Share this story!            

EDITORIAL: Outlawing “incitement to terrorism” and “call to jihad”

The United Nations Security Council, through its Resolution 1624, passed Wednesday, calls upon all 191 UN member states to “prohibit by law incitement to commit a terrorist act or acts” and to “deny safe haven” to anyone even suspected of incitement. The resolution was passed unanimously and will bind the nations of the world to interpret what incitement to violence means and to take steps to punish it. The United Kingdom has already adopted the law and it is to be seen how it interprets it. The Muslim states would be hard put to legislate on this resolution.

Fiery Muslim orators in the UK will have a tough time surviving the new law. In the US, the dreaded Patriot Act already takes care of such extreme advocates of Islam, but the resolution will morally strengthen the will to hunt down the distributors of what the Americans call “hate literature” in the mosques of the United States. It will definitely inform the forthcoming policies of the European Union and such states as Canada and Australia where the expatriate Muslim communities have not been able to persuade their clerics to tone down their rhetoric. Unfortunately, the new UN resolution will target many unconsciously offensive victims. And states such as Pakistan will have to move in some measure to act against the verbal provocateurs of terrorism.

Most Muslim states will take advantage of the failure of the General Assembly’s “reform package” to define terrorism — and the somewhat vague reference to terrorism in the final communiqué of the biggest-ever gathering of world leaders at the World Summit — to duck the embarrassing obligations imposed on them by the resolution. Which government can table an effective law against “incitement to terrorism” and survive?

The real problem in the Islamic world will be two concepts that the West increasingly associates with terrorism. The first is the call to jihad by non-state actors and the second is the freedom to act in defiance of the state under the concept of amr and nahi (enforce that which is good and stop that which is bad). Both concepts violate the sovereignty of the nation-state as it exists today but both are so far only weakly opposed by the states that they undermine. Some Muslim scholars think that the call to jihad should only be given by the state. But they are outnumbered by clerics who lean on a literal interpretation of the scripture to insist that the madrassas should go on teaching the concept of private jihad.

On September 9, 2005, MMA leader Maulana Abdul Malik told a private TV channel in the presence of Minister for Religious Affairs Ijaz ul Haq that the madrassas will not submit to the state on questions of when to declare war. He said that Islam gave the right to all Muslims to take up arms when endangered by their enemy’s aggression. He said, “Would you not fight if someone attacked your home?” But in the next breath he named the case of Afghanistan as an example of private jihad declared by the clergy in Pakistan in 2001. In so doing, he violated two principles of modern statecraft here: he deprived the state of its “monopoly of violence” and denied the sovereignty of Afghanistan by calling it the home of Pakistanis. The issue has become further complicated by the defeat of the jihad which the Pakistani clerics waged against the American invasion of 2001.

It is not possible to define jihad for all 191 states of the UN because of the lack of agreement on it between the status quo states and the anti-status quo states of the world. This disagreement has led to two tendentious interpretations of terrorism: “violence against innocent citizens” and “freedom-fighting”. In the Islamic world even secular intellectuals may accept suicide-bombing in cases where a nation is fighting for its rights under state oppression. The anti-status quo group has long been using the term “state terrorism” on which the opinion is so divided that the UN General Assembly and the Security Council have eschewed pronouncing clearly on the subject.

The truth is that hundreds of men taken prisoners in Afghanistan and kept subsequently at Guantanamo Bay had left their homes for jihad. What they got was the rough end of the “international campaign against terrorism”. Today the madrassas in Pakistan openly declare that they will not stop teaching that jihad is the right of all private individuals. Meanwhile, the state of Pakistan is in denial that the madrassas in Pakistan are involved in creating the ideological framework of terrorism. But what about “incitement to terrorism” under the garb of “exhortation to jihad”? This is where a tense debate between the West and the Islamic world (and Pakistan in particular) is going to take place next — the UN Security Council resolution notwithstanding. *

EDITORIAL #2: Defections from mainstream parties are an ill omen

The PPP old guard from Sargodha — the Pirachas — decided on Tuesday to leave the party and join the ruling PML because they were “impressed by the leadership of General Pervez Musharraf and the Chaudhrys”. Earlier a similar big defection had taken place in Multan where another pillar of the PPP — the Qureshis — decided to jump ship. This means that that the big “goodbye” of the “Patriots” to the ruling coalition was not the last robbery to happen in the vote bank of the PPP.

Defections are happening from the PMLN too. This may add to the panache of the ruling party but in the long run it is not good for the political system. Come 2007 general elections, Benazir Bhutto may decide — should the bleeding of her party continue at the hands of the Musharraf regime — to boycott them along with the PMLN that has already been bled to death. But if the two mainstream parties are out of the political arena the legitimacy of whoever wins the election would be suspect. Therefore the current stampede of defections triggered by the government is not a good thing and those who are engineering it should think of calling a halt to it. *

Home | Editorial

Share this story!