From The Economist
There is a heated debate about the role of Islam in jihadism. Will it make a difference?
WESTERN leaders have long urged Muslims to do more to counter jihadist ideology. This month Barack Obama said moderate Muslims, including scholars and clerics, had a responsibility to reject “twisted interpretations of Islam” and the lie “that America and the West are somehow at war with Islam”. On February 23rd Tony Abbott, Australia’s prime minister, urged Muslim leaders to say that Islam is a religion of peace—“and mean it”.
Muslims have not taken kindly to such hectoring. Yet they are starting to debate the role that Islamist ideology plays in extremism. On February 22nd Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Egypt’s al-Azhar mosque, part of a university that is the Sunni world’s oldest seat of learning, declared that extremism was caused by “bad interpretations of the Koran and the Sunna [the doings of the Prophet Muhammad]”, and that what was taught in Islamic schools and universities needed to change.
The doctrines of jihad and takfir are central to the debate. Extremists interpret jihad as mandating offensive holy war, though they may disagree about when and against whom it should be waged. The evidence from the hadith (the Prophet’s sayings) and renowned scholars that Islam is a religion of the sword is “so profuse that only a heretic would argue otherwise”, claims the most recent issue of Dabiq, the magazine of Islamic State (IS). Extremists differ, too, abouttakfir, the process whereby Muslims declare other Muslims to be apostates or unbelievers, for which the penalty is death. Al-Qaeda applies the doctrine with some limits to avoid alienating Muslims from its cause; IS invokes takfir wholesale, especially against Shias, perhaps in the belief that cinematic gore is the stronger lure.
Mainstream clerics are trying to rebut such views. “Jihaddoes not mean holy war but striving to achieve peace and anything good in obedience to Allah,” says Dauda Bello, an imam from Nigeria’s north-eastern region, where Boko Haram, an Islamist insurgent group, rampages. Last year 120 Muslim scholars wrote to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, IS’s leader, saying that he had misconstrued Islam by ignoring the context of the Koran, classical teaching and the current era. Takfir, they said, can only be pronounced on those who have openly professed unbelief. It is properly carried out only by ulema (a group of recognised experts in sacred law and theology), which will first offer the opportunity to repent. To prove the point, al-Azhar will not call IS non-Muslims.
