The Quran can be read to justify war as well as peace
The funeral of British suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer was held in absentia in his family's ancestral village, near Lahore, Pakistan. Thousands attended. The 22-year-old from Leeds, whose bomb at Aldgate station killed seven people, was hailed by the crowd as "a hero of Islam."
Some in Britain cannot conceive that a suicide bomber could be a hero of Islam. Since 7/7 many have made statements to attempt to explain what seems to them a contradiction in terms. Since the violence cannot be denied, they argue that the connection with Islam is invalid. The deputy assistant commissioner of the London police, Brian Paddick, said that "Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together." His boss, Commissioner Ian Blair, asserted that there is nothing wrong with being a fundamentalist Muslim.
But on July 8, the London-based Muslim Weekly unblushingly published a lengthy opinion by Abid Ullah Jan titled Islam, Faith and Power. The gist of the article is that Muslims should strive to gain political and military power over non-Muslims, that warfare is obligatory for all Muslims, and that the Islamic state, Islam and Sharia (Islamic law) should be established throughout the world. All is supported with quotations from the Quran.
It concludes with a veiled threat to Britain. The bombings the previous day were a perfect illustration of what Jan was advocating, and the editor evidently felt no need to withdraw the article or to apologize for it. His newspaper is widely read and distributed across Britain.
By far the majority of Muslims today live without recourse to violence, for the Quran is like a pick-and-mix selection. If you want peace, you can find peaceable verses. If you want war, you can find bellicose verses. You can even find texts which specifically commend terror, the classic one being Q8:59-60, which urges Muslims to prepare themselves to fight non-Muslims, "Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies."
If you permit yourself a little judicious cutting, the range of choice in quranic teaching is even wider. A verse one often hears quoted as part of the "Islam is peace" litany runs along the lines: "If you kill one soul it is as if you have killed all mankind." But the full and unexpurgated version of Q5:32 states: "If anyone slew a person - unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land - it would be as if he slew the whole people." The very next verse lists a selection of savage punishments for those who fight Muslims and create "mischief" (or in some translations "corruption") in the land, punishments which include execution, crucifixion or amputation.
What kind of "mischief in the land" could merit such a reaction? Could it be interpreted as secularism, democracy and other non-Islamic values in a land? Could the "murder" be the killing of Muslims in Iraq?
To meet this challenge, they developed the rule of abrogation, which states that wherever contradictions are found, the later-dated text abrogates the earlier one. To elucidate further the original intention of Mohammed, they referred to traditions (hadith) recording what he himself had said and done.
Sadly for the rest of the world, both these methods led Islam away from peace and toward war. For the peaceable verses of the Quran are almost all earlier, dating from Mohammed's time in Mecca, while those which advocate war and violence are almost all later, dating from after his flight to Medina.
Although jihad has a variety of meanings, including a spiritual struggle against sin, Mohammed's own example shows clearly that he frequently interpreted jihad as literal warfare and himself ordered massacre, assassination and torture.
So the mantra "Islam is peace" is almost 1,400 years out of date. It was only for about 13 years that Islam was peace. From 622 onward it became increasingly aggressive, albeit with periods of peaceful co-existence. For today's radical Muslims - just as for the medieval jurists who developed classical Islam - it would be truer to say "Islam is war."
Could it be that the young men who committed suicide were neither on the fringes of Muslim society, nor following an eccentric and extremist interpretation of their faith, but rather that they came from the very core of the Muslim community and were motivated by a mainstream interpretation of Islam?
Islamism is now the dominant voice
in contemporary Islam, and has become the seedbed of the radical movements.
The violence which is endemic in Muslim societies such as Pakistan is increasingly
present in Britain's Muslim community. Already we have violence by Pakistani
Muslims against Kurdish Muslims, by Muslims against non-Muslims living
among them (Caribbean people in the West Midlands, for example), a rapid
growth in honour killings and now suicide bombings.