The Muslim-kill-Muslim doctrine

Al Qaeda began to kill Muslims on the basis of a fatwa given by Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) saying Muslims can kill Muslims under certain conditions. The fatwa was issued at Mardin, in present-day Turkey, against a Muslim ruler and his government. Al Qaeda had an early dispute while interpreting the great jurist’s ruling.

A founder of al Qaeda, Abdullah Azzam, teaching at Islamabad Islamic University — from where a student is suspected of having killed the Parade Lane military personnel saying their namaz in Rawalpindi cantonment area — thought al Qaeda should kill ‘adu al-ba’eed’ (far enemy); Al Zawahiri, on the other hand, thought al Qaeda should kill ‘adu al-qareeb’ (near enemy). Azzam was killed in Peshawar along with his sons and Al Zawahiri became the thinker of al Qaeda, getting Muslims to kill Muslims, ‘the near enemy’.

Abdullah Azzam was a moderate who wanted to kill Americans, not Muslims. He had followers in Pakistan, including Fazlur Rehman Khaleel of Harkatul Mujahideen who later became a henchman of al Qaeda. After his death, the presiding saint of al Qaeda became Ibn Taymiyya, together with Syed Qutb who had twisted Maududi’s concept of ‘jahiliya’ into a religious culpability which must be penalised. In March 2010, some private Islamic organisations from all over the Islamic world, excluding Pakistan, got together at Mardin and resolved that Ibn Taymiyya had been misinterpreted by al Qaeda into a Muslim-kill-Muslim doctrine. Al Jazeera covered the event.

Did the government of Turkey go along? No. Turkey's Religious Affairs Directorate did not support the conference and said: ‘It is groundless to blame all post-September 11 violence on Ibn Taymiyya's fatwa when political, social and economic reasons also play a major role, and that no one in Anatolia or the rest of the Islamic world remembers a fatwa issued seven centuries ago’.

Something like this happened earlier in Saudi Arabia too. This is revealed in Ibn Taymiyya and his Times, edited by Yossef Rapoport & Shahab Ahmed (OUP 2010).

On 22 May 2003, 10 days after a series of suicide bombings in Riyadh, a leading Saudi newspaper published an article entitled ‘The Individual and the Homeland are more valuable than Ibn Taymiyya’. Author Khaled al-Ghanami wrote: ‘How did these murderers justify the shedding of the blood of Muslims and children? They did this based on a fatwa of Ibn Taymiyya on jihad, in which he rules that if infidels take shelter behind Muslims, and these Muslims become a shield for the infidels, it is permitted to kill the Muslims in order to get at the infidels. Ibn Taymiyya did not base his fatwa on any verse in the Quran, nor on any saying of the Prophet (pbuh)’ (p3). What happened next? The newspaper Editor-in-Chief, Jamal Khashoggi, was dismissed by order of the Saudi information ministry. Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia acted the same way. And this is how the Islamic world will react too. The liberal clerics who gathered at Mardin will be isolated if not condemned and apostatised. And al Qaeda too may target them. The country where al Qaeda lives, Pakistan, was not represented at Mardin.

Ibn Taymiyya argued that converts to Islam carried over remnants of their pre-existing practices, and brought to their new community deviant practices, customs, beliefs or innovations (p.233). For him, heterodox groups within Islam were most vulnerable to the threat posed by non-Muslim minorities. He dedicates one of the early sections of his book Minhaj al-Sunna to pointing out the similarities between Shias, Jews, and Christians (p233). Ibn Taymiyya interpreted the hadith ‘Do not make my grave into a festival’ to mean that Eid Milad should not be held (p289).

Published in Tribune, July 18^th, 2010.