Religious and theological underpinning of Global Islamist Terror

Mar 04, 2016

Islamic religious thought in India is either declining or stagnated. What are the reasons?

You are right. Islamic religious thought in India is either declining or stagnated. The primary reason is a lack of awareness of global currents of thought, unconcern over, and even ignorance of, the requirements of living in the present 21st-century. We are now living in an internet-wired, 24x7 television channel world. It’s a cliché to say we live in a global village. But that is true. There is no way a community, much less a global community like Muslims, can live all by itself, wallowing in its own backward thoughts, nursing its own victimhood, and nurturing a sense of supremacism, exclusivism, condemning everybody, including other than one’s own sect as kuffar, looking at a deeply religious people like Hindus and Christians as idolaters and with contempt, fighting seventh century battles of Ghazwa-e-Badr and Uhud, and Khandaq, assured of God’s support.

See how Saudi Arabia teaches its children to be the most xenophobic, intolerant, exclusivist, hateful,as they can be, towards the whole world, including 80 per cent of Muslims, but it has no option to engage with hundreds of thousands of non-Muslim and non-Wahhabi/non-Salafi Muslims living and working for them in the country. It teaches its children that Muslims and Jews can never be trustworthy friends, according to the Quran, no less, and yet, it has the most intimate relationship with the Christian West and Jewish Israel.

The present generation of youth, with all information available to it at the tip of its finger, can see the hypocrisy and has rebelled. Remember, Osama bin Laden was a wealthy Saudi engineer. Sixteen of the 19 terrorists involved in 9/11 were Saudi nationals. Juhayman al-Otaybi, of Najd and his brother-in-law Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani, the Mahdi-to-be, were both Saudis who seized the grand mosque, the Kaaba Sharif, in 1979, demanding freedom from the Kingdom’s oppressive rule and establishing a true Islamic state instead.

What all these people are saying is: practice what you preach. Terror and violence are the direct result of what is being taught in Saudi schools and madrasas, and, of course, through Saudi text books in other parts of the world wherever there is a Muslim community and considers Saudi Arabia an Islamic country worthy of importing books from.

There is stagnation in thought because Salafism/Wahhabism bans all ilulkalam, all discussions on ageeda (faith)-related subjects. Anyone would be declared kafir and deserving slaughter if found discussing the nature of God, for instance, or vital questions like whether the Quran is created or uncreated, whether war verses in the Quran are contextual and were meant only for the wars fought in seventh century or are applicable to us today as we are not engaged in any war with kuffar now, indeed we have all sorts of treaties with both at bilateral, multilateral levels with them, as well as international charters of peace and human rights that all Muslim countries have signed.

So you have raised a very good question, something I keep talking about all the time. This stagnation in Muslim discourse will just have to be broken. We must have many platforms like New Age Islam where everybody is heard, no matter how outrageous his/her views, except, of course, offensive, personal remarks that are alone censured. Any progress, I believe, will only come from dialogue and debate, but fruitful, thoughtful debate. I want New Age Islam to be a forum for all Muslims to brainstorm together; of course, non-Muslims can also chip in, after all we cannot live alone any longer anywhere in the world.

Overwhelmingly, Muslims condemn violence and do not subscribe to extremism as dished out by groups like ISIS. However, it is said that merely condemning violence and stating ‘Islam is a peaceful religion’ do not suffice. Muslims need to tackle sources that are interpreted to feed violence. What are your comments?

When your strategy doesn’t work, you have to think of a new strategy. So far, we have focused on denial — terrorism having nothing to do with Islam; victimhood – it’s all a CIAMossad creation, and so on. But our children, our sons and daughters continue to run away to the so-called Islamic state. Our youth are enamoured of the millenarian thesis being dished out by the ISIS ideologues, based on scores of ahadith (narrations of the so-called sayings of the Prophet (pbuh) and some allegorical verses of Quran. Our youth are honest and idealist. They want to practice what we, the parents and our madrasas have been teaching them in our homes and madrasas. They don’t want to be hypocrites like us. After all, if we say all verses in the Quran are of universal significance and applicable to us as guidance for all time to come, then why are we not at war, why are we not fighting the kuffar and expanding Islam’s reach to the world, why are we not engaged in demolishing idols and statues all the time? Our children and our youth can easily see that we are hypocrites and, perhaps, also apostates. So Jihadi youth are now being taught to kill their apostate, hypocritical parents and, in some cases, in Iraq they are doing that with glee.

So we clearly need to brainstorm deeply and evolve a consensus that says that contextual verses or the Quran, and narrations of the Quran relating to war, do not apply to us today in the 21st century. We are no longer, and not likely, to fight the same battles. For God’s sake, that was 1400 years ago. Those instructions had been given to fight those battles. Soon after those battles finished, those instructions lost their value, except as a valuable historical record. Unless we say so loud and clear, and convince our children of the veracity of this statement through the examples of thousands of communities in history who have fought bloody battles and have them come together, forgetting the instructions given to soldiers in the previous war. So yes, this war is not going to end, and our children are not stopping rebelling and leaving us, and even coming back to kill us, until we completely overhaul our theological positions in the light of an “adequate” reading of Quranic teachings, as the holy Pope Francis recently suggested. -- NewAgeIslam.com

--Part II to be continued next week