In an article published today, Barry Rubin comments on the recent ruling by Egyptian cleric, Dr. Imad Mustafa, of al-Azhar University, which Rubin describes as “the world’s most important Islamic university.” Al-Azhar was the setting for US President Obama’s Cairo address to the Muslim world. The university was selected for its significance in the mainstream Muslim world. President Obama noted in his speech that “For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning.”
Mustafa had previously supported the defensive Islamic doctrine of Muslim obligation to fight attacking infidels—albeit with flexible interpretation of what constitutes an attack. The change in position shifts towards the radical Islamist right, taking a position closer to al Qaeda, as Mustafa accepts the same obligation of offensive jihad as the terror group.
Mustafa states:
-“Two schools [of Islamic jurisprudence] have ruled that offensive jihad is permissible in order to secure Islam’s border, to extend God’s religion to people in cases where the governments do not allow it…and to remove every religion but Islam from the Arabian peninsula.
As Rubin notes,
As Rubin notes,
- “This means that it is permissible to wage jihad against a country if anything ‘necessary’ to Islam according to (hard-line) clerics’ interpretations is blocked (polygamy, child marriage, special privileges at work places, building mosques anywhere, permitting the wearing of head scarves or burkas).”
The result? Rubin explains:
-“In practice, according to this doctrine, then, any non-Muslim can be attacked anywhere…radical groups now have mainstream support for their most extreme, aggressive behavior. ... If this viewpoint continues to spread, along with the growing al-Qaida type doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood, it could be a historical turning point that will greatly intensify revolutionary Islamist terrorism and attacks on the West.”
Will this be picked up by Western media? Often we have seen that Muslim immigrant violence is described in the press as solely a function of disassociation from the host country generated by failed immigration policies. While better integration policy could have a positive effect, mainstream respected Muslim clerics advocating attacks on the West will certainly escalate the pace of Islamist radicalization among European Muslims.
For a country like Sweden, failure to take account of these external influences would be a dire mistake. Until the attempted bombing in Stockholm the SÄPO assessment was that Sweden might serve as a base for terrorists, but a left-leaning welfare state which backs terror-supporting NGOs would itself be exempt from attacks. What Swedish authorities have failed to register is that having terrorists in Sweden means terror in Sweden.
The current news means that things will probably get even worse. Rubin predicts that this decision will be a “turning point” for Islamist terror in the West—but don’t expect that the mainstream media will report this story. By: Chanah Shapira
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