The rules of engagement when fighting a jihad also forbid the killing of innocent civilians.
So for quite some time I was puzzled as to how Hamas, ISIS, al-Qaeda et al. could justify this to themselves.
Eventually, I came across this interview with the former leader of Hamas, Sheikh Yassin. It's one of the most chilling, surreal sequences I have come across in any TV programme, though its also one that I used with my GCSE Islam and International Baccalaureate students for many years.
Extract 1 from 'Langan Behind the Lines: Life's a Beach' tx 02.03.2001
www.bbc.co.uk
What Sheikh Yassin invokes in this interview is the principle of
qisas. It is similar to the famous
lex talionis or law of retributive justice found in the Bible (e.g. see Exodus 21v24 ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’). Here are two of the Quranic versions:
‘Whoever transgresses against you, respond in kind’ (Surah 2: 194)
‘
We ordained therein for them: “Life for life, eye for eye, nose for nose, ear for ear, tooth for tooth, and wounds equal for equal.” But if any one remits the retaliation by way of charity, it is an act of atonement for himself. And if any fail to judge by (the light of) what Allah hath revealed, they are (No better than) wrong-doers.’ (Surah 5: 45)
So movements like ISIS, al-Qaeda and Hamas try to justify their terrorism by framing
qisas as a law of revenge with a wide remit: if someone does something to you, you have the right to do something similar back to them. And because western countries (and Israel) have been responsible for murdering innocent civilians in places like Iraq and Palestine, ISIS, al-Qaeda and Hamas think they should be allowed to do the same thing.
This view was taken to its logical – and most extreme – conclusion by one Saudi cleric (Nasir ibn Hamad al-Fahd) in a now infamous book justifying the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction against enemy states. ‘Anyone who considers America’s aggressions against Muslims and their lands during the past decades, wrote Fahd, ‘will conclude that striking her [with WMD] is permissible merely on the basis of the rule of treating as one has been treated (
qisas). No other arguments need to be mentioned.’
However, the range of this principle has traditionally been very limited. The
qisas rule is usually only meant to apply to private individuals seeking justice in situations where they have been physically harmed by someone else. Typically, within the Islamic penal code, it has therefore been applied to cases of murder, manslaughter, or acts involving physical mutilation. It was not meant to apply to international affairs in a way that holds innocent civilians responsible for the crimes of their governments.
Suffice it to say that a majority of mainstream Muslim intellectuals and theologians operating from a variety of perspectives ranging from conservative to liberal utterly reject both militancy, the adoption of terrorist tactics by militants.
A good example is Asma Afsaruddin:
How widespread misuse of the term “jihad” creates confusion and misunderstanding about a core concept in Islam.
renovatio.zaytuna.edu
Closer to home, in 2002 Oxfam turned down a £5,000 pound donation, the advance fee for a book by the philosopher Ted Honderich. In it, he argued that the Palestinians 'have had a right to moral right to their terrorism as certain as was the moral right, say, of the African people of South Africa against their white captors and the apartheid state.'
All very grim and depressing, of course. But I thought this was worth mentioning.
In the case of those aforementioned Salafi-jihadists, it's also a classic case of deciding what you want to do first and then coming up with some
post hoc scriptural/theological justification for it.
