Judea Pearl, father of the journalist Daniel Pearl who was murdered by al Qaeda, wrote in the Sunday Times yesterday that condemnations of the London bombings by the Muslim community, however sincere they may be, are ineffective when dealing with fanatics capable of such irrational and cruel crimes:
‘It is only through the formal instruments of the Islamic religion — declaring such acts as suicide bombing to be apostasy, fasad (corrupting the principles of Islam) and kufr (falsifying the roots of Islam) — that the Muslim majority can hope to penetrate the shroud of self-righteousness that licenses killings in the name of God. And it is only through religious excommunication that Muslim communities can disassociate themselves from those who have defiled their religion. These considerations were keenly recognised by the spiritual leaders of the Spanish Muslim community. On March 11, commemorating the first anniversary of the Madrid train bombings, 75% of all clerics associated with the Spanish Muslim Council issued a fatwa against Osama Bin Laden, calling him an apostate and urging others of their faith to denounce the Al-Qaeda leader.
‘This brave and unprecedented move — most welcome to families like mine whose children have been murdered by Islamic extremists — generated only a meagre response from leaders of the great mosques in the Middle East, but sent an important symbolic message worldwide. It demonstrated that western Muslim clerics do have the Islamic credentials and jurisprudent justification to issue such fatwas. Further, it has accentuated the disingenuous stance of some clerics in the Middle East who refuse to denounce, in religious vocabulary, acts that they have proclaimed to be contrary to the teachings of Islam. The horrific events in London offer a unique opportunity for British Muslim clerics to join their Spanish brethren and issue a fatwa (ruling) against Bin Laden — the arch symbol of the ideology that led to the bombings.’
That very day, Associated Press reported that Britain's largest Sunni Muslim group on Sunday had issued a binding religious edict, a fatwa, condemning the July 7 suicide bombings as the work of a ‘perverted ideology’:
‘The Sunni Council denounced the bombings as anti-Islamic and said the Quran, the Muslim holy book, forbade suicide attacks. "Who has given anyone the right to kill others? It is a sin. Anyone who commits suicide will be sent to Hell," said Mufti Muhammad Gul Rehman Qadri, the council chairman. "What happened in London can be seen as a sacrilege. It is a sin to take your life or the life of others."
‘The council said Muslims should not use "atrocities being committed in Palestine and Iraq" to justify attacks such as those in London that killed 55 when suicide bombers struck in three Underground trains and a double-decker bus, the fatwa declared. "We equally condemn those who may have been behind the masterminding of these acts, those who incited these youths in order to further their own perverted ideology," Qadri said. More than 2,000 Sunni clerics, scholars and community leaders attended Sunday's meeting, which was scheduled before the bombings.’
It’s a start, and one for which the Sunni Council should be given credit. But it is
only a start. What particularly needs to happen is for Muslim religious leaders to declare named individuals who promote or support terrorism as apostates and to issue a fatwa against them. For if supporting terrorism is truly against the precepts of the religion, then a fatwa should be issued against such supremely influential terrorism promoters as Sheikh Qaradawi.
When such a development occurs, then we’ll know that the Muslim community is serious about reclaiming its religion from the evil that has consumed it.
