Scholars
Have Shown That There Is No Evidence That Islam Has Ever Preached The Use Of
Terror
Main
Points:
1. The Quran
and Hadith speak of jihad against one’s own self and struggling and taking
pains for the spread of the message of the Quran and Hadith as the true jihad.
2. Muslim
terrorist organizations are not true representative of Muslims and their
interpretations of Islamic texts are based on political and sectarian
ambitions.
3. The cause of
the spread of terrorism should be found out in the political analysis of the
actions of the western nations like the US and the UK and not in the Quran and
Hadith.
-----
By
New Age Islam Staff Writer
4 October
2021
Dr. N.C. Asthana is a retired IPS
officer and a former DGP, Kerala. Of his 49 books, five are on terrorism and
counter-terrorism.
-----
The world
has been struggling against terrorism for the last few decades. And the debate on the origins of and
motivation behind terrorism has also been going on for a long time. There has
been terrorism adopted by LTTE against the Sri Lankan government in the 80s and
some other organizations have also adopted terrorism as the sole means to
achieve their political goals. But it is the terrorism perpetrated by Muslim
organizations that has evoked a global reaction both theoretically and
politically. The emergence of Taliban against Russian aggression against
Taliban in the 80s and the emergence of Al Qaida in the beginning of the 21st
century and the 9/11 attacks by the Osama-led Al Qaida shifted the focus
completely to the ‘Islamic terrorism’ and the theory that only Islam is the
source of terrorism and that Islamic theological sources have served as the
origin of Islamic terrorism. The ISIS also took advantage of the dream of
Khilafat of general Muslims largely sold to the general Muslims by conservative
Muslim scholars also helped anti-Islam propagandists in spreading the myth that
Islam supports terrorism thought neither Khilafat nor jihad as they Holy War
has been supported by the Quran or hadith.
The Quran
and Hadith speak of jihad against one’s own self and struggling and taking
pains for the spread of the message of the Quran and Hadith as the true jihad.
However, the unsupported claims and ambitions of some terrorist organisatios to
establish Islamic caliphate was used by the West , particularly the US to
spread Islamophobia and the fear of Muslims and Islam among the global
community.
The US also
strategically ignored the correct and true interpretations of liberal and
knowledgeable Islamic scholars from across the globe and across linguistic
communities who brought out the truth through their exegeses and commentaries
that the Muslim terrorist organizations are not true representative of Muslims
and their interpretations of Islamic texts are based on political and sectarian
ambitions.
They have
time and again pointed out and made it known to the global community that
Islamic texts --- the Quran and Hadiths –do not support terrorism and violence.
But interestingly and unfortunately, the US and other Western nations and
Islamophobes only focus on the claims and interpretations of the mouthpieces
and press releases of the handful of
small terrorist organizations that they will capture the world with force and
establish Islamic caliphate in the whole world knowing full well that these
petty criminals with some hundred AK-47s, bombs and some captured old and
outdated tanks cannot defeat the mighty armies of the US, China, France,
Germany, Russia and other countries. But still the US creates fear psychosis
among the world to further its political interests in the world. In the name of
fighting terrorism in Africa, Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan, it spent
billions of dollars and fought long-drawn wars and after two decades, it had to
leave Iraq, Africa and Afghanistan not only after it ‘lost’ the battle to these
terrorist organizations but also in fact seeing those terrorist organizations
like ISIS come to power in Mosul and like Taliban come to power in Afghanistan.
Therefore,
like Mr A.C. Asthana puts it rightly, terrorism is a political
phenomenon and a political tool and not a religious phenomenon as no religion,
not even Islam encourages and canonises terrorism in religious literature. It
is only a tool of the West which speaks of Crusade ( as George Bush had inadvertently
spoken out). Islam does not have any idea of holy war against non-combatants,
children and women. He rightly says that the cause of the spread of terrorism
should be found out in the political analysis of the actions of the western
nations like the US and the UK and not in the Quran and Hadith.
---------------------------------
Following
is the Original Article written By Dr. N.C. Asthana. He is a retired IPS officer and a former DGP, Kerala. This article was originally printed in The Wire
Terrorism
Is a Political Phenomenon. To Blame it on Islam is Wrong
By
N.C. Asthana
Scholars
have shown that there is no evidence that Islam has ever preached the use of
terror, yet this narrative doesn’t stop.
Ever since
the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Islamophobia in the world in general
and India in particular has received a fresh impetus. A common refrain, which
you are quite likely to hear even from those who are not self-proclaimed
anti-Muslims is, “All Muslims are not terrorists but all terrorists are
Muslims.”
The
insinuation implicit in this belief is that there is something such and
fundamentally wrong with Islam per se, which predisposes Muslims towards
becoming brutal terrorists. In fact, even the brutal beheadings of captives by
ISIS terrorists like Jihadi John are, in popular Islamophobic perception,
attributed to them being Muslims and not to the individuals’ perversity.
Indiscriminate
use of a term like ‘Islamic terrorism’ has created an impression in the minds
of a large number of people that terrorists who happen to be Muslims exist
because Islam, somehow ‘approving’ of terrorism, drives them inexorably towards
it.
The notion
is so widespread that even scholars are not immune from it. An Israeli scholar
Shmuel Bar, for example, while admitting that terrorism is not an Islamic
phenomenon, still provocatively and misleadingly titled his study ‘The
Religious Sources of Islamic Terrorism’.
This is a
dangerous misconception – a vicious myth that is rooted as much in ignorance as
in prejudice. Terrorism as we find it today simply did not exist in the early
days of Islam when its religious concepts were crystallised for posterity.
Hence, there is no question of there being any support for the modern phenomenon
of terrorism in the Qur’an or the Hadis, a record of the words, actions, and
the silent approval of the Prophet.
Had there
been any religious sanction for terrorism as we understand it today, someone
was bound to have discovered it sometime in the past. There is no reason to
believe that some people discovered them only in the 20th century and have gone
berserk.
People take part in the “March for Love” at North Hagley Park after the
mosque attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand March 23, 2019. Photo:
REUTERS/Jorge Silva
------
People
usually fail to spot the fallacy in holding on to such a notion. If it is
accepted that there is indeed a thing called ‘Islamic terrorism’, the only
logical solution of the problem of terrorism in the world would be to eliminate
Islam per se from the face of the earth because Islamic religious concepts are
immutable and hence the virus of terrorism cannot be isolated from the body of
Islam. If the world is, by any chance, unanimous in believing that Islam is the
source of terrorism let them raise an international coalition force and destroy
it; however, it is unfair to keep on tormenting Muslims on a mistaken notion.
The fallacy persists even if they use terms like ‘Islamist terrorism’, ‘jihadist terrorism’, ‘militant Islamism’, or ‘Wahhabi terrorism’. All of them necessarily imply that it is terrorism inspired eventually by Islam, or perhaps an ‘aberrant’ variety of Islam – the blame on Islam, however, remains the same.
Misconceptions
Regarding The Concept Of Jihad
In
theological matters, there cannot be any final authority or interpretation.
However, we must have the intellectual honesty to take note of those
interpretations also, which do not conform to the notions emanating from
Islamophobia.
The very
word ‘jihad’, for example, is often loosely translated in the West as ‘Holy
War’. Fact is, as J.M.B. Porter also points out, there is no term in classical
Arabic, which means ‘Holy War’.
The Western
notion of a Holy War comes from the Crusades. The etymology of the word Crusade
(from French Croisade, f. Croix meaning ‘cross’, f. Sp. Cruzado, f. Croisee,
literally meaning ‘the state of being marked with the Cross’) makes it clear
that it meant ‘War for the Cross’.
Scholars
like Bernard Lewis and Richard Ostling also admit that the closest equivalent
of ‘Holy War’ in Arabic would be Harb Muqaddas and incidentally, this word does
not figure in the Qur’an or any other classical Arabic text. Jonathan
Riley-Smith points out that the concept of Jihad was codified during the Muslim
conquests of the eighth century, long before Pope Urban II preached the First
Crusade in 1095. Hence, the question of Jihad being any ‘Holy War’ does not
arise.
Jihad, or
more correctly, the full word Jihad Fi Sabilillah, as Sayyid Abul A’la
Maudoodi, the well-regarded scholar of Islam says in his famous works ‘Jihad
fi Sabilillah’ and ‘Al Jihad fil Islam’, means ‘to strive, to exert
or to take extraordinary pains in the way of Allah’.
Along this
line, Majid Khadduri, one of the most respected theologians of Islam, describes
four kinds of Jihad:
Jihad of the heart (Jihad Bil Qalb/Nafs);
Jihad by the tongue (Jihad Bil Lisan);
Jihad by the hand (Jihad Bil Yad); and
Jihad by the sword (Jihad Bis Saif).
An ordinary
warrior or combatant who fights for worldly objectives is called Muhaarib;
one who fights for loftier objectives is called Mujahid. The Prophet himself,
after his return from battle, reportedly commented that “We have returned from
the Lesser Jihad (Al-jihad Al-Asghar, meaning battle) to the Greater
Jihad (Al-jihad Al-Akbar, that is, struggle for one’s soul).”
The usual
references in the West to the Surah Anfal verse 8:39, Surah Al-Baqarah verse
2:193 and Surah At-Tauba that have flooded the internet as some sort of
Qur’anic support for violence against non-Muslims have been hotly contested by
numerous scholars. Muhammad Mushtaq Ahmad, for example, concludes in his study
‘The Notions of Dār al-Ḥarb and Dār al-Islām in Islamic
Jurisprudence with Special Reference to the Ḥanafī School’ that Muslims must not
fight against non-Muslims who are not belligerent towards them just for their
being non-Muslims.
It has also
become fashionable to blame a mysterious thing called radicalisation for the
phenomenon of terrorism. People have, in fact, been speaking of terrorism,
radicalisation, and fundamentalism in the same breath as if they all happen to
be synonymous.
Etymologically,
the word ‘radical’ comes from the Latin radix-radicis meaning ‘root’.
For any
religion, holding fast to its original beliefs and practices or observing
extreme religiosity, might lead to a regressive or backward society by modern
standards; it, per se, cannot lead to terrorism. If one insists, she is free to
live the way the original proponents of his faith did; it does not follow from
it that she would become a terrorist because the original proponents were not
terrorists.
Terrorism
is not simply the employment of unlawful violence or unconventional means of
combat (asymmetric, guerrilla or whatever) to inculcate fear, intended to
coerce or intimidate governments or societies. Since most other crimes also
involve unlawful violence, terrorism is distinguished from them by its
objectives. These objectives might have religious or ideological overtones or
undertones but they are necessarily political in character. Criminals commit
crimes for personal gain; terrorists don’t. When non-state actors decide to
resort to terrorism, it means they believe that nothing short of unconventional
violence (as against permitted forms of protest) will result in the political
concessions they seek.
As Lt. Gen.
Asad Durrani, a former chief of the ISI, described it very astutely in his
article ‘CT Made Easy’, “Nothing comes close to a non-remedy to fight the
menace of terrorism than our latest gimmick – ‘The terrorists have been
brainwashed, so let’s read to them another narrative’. Anyone who believes that
those committed to a cause deeply enough to blow themselves up could be
‘reprogrammed’ by a mantra, obviously has no idea what ‘de-radicalisation’
entails.”
Michael
Scheuer, a former CIA intelligence officer and former head of the agency’s
Osama bin Laden unit, argues in his book ‘Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is
Losing the War on Terror’, “They hate us for what we do, not who we are.”
Amongst other reasons, he holds the US foreign policy actions of the invasion
and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan; their unstinted support of Israel
against the Palestinians, etc. as fuelling acts of terrorism by some Muslims.
US troops patrol at an Afghan
National Army (ANA) base in Logar province, Afghanistan August 7, 2018. Photo:
Reuters/Omar Sobhani/File Photo
-----
Albert J.
Bergesen and Omar Lizardo conclude in their work ‘International Terrorism and
the World-System’:
“Terrorism should be seen as a strategic
reaction to American power, an idea associated with the ‘blowback’ thesis… The
causal mechanism here is that the projection of military power plants seeds of
later terrorist reactions, as ‘retaliation for previous American imperial
actions’.”
Adam Curtis
put it boldly in his ‘The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of
Fear’: it is the ‘politics of fear’ which enables the Western governments to
perpetuate their oppressive and exploitative policies.
“The
attacks on 11 September were not the expression of a confident and growing
movement; they were acts of desperation by a small group frustrated by their
failure which they blamed on the power of America.”
The West
has been deliberately denying the political aspects of terrorism in its
discourses because overplaying the religious aspect helps them in two ways.
First, it
obscures the enduring impact of the political injustices committed upon the
Muslims starting from the Sykes-Picot agreement (1916) to the Gulf War (1991)
and the invasion of Afghanistan (2001), etc.
Second, it
helps them project a condescending attitude towards Islam that the West is
prepared to put up with Islam as long as they are ‘good Muslims’ conforming to
Western values but would not tolerate the ‘radical Muslims’ who espouse a
different view of life.
Those who
do not tire of referring to the concept of Dar-ul-Islam (Abode of Islam) and
Dar-ul-Harb (Abode of War) as a driving force behind terrorism, fail to realise
that the medieval age of swords-fighting-swords is over and now there is no
such lunatic who would genuinely believe that, even with a few lakhs of AK-47
rifles, they could launch upon a Muslim conquest of the world against
unimaginably mighty militaries of the nations of the world, teeming with
immensely powerful weapons.
Back in
1955 itself, Majid Khadduri had called this idea an ‘obsolete weapon’.
While it is
true that the ISIS had said that their Caliphate in Greater Syria will be the
core of a huge Islamic Caliphate that will include the countries of the Middle
East; North Africa; parts of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan (collectively
called Khurasan in the medieval past); European countries that were conquered
from the Muslims in the past (that is, Spain, the Balkans) and other Muslim
countries (Turkey, the Caucasus), also knew that it was insane public
posturing. In any case, can we blame a faith for what a few crazy people had
said and who were bombed out of existence almost as quickly as they had flared?
Attributing
the complex phenomenon of terrorism to just a few lines in a nearly 1,400 year
old religious text is not only ridiculously simplistic, it is outright
injustice to about 1.9 billion adherents of the faith.
A fair
analysis of terrorism must not be misconstrued as sympathising with terrorism
in any way. On the contrary, it is the most vital step towards shaping and
implementing appropriate policies and actions for dealing effectively with the
menace of terrorism.
If the
world has floundered in its ‘war against terrorism’, it is because it has never
had an honest-to-god analysis of terrorism.
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Source: The
Wire
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