Muslim Shi'a Attitudes Towards Terrorism

There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, and Islam is the world's fastest-growing religion. If the evil carnage we witnessed on Sept. 11 were typical of the faith, and Islam truly inspired and justified such violence, its growth and the increasing presence of Muslims in both Europe and the U.S. would be a terrifying prospect. Fortunately, this is not the case.

The very word Islam, which means "surrender," is related to the Arabic salam, or peace. When the Prophet Muhammad brought the inspired scripture known as the Koran to the Arabs in the early 7th century A.D., a major part of his mission was devoted precisely to bringing an end to the kind of mass slaughter we witnessed in New York City and Washington.

Pre-Islamic Arabia was caught up in a vicious cycle of warfare, in which tribe fought tribe in a pattern of vendetta and countervendetta. Muhammad himself survived several assassination attempts, and the early Muslim community narrowly escaped extermination by the powerful city of Mecca. The Prophet had to fight a deadly war in order to survive, but as soon as he felt his people were probably safe, he devoted his attention to building up a peaceful coalition of tribes and achieved victory by an ingenious and inspiring campaign of nonviolence. When he died in 632, he had almost single-handedly brought peace to war-torn Arabia.

Because the Koran was revealed in the context of an all-out war, several passages deal with the conduct of armed struggle. Warfare was a desperate business on the Arabian Peninsula. A chieftain was not expected to spare survivors after a battle, and some of the Koranic injunctions seem to share this spirit. Muslims are ordered by God to "slay [enemies] wherever you find them!" (4: 89). Extremists such as Osama bin Laden like to quote such verses but do so selectively. They do not include the exhortations to peace, which in almost every case follow these more ferocious passages: "Thus, if they let you be, and do not make war on you, and offer you peace, God does not allow you to harm them" (4: 90).

In the Koran, therefore, the only permissible war is one of self-defense. Muslims may not begin hostilities (2: 190). Warfare is always evil, but sometimes you have to fight in order to avoid the kind of persecution that Mecca inflicted on the Muslims (2: 191; 2: 217) or to preserve decent values (4: 75; 22: 40). The Koran quotes the Torah, the Jewish scriptures, which permits people to retaliate eye for eye, tooth for tooth, but like the Gospels, the Koran suggests that it is meritorious to forgo revenge in a spirit of charity (5: 45). Hostilities must be brought to an end as quickly as possible and must cease the minute the enemy sues for peace (2: 192-3).

Islam is not addicted to war, and jihad is not one of its "pillars," or essential practices. The primary meaning of the word jihad is not "holy war" but "struggle." It refers to the difficult effort that is needed to put God's will into practice at every level--personal and social as well as political. A very important and much quoted tradition has Muhammad telling his companions as they go home after a battle, "We are returning from the lesser jihad [the battle] to the greater jihad," the far more urgent and momentous task of extirpating wrongdoing from one's own society and one's own heart.

Islam did not impose itself by the sword. In a statement in which the Arabic is extremely emphatic, the Koran insists, "There must be no coercion in matters of faith!" (2: 256). Constantly Muslims are enjoined to respect Jews and Christians, the "People of the Book," who worship the same God (29: 46). In words quoted by Muhammad in one of his last public sermons, God tells all human beings, "O people! We have formed you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another" (49: 13)--not to conquer, convert, subjugate, revile or slaughter but to reach out toward others with intelligence and understanding.

So why the suicide bombing, the hijacking and the massacre of innocent civilians? Far from being endorsed by the Koran, this killing violates some of its most sacred precepts. But during the 20th century, the militant form of piety often known as fundamentalism erupted in every major religion as a rebellion against modernity. Every fundamentalist movement I have studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced that liberal, secular society is determined to wipe out religion. Fighting, as they imagine, a battle for survival, fundamentalists often feel justified in ignoring the more compassionate principles of their faith. But in amplifying the more aggressive passages that exist in all our scriptures, they distort the tradition.

It would be as grave a mistake to see Osama bin Laden as an authentic representative of Islam as to consider James Kopp, the alleged killer of an abortion provider in Buffalo, N.Y., a typical Christian or Baruch Goldstein, who shot 29 worshipers in the Hebron mosque in 1994 and died in the attack, a true martyr of Israel. The vast majority of Muslims, who are horrified by the atrocity of Sept. 11, must reclaim their faith from those who have so violently hijacked it.

Muslims are a monolithic group. National, political and religious variations highlight stark differences and multiple identities among Muslims. The Sunnis who account for less than 10% of Muslims have over centuries fragmented in to three clear strands, the Political, Missionary and Jihad movements who possess individual characteristics and vary in global view. It is only the Jihadists however that pursue and promote an armed Islamic struggle, which led by the al-mujahid can occur in an internal, irredentist or global capacity.

Condemnation

In the article "Why are there no condemnations from Muslim sources against terrorists?"Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance summarizes.

A common complaint among non-Muslims is that Muslim religious authorities do not condemn terrorist attacks. The complaints often surface in letters to the editors of newspapers, on phone-in radio shows, in Internet mailing lists, forums, etc.

Actually, there are lots of fatwas and other statements issued which condemn attacks on innocent civilians. Unfortunately, they are largely ignored by newspapers, television news, radio news and other media outlets.

In fact, many Muslims have spoken out against 9/11 and terrorist attacks in general.However, some Muslims admit that most terrorists are in fact Muslim.

A 2005 Pew Research study that involved 17,000 people in 17 countries showed support for terrorism in the Muslim world declining along with a growing belief that Islamic extremism represents a threat to those countries. A Daily Telegraph survey showed that 6% of British Muslims fully supported the July 2005 bombings in the London Underground.

The Free Muslims Coalition rallied against terror, stating that they wanted to send "a message to radical Muslims and supporters of terrorism that we reject them and that we will defeat them."

On the other hand, Fethullah Gülen, a prominent Turkish Islamic scholar, has claimed that "a real Muslim," who understood Islam in every aspect, could not be a terrorist.There are several, if not many, other people with similar points of view such as Karen Armstrong, Prof. Ahmet Akgunduz, and Harun Yahya.

Support and perceived support

In the Palestinian parliamentary election of January 2006, 57% of the electorate voted for Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States, Canada, and the European Union. It is responsible for numerous attacks targeting Israeli civilians. Observers are divided over whether the election results represent support for the organization's tactics, support for the organization's social programs, or dissatisfaction with the previous government, which was widely seen as corrupt and incompetent. A public opinion survey released following the election indicated that nearly 75% of the Palestinian electorate believe that Hamas should change its policy regarding the destruction of Israel and 84% of Palestinians support a peace agreement with Israel. Among Hamas voters, 73% of respondents supported a peace agreement with Israel. However Hamas leaders ruled out removing the clause in its constitution which demands the destruction of Israel.

A 2004 Pew survey revealed that Osama bin Laden is viewed favorably by large percentages in Pakistan (65%), Jordan (55%) and Morocco (45%). In Turkey as many as 31% say that suicide attacks against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq are justifiable.Iranian Ayatollah Ozma Seyyed Yousef Sanei issued a fatwa (ruling) that suicide attacks against civilians are legitimate only in the context of war.The ruling did not say whether other types of attacks against civilians are justified outside of the context of war, nor whether Jihad is included in Sanei's definition of war.

Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, a Muslim and the general manager of Arab news channel, Al-Arabiya has said it is a "fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims." Statistics compiled by the United States government's Counterterrorism Center present a more complicated picture. Slightly more than half of the fatalities of known and specified terrorist incidents from the beginning of 2004 through the first quarter of 2005 were attributed to Islamic extremists but a majority of over-all incidents were considered of either "unknown/unspecified" or a secular political nature. The vast majority of the "unknown/unspecified" terrorism fatalities did however happen in Islamic regions such as Iraq and Afghanistan, or in regions where Islam is otherwise involved in conflicts such as the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, southern Thailand and Kashmir.The methodology employed by the Center is sometimes disputed.

Western perspectives

Some in the West assume Islam to be polarised between pro-Western and pro-jihadi mentalities, enabling a clear divide between opponents and proponents of violent action. In reality however, Islamic ideological and political spectrums are far more diverse than this idea suggests. American policy is unpopular among some Muslims, yet this hostility does not directly translate to support or participation in Al-Qaeda's global jihad and for Political Islamists who support non-violent measures it can not be assumed that they are in agreement with Western agendas.

Late on the night of Aug. 24 last year, two Russian airplanes disappeared nearly simultaneously from radar screens not long after taking off from a Moscow airport. Both crashed when Chechen women blew up explosives hidden on board, killing nearly 100 people in the first multiple-plane terrorist incident since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

But the U.S. government considers only one of the downed planes the result of an international terrorist attack, because two Israeli citizens were on board one of them while the other explosion killed only Russian passengers. It was, said the senior intelligence official responsible for compiling the U.S. statistics, "the poster child for what is wrong" with the annual report monitoring global terrorism that the United States has put out since the 1980s. "It simply makes no sense," said John O. Brennan, acting head of the new National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC)

For years, the statistical annex attached to the State Department's annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report was a respected but low-profile government publication, pored over by academics, debated by a small circle of policy wonks, a "seminal" if flawed work in the opinion of one specialist who regularly used it. But that was before Sept. 11. Now, the report has become so controversial, its findings so politically charged, that for the second year in a row the State Department has been involved in an embarrassing public dispute over the statistics.

Last year, the department was forced to withdraw the report and admit that its initial version vastly understated what turned out to be a record high number of terrorist attacks. This year, government analysts determined that attacks had gone up once again -- three times more, in fact, to a high of 651 attacks that resulted in 1,907 deaths. Rather than publish that information, the State Department decided to strip the annual terrorism report of the numbers and hand responsibility to Brennan's new NCTC. Faced with an outcry once the redacted statistics showing a surge in terrorism leaked out, the NCTC last week released the numbers, but then said the methodology that produced the statistics was so hopelessly flawed the numbers should not be relied upon to make any conclusions.

All of which has left official Washington debating a key question: How to measure progress, or lack thereof, in the Bush administration's war on terrorism, now that the government's top analysts have deemed their own report unreliable? President Bush, quizzed on the apparent upsurge of global terrorism at his prime-time news conference Thursday, attributed the increase to aggressive U.S. action. "We've made the decision to defeat the terrorists abroad so we don't have to face them here at home," he said. "And when you engage the terrorists abroad, it causes activity and action."

But other top officials dispute that there has been any measurable increase at all in terrorism, saying the increase is mostly a result of more aggressive effort by the NCTC to identify terrorist acts and include them in the statistics. "It doesn't tell us anything about the war on terror," said Philip D. Zelikow, counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Zelikow, who served as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission that investigated the attacks on the United States, recommended that Rice pull the statistics from the report. They "are simply not valid for any inference about the progress, good or bad, of American policy," he told reporters at a hastily called news conference to release the already leaked numbers.

Congressional Democrats have assailed that interpretation, pointing out, as Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.) did in a letter to Rice on Friday, that no fewer than five other reports on terrorism in 2004 also found sharp increases. A new Congressional Research Service survey, for example, concluded that al Qaeda and its associated groups launched seven attacks that killed at least 220 in 2004 -- up from four attacks killing 104 in 2003. The NCTC may have made a more rigorous attempt to include terrorist acts in its report, Waxman wrote, but "it seems inconceivable that the administration missed two-thirds of the international terrorist attacks that occurred in 2003."

Amid the small circle of analysts inside and out of the government who have followed the terrorism numbers for years, the controversy has revived debate over how to compile useful statistics.

"Good riddance to meaningless rubbish," is the way security analyst Anthony H. Cordesman greeted the decision in an e-mail circulated around Washington, in which he highlighted numerous problems with a report that never found a useful way to distinguish between a "freedom fighter" and a "terrorist," overemphasized attacks on U.S. interests, and made arbitrary distinctions, such as in the Russian airliner explosions, between domestic and international acts of terrorism.

"The problem is we've had meaningless statistics on terrorism for a very long time. But they've only dropped it now because it didn't produce the cut in terrorism they wanted," Cordesman said in an interview. "My hope is there'll be enough pressure on them to do something right rather than simply stopping doing something wrong."

Dennis Pluchinsky, a former State Department terrorism analyst, agreed that the numbers are far less useful than they might seem in assessing efforts to combat terrorism. "They talk about the war on terror and the increase of international incidents taking place, but they don't weigh the statistics -- 9/11 and someone throwing a Molotov cocktail is treated as the same thing," he said.

Many analysts agree there were problems with the method used to generate the government's numbers of "significant" international terrorist attacks. Among those identified by Brennan: how to identify what constitutes "significant" property damage, whether deadly acts by homegrown terrorist groups with links to international terrorism should be counted and how to decide what is a terrorist act in a war zone. Iraq has proved a particularly vexing test, and government counters, Brennan said, "found it virtually impossible to distinguish between insurgency and terrorism" there, settling instead for the imperfect solution of a report that includes attacks that killed or wounded non-Iraqi civilians in Iraq but excludes many other incidents in which terrorist-style tactics were employed. Overall, the NCTC identified nine times more terrorist attacks in Iraq in 2004 than in 2003.

"Inevitably there are some judgment calls that go into deciding what is a terrorist event," said Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economics professor who helped reveal the flawed statistics used in last year's report. "But it is astonishing to me that three years into the 'war on terrorism' there is not more interest by the administration in keeping track of terrorist events."

Flawed or not, some politicians said the government should not abandon the one annual report card it had. "How can we hold ourselves accountable for achieving benchmarks of progress in this struggle," asked Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) in a letter to Rice, "if we have no clear idea of what exactly it is that would constitute success?"