This is a guest post by The Professor
Two days ago the Pakistani Sufi organisation Minhaj-ul-Quran launched their remarkably comprehensive fatwa (religious ruling) against terrorism and suicide bombing.
Since then the Muslim Brotherhood’s Azzam Tamimi has been on a one-man mission to discredit it.
On the BBC, he mocked al-Qadri for not preventing suicide bombings in Pakistan before saying that he himself believed that suicide bombing was allowed in “self-defence” (but not against “innocent civilians” – as opposed, presumably, to guilty civilians) and saying that:
‘Then there is the question of utility and whether this is actually good for the cause or bad for the cause and in most cases it’s not good for the cause. And I think this is the argument we need to push forward rather than resorting to fatwas because for every fatwa, there is a counter fatwa.’
So, in other words, the question of whether or not jihadists should kill civilians is not one of morality but rather of ‘utility’. If killing civilians produces results, Tamimi says, then it is ok.
He then hammers this point home by saying that British Muslims should not carry out suicide bomb attacks at present because this would be ‘counter-productive’:
‘British young Muslims; I would advise them against resorting to any of these tactics because they are counterproductive. But I cannot apply the same thing for people who are defending their country and defending their homes and for people whose families have been wiped out completely by coward pilots flying F16’s and Apache helicopters.’
Presumably then, if circumstances changed and suicide bombing in the UK stopped being ‘counter-productive’ and instead became ‘good for the cause’, Tamimi would then be supportive of such attacks.
Tamimi’s latest outburst is yet another nail in the coffin of the increasingly threadbare argument pushed by pro-Islamist lobbyists Andy Hull, Jamie Bartlett and the widely discredited Robert Lambert that the Muslim Brotherhood should be used by the British government to fight jihadist terrorism.
Instead, as Tuesday’s anti-terrorism fatwa by Minhaj-ul-Quran proved, it is those non-Islamist groups that openly condemn terrorism ‘with no ifs and no buts’ who are our real allies against religious extremism.
