Church Mouse Publishing : A fatwa against terrorists

WEDNESDAY, 3 MARCH 2010

Yesterday Dr Mohammad Tahir-ul-Qadri issued a fatwa against suicide bombers in London. The 600-page tome explained in great detail, referencing Islamic texts, why terrorists will go to hell.

This is not the first such fatwa, although it is possibly the most comprehensive and widely available. The question is whether it will make a difference to those young and easily influenced Muslims who are at risk of becoming radicalised.

The first question is whether Dr Tahir-ul-Qadri carries sufficient weight to convince people. Opinion on that appears to be split. He claims to have hundreds of thousands of followers. By no means a big proportion of the worlds Muslims. His organisation appears to have only a handful of mosques in Britain.

The second question is whether this approach is the right strategy in the first place. Brian Whitaker in the Guardian argues that it is well meaning, but "does nothing to help progressive Islam". His argument is that waging 'fatwa wars' ends up emphasising the importance of fatwas in general, which ends up giving more weight to those which promote extremism.

Mouse can see this point, however, cannot accept that extremist teaching should be allowed to go unchallenged. As far as Mouse is concerned, everyone with a voice should be raising it to say that violence done in the name of Islam is wrong, and that those who advocate it are distorting Islam for their own purposes.

The issue is too important to stay silent on. Which is why Tahir-ul-Qadri started down this course in the first place.

Source : http://churchmousepublishing.blogspot.com/2010/03/fatwa-against-terrorists.html