There are Bad Fatwas and Good Fatwas. [URGENTLY UPDATED, TWICE]

Pretty good pun, huh, dieters? But I'm serious.

The word "fatwa" gives us the chills. It conjures memories of the death sentence pronounced by Ayatollah Khomeini upon novelist Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, and of Osama's 1996 declaration of war on America.

But a fatwa is only a decree or judgment in Islamic law, says Wikipedia:

A fatwa (Arabic: فتوى) plural fatāwa (Arabic: فتاوى) , is a legal pronouncement in Islam, issued by a religious law specialist on a specific issue. Usually a fatwa is issued at the request of an individual or a judge to settle a question where ’’fiqh,’’ Islamic jurisprudence, is unclear. A scholar capable of issuing fatwas is known as a Mufti.

Contrary to what is believed by non-Muslims, and even by the majority of Muslims, a fatwa is not binding on all persons professing the Muslim faith. The only ones who are obliged to obey any specific fatwa are the mufti who issued it and his followers.

Because Islam has no centralized priestly hierarchy, there is no uniform method to determine who can issue a valid fatwa and who cannot. Some Islamic scholars complain that too many people feel qualified to issue fatwas.

Different Islamic clerics can issue contradictory fatwas. The effect depends upon whether or not this takes place in a nation where Islamic law (sharia) is the basis of civil law. . . .

And so on. If you'd like to get a look at some assorted fataawa, here's a site called e-fatwa.com, I kid you not. This one made the women of Saudi Arabia happy:

Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Asheikh, who heads the Council of Senior Islamic Scholars, has come out strongly against the practice of forcing women to marry against their will while calling for the imprisonment of violators, the Saudi Press Agency reported yesterday.

The grand mufti’s call evoked positive reaction among women in the Kingdom, who greatly welcomed the move, saying it was a “wake-up” call. They also hoped that a mechanism would be set up to monitor and help those who come out against such practices.

“Forcing a woman to marry someone she does not want and preventing her from wedding someone she chooses ... is not permissible,” the grand mufti said. “Anyone who insists on forcing a woman ... to marry against her will is disobeying God and His Prophet (Muhammad),” he said.

Sheikh Abdul Aziz said anyone who does not give up this pre-Islamic practice “should be punished by imprisonment and should not be released until he drops his demand, which contravenes the provisions of Shariah.”

This one says that contrary to what you may have heard, Allah will forgive the repentant homosexual. . . .

Well, anyway . . . there are good fatwas and bad fatwas, and good fatwas circulating in society's arteries can help protect against the bad fatwas. Today, a good fatwa was issued:

American Islamic Scholars Issue Fatwa Against Terrorism
Voice of America

A council of Muslim scholars in the United States has issued a religious ruling, or fatwa, against terrorism and extremism.

The Muslim scholars released the ruling during a press conference in Washington, saying that Islam condemns terrorism, religious radicalism and the use of violence.

The scholars serve on the Fiqh Council of North America, an association of Muslim jurists who interpret Islamic law.

The council's chairman, Muzammil Siddiqi, read the fatwa, which says "targeting civilians' life and property through suicide bombings or any other method of attack is forbidden, and those who commit these barbaric acts are criminals, not martyrs." [Emphasis added]

"All acts of terrorism targeting the civilians are haram, forbidden in Islam. It is haram, forbidden, for a Muslim to cooperate or associate with any individual or group that is involved in any act of terrorism or violence," he said.

The fatwa also says it is the "civic and religious duty of Muslims to cooperate with law enforcement authorities to protect the lives of civilians."

The Islamic scholars say the fatwa was prompted by a similar ruling from the Muslim Council of Britain, following the July 7 terrorist attacks in London.

U.S. Muslim groups have frequently condemned terrorist acts, but the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Nihad Awad, says issuing a fatwa is the strongest statement that can be made by the Islamic community. . . .

The Muslim scholars have called for the fatwa to be read during Friday prayers at mosques across the United States.

Salam al-Marayati, the executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, says he hopes the message will resonate globally, but also close to home.

"We hope that this would influence other parts of the world, but more importantly I think we are doing this for our children and for our future," he said. "Our children need to be very clear on these matters. There should be no confusion and no ambiguities. As we stand together, tall, as leaders of established Muslim-American organizations, this is a message to our future generation and to our children that this notion that suicide bombing or terrorism has any room in Islam is rejected outright."

The Council on American-Islamic relations has launched public service announcements on radio and television saying that Islam forbids terrorism.

Those are the kind of strong words we've been waiting for from mainstream Muslims. In the report on this I heard tonight on ABC World News, it was clear that one of the chief motivations for this fatwa and the campaign to promote it was to turn the young generation of Muslims away from terrorism, to decisively destroy its glamour in their eyes.

GOOD FATWA.

- amba

UPDATE: FAKE FATWA?

Jjay in the Comments sends me over to The Counterterrorism Blog, where Steven Emerson of The Investigative Project on Terrorism says, "[T]he fatwa is bogus."

Nowhere does it condemn the Islamic extremism ideology that has spawned Islamic terrorism. It does not renounce nor even acknowledge the existence of an Islamic jihadist culture that has permeated mosques and young Muslims around the world. It does not renounce Jihad let alone admit that it has been used to justify Islamic terrorist acts. It does not condemn by name any Islamic group or leader. In short, it is a fake fatwa designed merely to deceive the American public into believing that these groups are moderate. In fact, officials of both organizations have been directly linked to and associated with Islamic terrorist groups and Islamic extremist organizations. One of them is an unindicted co-conspirator in a current terrorist case; another previous member was a financier to Al-Qaeda.

I spoke with Judea Pearl, father of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl who told me that the fatwa was “vacuous because it does not name the perpetrators of Islamic terrorist theologies and leaders of Islamic movements like Yousef Al Qaradawi, Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahari, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc.” Pearl told me that these groups are “trying to perpetrate a deception on the American public.”

Emerson goes on to detail the links between officials of both the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) and the Council on American - Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Islamic terror groups, primarily Hamas, Hizbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but also the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda. Even more in-depth information from the Investigative Project on Terrorism is here.

If these groups have ties to practitioners of terror, what would be their motivation for engaging in a PR campaign to convince Americans of their peaceful moderation? As long as they don't name names and dissociate themselves decisively from the Wahhabis and jihadis, is this fatwa no different from the empty condemnations mouthed for years by Yasir Arafat? I can imagine three possible motivations:

1) A change of heart. (Fatwa chance.) Motivated by fear for the Muslim community in the wake of the London bombings. (Hey Michael -- it was you threatening to nuke Mecca! . . . )

2) A change of strategy, in sync with the change in the strategy of the Palestinian leadership, with which these groups are apparently most closely allied. If based on the pragmatic perception that terror isn't working to achieve their political goals, this would be a tentatively positive development.

3) A deliberate campaign to deceive, to lull Americans into a false sense of security and soften us up for further attacks.

I'm betting on #2. But I will continue to read The Counterterrorism Blog and try not to let the hope of hope make me a dupe.

UPDATE II: But wait -- read this post at Dean's World. (A big H/T to Restless Mania.)

First, he quotes Martin Shram's prediction from a January 2005 column that "2005 [will be] the year of Islam vs. Islam." Then, he quotes "a recent document published on MEMRI [The Middle East Media Research Institute], a site devoted to translating Arabic-language media for Western audiences. While MEMRI has taken criticism for . . . focusing only on the most negative and inflammatory of materials, this particular item simply demands attention. . . . [O]riginally written in Arabic . . . [i]t contains recommendations put before the United Nations legal and security councils."

I looked up the document, Fighting Terrorism: Recommendations of Arab Reformists. Oddly, it is written by "A. Dankowitz," who is identified as "Director of MEMRI's Reform Project ." (It's explained here: MEMRI is actually Israeli!) But it identifies a number of "Arab reformists" by name and quotes them at length in translation from the original Arabic. These guys are as outspoken as Steven Emerson and Judea Pearl deplore yesterday's FCNA fatwa for not being. For example, here is "Iraqi commentator and human rights activist Dr. Kazem Habib":

Where there are extremist Muslims, there is no point in talking about how murdering a man who has committed no crime is forbidden by Islam – because most of the religious schools, the large majority of the imams in the world's mosques, and most of the preachers on the Arab TV channels educate to violence and spread hatred and animosity towards people of other religions and other streams of thought. They do not acknowledge the other; they do not show tolerance towards non-Muslims. Moreover, they disseminate hatred against Muslims who do not walk in their own path, treating them as unbelievers – distinguishing between murdering a Muslim and murdering a non-Muslim, and preaching that it is permitted to murder a non-Muslim but forbidden to murder a Muslim. . . .

[T]he war on terror … requires intensive and ongoing intellectual, political, and educational activities, in order to fight the extremist and terrorist Islamic Salafi thought and the Salafi da'wa that calls to establish a fundamentalist Islamic regime . . .

Here is Egyptian Mamoun Fandy, writing after the July 23 bombings at Sharm al-Sheikh:

Muslims worldwide must have the courage to reject terrorism... Just as bin Laden and his group describe moderate Muslims as followers of the West and as unbelievers, it is time for the Muslim leaders to proclaim bin Laden himself to be an unbeliever...

Further, it is time to strip the title of "mosque" from a place where firebombs are made.... When a mosque becomes a place where firebombs are made, it ceases to be a mosque, and should be treated as the scene of a crime...

I have met with and talked to a large number of Muslims, especially in the West, who denounce violence in public but say in private conversations that "the West deserves [to suffer from terrorism]." In addition, they say in public that this is vengeance for what is happening in Palestine and Iraq. In their private conversations, all I have heard is blind hatred spurred by a sense of nihilistic destruction, which is a virus that has begun to take over many Muslims, particularly those living in the West.

Many condemn bin Laden, but unfortunately many others have not condemned him in any way. Most of [the latter] live in Europe and the U.S. They are not sleeper cells, as the naïve in the West call them; they are cells that are wide awake, ready to strike at any moment. . . .

Only two things can stop terrorism:...issuing fatwas removing bin Laden and his supporters from the fold of Islam, and the West ceasing to be naïve about "moderate Islamists." . . .

Here's another Iraqi reformist, Sa'ad Allah Khalil (is it a coincidence that so many are Iraqis? Is that country now a hotbed of more than just extremism?):

The religious discourse has not educated the people of the Islamist movements to adopt leniency, mercy, and tolerance for the other – but rather has educated to hatred of the other and plans to murder and uproot the other… The individual in the Islamist movements was not created to settle the land and live his life, but rather for the sake of the world to come; [this individual] aspires daily for Allah to grant him martyrdom so that he will be freed of the burden of responsibility, and will gain Paradise and pleasing Allah forever… This culture is completely unconnected to the human values to which the Koran calls…

How is it possible to deal with this way of thought? … In my opinion, even fatwas that prohibit this will not help, because [the clerics who would issue them] are denounced by the extremist Islamist movements …

There is a need to form a new religious culture that will lay out the borders of the Shari'a laws in the Koran, will set out what is characteristic of the life of the Prophet, and will clarify when and how the law is absolute for every time and place… Then, there is a need to discuss intensively the issue of abolishing chapters in the Koran [naskh] and [a need to examine] whether it is true that the verse of the sword [Koran 9:5] abolished all mercy, leniency, and forgiveness in the Koran… [Likewise,] there is a need to view the first Muslims as human beings with feelings, aspirations, and political goals [and not as divine]…

We must uncover the shame of all those who have enlisted the religion and the religious text for their own political and social goals . . .

These voices just do not have the ring of tagiyyah, or dissimulation (see Dave Schuler's contribution to the Comments). Others less naïve than I will no doubt put them in their political context; nonethless, they are voices that the blogsphere should be celebrating and amplifying. A good way to start is to go to Dean's World, read his post, and follow the links.

Fatwa shmatwa: Something's happening.

Comments

[gljunket]

At last! That's two steps: Condeming terrorism, then issuing the fatwa. Now how about some action, like proactive efforts to help root out terrorist cells and funding streams? It would seem mainstream Muslim-Americans should be eager to demonstrate their policies and beliefs, and distinguish themselves from the extremists.

[Jjay]

Check out the Counterterrorism Blog. It says the fatwa is baloney.

[Dave Schuler]

Motivation three from your update above has a name: tagiyyah, sometimes defined as dissimulation.

[Mark Daniels]

In a comment on my site, Richard Lawrence Cohen suggested I check out the very thorough job you've done researching and discussing the fatwa. I'm going to link to it. Thanks for your work here!

[amba]

Thank you, but it's all those others who did the work -- I copied and linked!