Many thanks and much appreciated. As you well know, you and Farooq are
two great assets to the series.
Unfortunately your two essays "Extremism in Northern Nigeria",
*Mutallab, African Islam, and Foreign Extremism * " which add flavour
to the topic being discussed presently, did not elicit any responses.
We are to assume that they were read and digested with some
satisfaction and merely laid to rest, no comment/s. I was waiting for
some missionary inputs from here and there or some poetry from Chidi,
before butting in, but it never happened.
Now to business:
The Quran is the ideological basis/weapon of all the Islamic terrorist
groups we have operating in the world today and therefore there are
those who say that the war on terror in part has to be an ideological
war :discredit and dismantle the ideology that supports terrorism and
we are then possibly on the road to success. Since the prophet of
Islam and his companions were mostly warriors, there is the history of
violence in Islam and even the glorification of violence and jihad
and the success story of violence (with a little help from Allah) at
the core of Islamic doctrine.
Jihadists take succour in al Baqarah Surah 249.:
" But those who knew that they would meet Allah exclaimed: How many a
little company hath overcome a mighty host by Allah's leave! Allah is
with the steadfast."
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=Holy+War+and+Quran
In my opinion in the ideological sphere we have to distinguish
between legitimate "holy war" and criminal "holy terrorism" since the
difference is not very clear in the minds of terrorists in Hamas for
example who do not distinguish between civilian and military targets.
They say everybody, civilian and non-civilian who supports Israel is a
legitimate target (for death and destruction.)
One of the anti-Jihadists is Robert Spencer:
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=Robert+Spencer
We already have Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the Nigerian terrorist also
popularly known in Jihadist circles as Omar Farooq al-Nigeri , the
terrorist who failed to set his pants on fire on board Northwest
Airlines Flight 253, over Detroit, on Christmas Day,
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=Umar+Farouk+Abdulmutallab
Let us Pray that the same demon does not take possession of the
other Muslim Jihadists in Nigeria or there will be hell to pay.
With reference to the observations that you make in point 1 and
subsequent points you make about the Qur'an, it's a little too
abstract and therefore difficult pin-pointing exactly what we're
talking about if we do not at least quote from the Quran and give a
few examples of what we mean.
Today, I cannot help but chuckle to myself when I think of the word
phoneme applied to the miracle of the Quran which was revealed in
Arabic in the Quraish /Quraysh dialect, not in the variant dialectal
readings/ memorizations of Islam's first century. It's a point that
John Burton repeatedly brings attention to in his "The Collection of
the Quran" which I went through at the London Mosque library at 146
Park Road a quarter of a century ago and consequently stopped taking
some things for granted.
About point 2, today, for obvious reasons ( in the Muslim world it
would bring back some bad feelings about the Crusades and this would
help unite Muslims into the We and Them ( the Kuffar) so today this
does not seem to be the West's battle hymn:
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=Onward+Christian+soldiers
Very generally speaking when the West says "God" and politically and
culturally speaking when the West says in the name of God ( going to
war) they generally add a special value to Him ( God) and when they
say in the name of God they mean in the name of Western ideals such
as Western Civilisation, Freedom, Human Rights & Democracy, the
Geneva Convention etc.
I am in complete agreement with you about point 3: Ijtihad as the way
forward
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=+Ijtihad
and since the gates of Ijithad were closed in the tenth Century in
the Sunni world ( and mind you not by colonialists/ colonialism ) in
this instance it is Shia Islam that is sufficiently resilient and
can - can modernise, is equipped to meet the exigencies of
modernization and is delivering.
For the really interested , there is a seminal work my my young friend
Askh Dahlen "Deciphering the Meaning of Revealed Law", followed by his
"Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity: Legal Philosophy in
Contemporary Iran"
And there is always AbdolKarim Souroush , forever urging on to reform,
and modernization
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=AbdolKarim+Soroush
On May 5, 3:30 pm, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoch...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Cornelius, thanks. Three quick things:
>
> 1. Yes, the Quran is not arranged in chronological order but it was revealed
> in a chronological order over the course of twenty three years, a time that
> both Mohammed and the religion he founded underwent multiple transitions and
> experience a diverse array of fortunes. You're right that the verses do not
> fit neatly into a chronological persecution/post-persecution pattern since
> there are some "violent verses"whose revelation dates to the
> post-persecution period and since some startlingly conciliatory ones were
> revealed during the time of persecution and military setbacks for the
> pioneers. Nonetheless, for the most part, one can see transitions from
> confrontational implacability to accommodationist prescriptions that conform
> generally to the transitions from existential persecution to victory and
> triumphant expansion. The arrangement of the Quran was a fairly capricious,
> contentious, and contested exercise, done by Muslims many years after
> Mohammed's passing. So, the arrangement carries little weight in determining
> the order of revelations and what it might tell us about the importance of
> context--temporal and circumstantial--to how we interpret the verses of the
> Quran in our era.
>
> 2. When I speak of Christians setting aside violent verses, I don't mean to
> argue that some Christians do not invoke God in their struggles (by the way,
> the example you cited is a context of war and praying for soldiers going to
> war on behalf of their nation hardly approximates a declaration of Holy War
> or the authorization of terrorism or the deliberate killing of
> non-combatants in the name of God). What I mean is that due to the outrage
> and activism of scandalized Christians, itself brought on by Enlightenment
> humanistic and intellectual values, by the violent ascendancy of Europe,
> which produced self-critique, and by the vocal clamor for reform,
> Christianity succeeded in quarantining interpretations that support violence
> against "unbelievers." Of course this not mean that Christians do not commit
> crimes or do not engage in acts of terror. But they cannot, under the
> current Christian interpretive conventions, legitimately claim to do so in
> obedience to scripture. That was not always the case, as there were eras in
> which Christians explicitly carried out terror in the name of God. I
> mentioned several other reasons why this kind of interpretive consensus is
> more possible in Christianity than it is in Islam. Aside from these factors,
> there is also the fact that Muslims feel persecuted and besieged on all
> fronts and so are less likely, as long as this feeling persists, to be drawn
> to moderate, accommodationist interpretive conventions.
>
> 3. I forgot to even include the idea of Ijtihad, a hotly debated, highly
> contested idea in Islamic exegesis but one that factors into what we're
> discussing. Debates aside, Ijtihad allows for or has the capacity to
> authorize creative, dynamic, and instrumental interpretations of verses to
> authorize actions deemed in self defense or to legitimize acts--including
> terroristic ones--deemed crucial to the struggles of an Islamic community in
> a particular era. SOme scholars argue that Ijtihad was a one-off or a set of
> one-off permissions granted when Islam faced daunting existential threats
> and that they can no longer be legitimately invoked today. Others disagree
> and argue that in the context of perceived threat, Ijtihad (creative,
> presentist interpretation) can be used to "fight back." It is Ijtihad that
> Hezbollah used to justify their endorsement of suicide bombing, a fatwa that
> Hamas later adopted and which then spread to Al-qaeda and its franchises.
> Many mainstream Muslims would and have described that as an abuse of
> Ijtihad. Maybe it is. Maybe not. But to the extent that Ijtihad is available
> as a legitimate, if contentious, tool to be deployed as and when needed to
> arrive at interpretations that give a Muslim community theological cover for
> terror and unrestrained violence in proactive and reactive "self-defense,"
> its appeal to Islamists will only grow. If you listen to the sermons of some
> Wahabi-Salafist preachers in Northern Nigeria, you'll discern what I mean.
> They openly call for violence against Christians and those they regard as
> false Muslims. Of course they don't do so within the confine of the dominant
> Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence in Northern Nigeria or within the
> existing sufi orders. They use theological authority of Ijtihad to construct
> their own political and politicized set of injunctions and instructions
> based on a creatively urgent and presentist interpretation of violent verses
> that are plucked from their temporal, spatial, cultural, and circumstantial
> contexts.
>
> By the way, below is Farooq's article that I was responding to:
>
> JOS BOMBINGS: CAN WE FOR ONCE BE TRUTHFUL?
>
> by Farooq Kperogi
>
> User Rating: / 0
> PoorBest
> <http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/profile/Farooq-A.-Kperogi.html>
>
> - Farooq A. Kperogi<http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/profile/Farooq-A.-Kperogi.html>
> - January 01, 2011
> - More from this
> author<http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/farooq-a-kperogi/jos-bom...>
> - Follow Farooq A. Kperogi <http://www.facebook.com/#!/farooqkperogi> on
> Facebook
> - Follow Farooq A. Kperogi <http://twitter.com/farooqkperogi> on Twitter
>
> A monstrous mass murder of innocent souls has occurred in Jos
> again<http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/newsflash/multiple-xmas-...>
> and
> we are, as always, being insulted with unimaginative, flyblown, and
> soporific platitudes by our political, media, and clerical elites. Almost
> every prominent Nigerian who has commented on this heartless, high-tech mass
> slaughter has mouthed one of three predictably ready-made bromides: oh, this
> is all about politics, not religion; it's a failure of security and
> leadership; and it's the consequence of poverty.
>
> This is the safe, standard, prepackaged rhetorical frippery that our elites
> effortlessly regurgitate whenever violent communal convulsions erupt in any
> part of the country. But this is getting insufferably trite. If the
> hypocrisy or intellectual laziness that actuates these thoughtless,
> simplistic sound bites didn't have far-reaching consequences for our
> continued existence as a nation and, in fact, our very survival as a people,
> one would simply yawn in silence and ignore them.
>
> But it so often happens that after these hypocritical, clichéd phrases are
> uttered, the nation will be anesthetized into a false sense of security and
> normalcy, the culprits will never be ferreted out much less punished, and
> everybody will go to sleep—until the next upheaval recrudesces and jolts us
> all out of our pigheaded complacence.
>
> [image: alt]<http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cIW44Bimg1A/TR9elwK1sXI/AAAAAAAAAyI/MZlXjqz...>
>
> A scene from the bombings in Jos
>
> And then the predictably mind-numbing, mealy-mouthed banalities will be
> invoked again by the elites to explain away what happened, and so on and so
> forth. This rhetorical formula is safe because it absolves people in
> political and cultural authority from the triple burdens of thinking,
> confronting uncomfortable truths, and taking action. That's why politicians
> are often ironically the first to blame "politicians" for the episodic fits
> violence that now punctuate our national life. Well, "politician" is a
> floating signifier that encapsulates everybody in politics, and what refers
> to everybody refers to nobody. Case closed.
>
> To be sure, political manipulation, inept security and leadership, and
> poverty are all deeply implicated in the perpetual cycle of violence and
> recriminations that have become fixtures in our socio-political landscape.
> But a murderous pervasion of religious doctrines and violent, unthinking
> ethnic particularism are even greater culprits. People who are brainwashed
> into believing that those who don't share their faith deserve to be
> murdered, or people who are so wedded to their ethnicity that they lack the
> capacity to tolerate others, are just as dangerous and as culpable—if not
> more so— as the politicians who "manipulate" them.
>
> Poverty, in and of itself, does not predispose people to violence. There are
> much poorer countries in Africa than Nigeria that are remarkably peaceful.
> Take, for an example, Benin Republic, our western neighbor. Or Senegal, an
> over-90-percent Muslim country that elected a Roman Catholic as its first
> president. And, of course, security lapses become an issue only in societies
> that have a predisposition to senseless, unprovoked violence, such as ours.
>
> Now, a group which calls itself Jama'atu Ahlus Sunnah Lid Da'awati Wal
> Jihad has claimed responsibility for the deadly
> bombs<http://www.saharareporters.com/news-page/video-jama%E2%80%99atu-ahlus...>
> in
> Jos. It also claims to have perpetrated its savage murder of innocents, some
> of whom may in fact be Muslims, on behalf of Muslims and Islam. But the
> preponderance of reactions to this unsettling revelation among our Muslim
> leaders and commentators, including security
> agencies<http://dailytrust.dailytrust.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=ar...>,
> has been to impulsively dismiss the group's claim even when they have no
> contrary evidence—much like Goodluck Jonathan and his minions unthinkingly
> exculpated the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) of
> responsibility for the October 1 terrorist attacks even when the group
> claimed responsibility for the attacks. Same attitude, different
> personalities. That is the Nigerian story.
>
> One uncomfortable fact that our elites in northern Nigerian have been shy
> to confront meaningfully and fearlessly is that we do have a worryingly
> enervating crisis of noxious religious literalism. By ...
>
> read more »
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