Soccer Dad

Islamism or: How They Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

In The Crisis of Islam, Bernard Lewis writes:

There are several forms of Islamic extremism current at the present time. The best known are the subversive radicalism of Al-Qa'ida and other groups that resemble it all over the Muslim world; the preemptive fundamentalism of the Saudi establishment; and the institutionalized revolution of the ruling Iranian hierarchy. All of these are, in a sense, Islamic in origin, but some of them have deviated very far from their origins.

Just how far they have deviated is discussed by Noah Feldman, an American author and professor of law at the New York University School of Law. He also worked as an advisor in the early days of the Paul Bremer transitional team in Iraq for the writing of the country's then unwritten constitution. In an article for the New York Times magazine, Islam, Terror and the Second Nuclear Age, Feldman touches on the attempt to justify suicide bombings in Islamic law.

Basically, Islamists have solved the problem of the apparent contradiction between suicide and suicide bombings by redefining these bombers--despite the blatant contradiction with the standard definition of a martyr as being killed by someone other than the martyr himself.

That leaves the problem of justifying the killing of women and children, which seem to clearly go against Islamic law.

“A woman was found killed in one of the battles fought by the Messenger of Gd,” runs a report about the Prophet Muhammad considered reliable and binding by the Muslim scholars. “So the Messenger of Gd forbade the killing of women and children.” This report was universally understood to prohibit the deliberate killing of noncombatant women and children. Some scholars interpreted it to mean that anyone incapable of warfare should be protected and so extended the ban to the elderly, the infirm and even male peasants, who as a rule did not fight. Muslims living among the enemy were also out of bounds. These rather progressive principles were broadly accepted by the Islamic legal authorities, Sunni and Shiite alike. For well over a thousand years, no one seriously questioned them.

Even Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, the Lebanese cleric who approved the attack on US Marines in 1983 said the 9/11 bombers were not martyrs--but "merely suicides."

At first, the sanctioning of the killing of women and children in Israel by suicide bombers developed almost on its own.

The equivocation by Muslim scholars with respect to the technique of suicide bombing reflected the reality that throughout the Muslim world, Palestinian suicide bombers were by 2001 identified as martyrs dying in a just cause. This, in turn, was the natural outgrowth of the decades before suicide bombing, when Palestinian terrorists were applauded for killing Israeli civilians, including women and children. Given that embracing Palestinian suicide bombing had become a widespread social norm, it would have been essentially unthinkable for an important Muslim scholar to condemn the practice without losing his standing among Muslims worldwide. In the Islamic world, as in the U.S. Supreme Court, the legal authorities cannot get too far away from their public constituency without paying a price.

What happened, in other words, is that without the scholars paying too much attention to the question, the killing of Israeli women and children had become a kind of exception to the ordinary laws of jihad.

It wasn't too hard to widen the loophole to include more than just Israelis.
o Israeli women could be killed because they served in the army.
o bin Laden claimed attacks on American were allowed because they were defensive in nature, since Americans were occupying Saudi soil
o Later, killing American civilians became justified because they freely voted for the government and were thus liable for its policies
o Muslims worldwide are under attack and they are therefore allowed to use all means necessary to defend themselves--even those that violate the Islamic laws of Jihad.

The underlying basis for permitting the killing of women and children boils down to it's right because it's necessary: the basic argument used by the West in modern warfare--particularly the nuclear bomb--has been adopted by the Moslem world, just as it has adopted the technology of mass destruction.

Feldman concludes that:

it is an unavoidable fact that the classic restrictions on the killing of women, children and Muslims in jihad have been deeply undermined in the last decade.

Which is why we need real moderate Moslem leadership to take a stand--something that we are not going to see from organizations like CAIR.

Daled Amos

Technorati Tag: Islam and Islamism and Suicide Bombers and Islamic Law .

Posted by daledamos at November 1, 2006 2:29 AM