Week in review: Al Qa'eda denounced by Libyan group

Paul Woodward, Online Correspondent

• Last Updated: November 20. 2009 9:50AM UAE / November 20. 2009 5:50AM GMT

Jihadist ideology is now under attack from some of its erstwhile proponents. A Libyan group has issued a new religious document denouncing the tactics used by al Qa'eda as illegal under Islamic law.

"In May 2007, Sayyid Imam al Sharif, better known as Dr Fadl, a former member of the al Qa'eda leadership, attacked its tactics of mass slaughter, arguing that this inevitably led to the deaths of innocents, and was therefore un-Islamic," wrote Michael Smith in The National.

"He was particularly critical of the way in which Muslims lived freely within western societies, then attacked the very people who had given them shelter. Fadl's attack was dismissed by his fellow Egyptian, and former fellow student, al Zawahiri, as having been written while Fadl was in prison in Egypt.

"But last week saw a fresh attack, this time not from just one man, but from a complete militant movement previously aligned to al Qa'eda. The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), issued a new religious document denouncing the tactics used by al Qa'eda as illegal under Islamic law."

The text featured in a new documentary, "The Jihadi Code", which aired on CNN on Sunday.

Omar Ashour, writing for the Carnegie Endowment, described what he calls a second wave of modern Islamist de-radicalisation, which is being laid out through a process of ideological revision in a corpus of writings.

"The new body of literature, which is composed of more than 30 books, mainly deconstructs the eight major arguments of jihadism: al hakimmiyya (God's exclusive right to legislate), al riddah (apostasy, mainly of ruling regimes), al jihad/qital (fighting) for the Islamic state, jihad al daf' (defensive jihad), ahkam al diyar (rules of conduct in the 'abode of Islam' and the 'abode of infidelity'), methods for sociopolitical change, the inevitability of confrontation, and the 'neo-crusader' arguments.

"Deconstructing those arguments in the post-jihadist literature entails an inference shift. The theological arguments of jihadism rest on the idea that literal orders from God supersede any rational calculations or material interests. In other words, al nass fawq al maslaha (the text is above interests); believers are to follow divine commands literally and leave the consequences and results to God. This usually translates into an impetus to engage in armed confrontations against much stronger powers.

"In post-jihadist literature, there is a shift to the idea that interests determine the interpretation of religious texts. If a confrontation, or any other behavior, is likely to lead to negative consequences, it must be forbidden and should be avoided. In other words, it is theologically sanctioned pragmatism."

Johann Hari, in The Independent, tracked down some of Britain's best known former jihadis to find out what had led to their change of heart. They included Maajid Nawaz who had been a prominent member of the pan-Islamist political group, Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Mr Maajid had moved to Egypt in 2001, where he started to recruit fellow students, as he had done so many times before, but was soon arrested. He was put on trial for "propagation by speech and writing for any banned organisation" and found himself receiving help from an unexpected source.

"Although they abhorred his political views, Amnesty International said he had a right to free speech and to peacefully express his views, and publicised his case.

" 'I was just amazed,' Maajid says. 'We'd always seen Amnesty as the soft power tools of colonialism. So, when Amnesty, despite knowing that we hated them, adopted us, I felt - maybe these democratic values aren't always hypocritical. Maybe some people take them seriously ... it was the beginning of my serious doubts.'

"For the duration of the trial, he was placed in a cramped cell with 40 of Egypt's most famous political prisoners. There were row after row of beds with only a thin crack between them to inch through. Maajid was thrilled to discover two of the men who had conspired to murder Anwar Sadat - Omar Bayoumi and Dr Tauriq al Sawah - had recently been moved to this dank cell. 'This is like meeting Che Guevara - these great forerunners and ideologues who I can now get the benefit of learning from,' he says. But 'they were very fatherly, and they had been spending all these years studying and learning. And they told me I had got my theology wrong'.

"After more than 20 years in prison, they had reconsidered their views. They told him he was false to believe there was one definitive, literal way to read the Quran. As they told it, in traditional Islam there were many differing interpretations of sharia, from conservative to liberal - yet there had been consensus around once principle: it was never to be enforced by a central authority. Sharia was a voluntary code, not a state law. 'It was always left for people to decide for themselves which interpretation they wanted to follow,' he says.

"These one-time assassins taught Maajid that the idea of using state power to force your interpretation of sharia on everyone was a new and un-Islamic idea, smelted by the Wahabis only a century ago. They had made the mistake of muddling up the enduringly relevant decisions Mohammed made as a spiritual leader with those he made as a political ruler, which he intended to be specific to their time and place."

Meanwhile, Der Spiegel reported on another case of a propoent of jihadist violence who has now changed course.

"Mohammed El Fazazi, a Moroccan preacher who knew three of the September 11 suicide pilots, appears to have forsworn violence. Fazazi, who was sentenced to 30 years in jail in his home country for the 2003 Casablanca attacks, has written an open letter addressing Muslims in Germany and saying he has 'taken a wrong turn' and 'overshot the target'.

"In 1999 and 2000, when he was imam of the Al-Quds mosque (now Taiba mosque) in the northern port of Hamburg, he called on Muslims 'to remove the infidels from power, kill their children, capture their women and destroy their houses.'

"Now Fazazi writes that 'Germany is not a battle zone'. Every immigrant has a contract with the German state that must be adhered to. Germany, he writes, 'has a freedom of religion which does not exist in many Islamic countries'.

"The fact that Hamburg alone had 46 prayer rooms was evidence of the German state's tolerance towards Muslims, he said, 'because there is no comparably large number of churches in a city in any Islamic country'."

pwoodward@thenational.ae