional narrative more vigorously and
downplaying some other aspects. But they are not saying anything that is
entirely new or radically different.
Jihadi literature has not dropped
from the sky all of a sudden. This is not the creation of Osama bin Laden or
so-called “Khalifa” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Their narrative of world domination,
fighting those who do not accept the message of Islam is basically what is
taught in all our madrasas. The definition of Jihad as fighting those who do
not accept the oneness of God and prophethood of Mohammad (pbuh) is found in
books of every school of Sunni fiqh (jurisprudence), be it Hanafi,
Malaki, Shafei or Hanbali. Indeed, even Shia theology does not differ much with
Sunnis in matters of political Islam. They too want world domination for Islam
and desire to subdue all non-Muslims.
If I were mad enough to occupy a federal government building in
Islamabad with a group of like-minded men and women, you can easily imagine the
consequences: we would be thrashed, dragged to jail and probably charged with
sedition....
The mass shootings at Sheesha bars in Hanau, Germany, and the stabbing
of the muezzin of London’s Regent’s Park mosque have put far-right extremism
back in the headlines....
Surely it’s time to recall how appeasing terrorism culminated in the
horrific disaster of 2007. That’s when Islamabad became a battlefield above
which thick smoke filled the sky for days....
A War on Terror
has been raging for 17 years now but we are no closer to defeating Islamist
terror. Jihadism continues to attract Muslim youth. This is because the world
has not paid enough attention to the ideology of Islamism and Jihadism.
Mainstream
Muslims have considered Islam a spiritual path to salvation, one of the many.
Islam aims at reforming society for a peaceful, harmonious, pluralist
existence. However, due to certain historical factors, the theology and
jurisprudence of Islam that evolved in the 8th and 9th
centuries (CE), present Islam as a political, totalitarian ideology of
supremacism, xenophobia, intolerance and gender discrimination. It is this
theology of violence, exclusivism and world-domination that is taught in
madrasas and sustains Islamism. But despite the Islamist violence against
peaceful Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the community is still not focussed on
the need for evolving a counternarrative of Islam.
It is imperative that Muslim countries that
have signed the UN Charter look into the issue urgently and work towards
developing a new theology of peace, pluralism and gender justice. While several
countries like Morocco and now Saudi Arabia appear to be moving in this
direction, the one country that has made a solid contribution is Turkey. In a
decade-long exercise 100 Turkish scholars have managed to limit the number of
authentic ahadith to just 1600, out of over 10,000, and provide each hadith
with context and suitable interpretation. This book of authentic Hadith has been
provided to all mosques in Turkey but I hope it is made available to the global
Muslim community in their own languages as soon as possible.
Allama Iqbal, a
poet-philosopher of the South Asian sub-continent had called for the
reconstruction of religious thought in Islam almost a hundred years ago. Let us
at least start working on it now....
Islamists, a broad label that covers political parties, preachers and
militant groups, among others, actively promote a more conservative version of
Islam. The most influential Islamist party is Jamaat-e-Islami, whose name means
“Islamic gathering.”...
Aziz belongs to a hardliner Islamic school of thought, who believes in
armed jihad and waging war in order to enforce and expand their model of an
Islamic Shariah-based system. He justifies the December 2014 attack on the Army
Public School Peshawar by TTP, by saying that “every action has a reaction”....
The extreme poverty of the area and its economic marginalisation has
made it ripe for recruitment, especially when schools and services are hard to
come by. The state is largely absent from the area, and as al-Shabaab gained in
strength and resources...
Over the past 20 years, terrorism and religious extremism have become
major challenges for the national security of Indonesia, the world’s most
populous Muslim-majority country. Indonesia has been home to terrorist networks
and training camps connected to al-Qaeda, Islamic State (ISIS) and Jemaah
Islamiyah....
Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) suspected that a splinter group of Al
Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) had entered Karachi to carry out terrorist
attacks. “We have received reports that six ‘disgruntled’ militants...
There is no doubt that many are radicalised in such places as Belmarsh.
We are not helped by the fact that many imams we allow to minister to these
maniacs are followers of the Deobandi sect, which is strictly opposed to
integration....
Their children get radicalised growing up in labour-class communities
where Islam is practiced in more intense forms. One such “transformed” person
was Al-Muhajiroun’s founder, Anjum Chaudhry, of Pakistani origin, who is now in
jail....
Cultural Islam taught us in schools that only prayers and rituals of
religion are Ibadan. There was no forcing of anyone into Islam or a Dawah
programme to convert non-Muslims....
Despite making tremendous gains in its fight against domestically
oriented terror groups across Pakistan, and more particularly in KP,
Islamabad’s attempts to restore normalcy remain far from complete success....
A decade after the Arab Spring, good news anywhere is hard to find. In
contrast to Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, extreme poverty has
increased in the Arab region....
This is significant as a living Southeast Asian fighter stands a greater
chance of being accepted as ‘the’ leader of IS’ affiliate networks in the
region, having earned the status of having fought and survived the ‘jihad’ in
the Middle East....
Working
together and separately, those nations and their allies by early 2019 managed
to subdue the group in Iraq and Syria, where it once controlled a chunk of
territory as big as Iceland. Now, tensions among the countries that dismantled
Islamic State threaten to subvert efforts to combat its resurgence....
It recorded 31 terrorist attacks and seven fatalities in 2018, a 70
percent reduction in deaths from the prior year.” The index published by the
Sydney-based Institute for Economics & Peace ranked Bangladesh 31st in
2018, down from 25th the preceding year....
Throughout post-Islamic history, the people of Afghanistan have been
associated with a kind of traditional balanced Islam that derives from the
influence of custom and social traditions on society....