Category Archives: Yusuf al-Qaradawi

Qaradawi denounces terrorist attack on Egyptian church, says perpetrators are ‘criminals, assassins and non-Muslims’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Qaradawi and MayorDr. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, President of the International Union for Muslim Scholars (IUMS), vehemently denounced the suicide attack, which happened during New Year’s Eve outside the Al-Qiddissine (The Saints) church on Saturday, killing 21 people and wounding 80 others.

Al-Qaradawi stressed that “the perpetrators of this crime are criminals, assassins and non-Muslims because Islam asserts the sanctity of human life and strongly prohibits aggression against it. Islam does not condone the killing of the innocent civilians of any nation or nationality except for a prescribed penalty. Murdering the civilians of any nationality by a group, individual or even nations at random, especially if they are celebrating in a place of worship could never be viewed as jihad and is undoubtedly against the teachings of the Qur’an and the Sunnah”.

The Qur’an, along with other divine scriptures, states that [Whosoever kills a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind] (Al-Ma’idah: 32)

Islam considers killing others as one of the gravest of sins in the sight of Allah. This heinous sin and abominable crime leads to Allah’s curse in this world and His severe punishment in the Hereafter.

The International Association of Muslim Scholars (IAMS) is appalled to see the bloody incidents that left behind great numbers of innocent civilian casualties who were killed in cold blood without any sin committed on their part.

The ethical constitution of legitimate warfare in Islam dictates that it is prohibited to kill anyone except those who are engaged in fighting. In this legitimate war, fighting is restricted to face-to-face confrontation between Muslims and the army of the aggressors. Upon seeing a woman killed in the battlefield, the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) renounced the act and forbade killing women, children, the aged, monks in their hermitages, farmers in their lands, and traders. All of these are protected, so how could it be permissible to kill people who worship Allah in a religious event? This is never permitted by Islam.

Ikhwanweb, 3 January 2011

A further reply to George Readings

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In a piece for the Guardian’s Comment is Free, George Readings of the Quilliam Foundation has finally got round to replying my Socialist Unity article (crossposted at Islamophobia Watch) in which I defended the noted Islamic scholar and Al-Jazeera TV star Yusuf al-Qaradawi against an attack from Readings.

Readings misrepresents my views – and more importantly those of Qaradawi himself – but at least he has attempted to rebut my criticisms with reasoned argument. This is certainly an improvement on Quilliam’s previous methods, which have involved trying to politically blackmail a London Assembly member for whom I worked into taking action against me, and then, after he told Ed Husain to take his threatening email and shove it, hiring libel lawyers in an attempt to shut me up.

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‘Qaradawi won’t talk to Jews’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Well, so Harry’s Place claims. They quote that reliable source, the Elder of Ziyon blog, as follows: “The 8th Annual Doha Conference on Interfaith Dialogue is to start tomorrow, but prominent Islamic Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi is boycotting the conference, according to Palestine Today. The reason? Because there will be Jews there!”

In fact Qaradawi’s position on interfaith dialogue is quite clear. Back in 2005 he stated that he objected to dialogue with Israel’s chief rabbi because “he supports the murder of Palestinians on a daily basis, supports the destruction of homes and the eviction of people, and supports the crimes and the barbaric slaughter that are taking place every day. How can I shake his hand and sit down with him?

But Qaradawi said he had no problem engaging in dialogue with representatives of the Jewish community who oppose the repression of the Palestinians: “I welcome Jews who dissociate themselves from what Israel is doing, and I welcome being with them.”

He concluded: “I oppose dialogue with Jewish rabbis living in Israel, who support the crimes committed by Israel. With them there is no possibility [of dialogue]…. We will hold a dialogue with those who are reasonable among them, as well as with the Christians, as indeed I have been present at a number of conferences for Islamic-Christian dialogue. But with those ‘who do evil’, as Allah said, we shall neither argue nor shall we have any dialogue.”

The source of these quotes? None other than the Middle East Media Research Institute, an institution that is of course highly regarded by the contributors to Harry’s Place.

Lies from Gilligan about Qaradawi

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Qaradawi and MandelaContinuing his witch-hunt of Lutfur Rahman, Andrew Gilligan has directed his fire against Ken Livingstone, who in an appeal for unity has attempted to repair some of the damage caused by the Labour Party NEC’s shameful decision to override a democratic decision by party members in Tower Hamlets and deselect Lutfur as Labour’s mayoral candidate.

According to Gilligan, Ken “has been an ally of Islamic fundamentalism for far longer than Lutfur Rahman”, and as evidence he offers Ken’s “embrace of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a man who has justified rape and suicide bombing”.

For Qaradawi’s position on suicide bombing Gilligan refers us to a BBC News report dating from Qaradawi’s visit to London in July 2004, which states: “Defending suicide bombings that target Israeli civilians Sheikh Al-Qaradawi told the BBC programme Newsnight that ‘an Israeli woman is not like women in our societies, because she is a soldier. I consider this type of martyrdom operation as an evidence of God’s justice. Allah Almighty is just; through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have and and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do’.”

But if you check out the Newsnight report you can see that Qaradawi was talking generally about the legitimacy of suicide bombing as a military tactic in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict. And while he addressed the issue of civilian casualties, there is no indication that he was responding to a specific question about Palestinian suicide bombers targeting Israeli non-combatants. In fact Qaradawi has avoided justifying such attacks.

In a Guardian interview with Madeleine Bunting in 2005, for example, Qaradawi made it clear that when he defended the legitimacy of suicide bombing he was talking about attacks on members of the Israeli armed forces: “Sometimes they kill a child or a woman. Provided they don’t mean to, that’s OK, but they shouldn’t aim to kill them. In every war, mistakes are made and non-combatants get killed…”.

In an interview in Asharq Al-Awsat in 2001, Qaradawi made the same point: “Some children, old people, and women may get hurt in such operations. This is not deliberate. However, we must all realize that the Israeli society is a military society, men and women. We cannot say that the casualties were innocent civilians…” (emphasis added).

So, while Qaradawi holds the view that there is no clear dividing line between civilians and non-civilians in Israel, he does not present this as an argument in favour of suicide bombers deliberately targeting non-combatants. The deaths of the latter, he says, are justifiable only if they are a side-effect of attacks on members of the Israeli military.

As for the ludicrous charge that Qaradawi has “justified rape”, Gilligan directs us to a Daily Telegraph article, published as part of the hysterical right-wing campaign against Qaradawi during his 2004 visit to London, which claimed that Qaradawi “believes that female rape victims should be punished if dressed ‘immodestly’ when assaulted”. (The article, which concludes with a quote from Peter Tatchell, was in fact inspired by an OutRage! press release.)

Leaving aside the fact that the main thrust of the IslamOnline article was to counter the view, widespread in some backward rural societies, that women who are the victims of rape are guilty of damaging the “honour” of the family or community, the article wasn’t by Qaradawi anyway. Nor was it written by “a panel, headed by Mr al-Qaradawi” (an invention lifted by the Telegraph from the OutRage! press release). The author of the IslamOnline was an individual named Kamal Badr.

Even the Israeli-American academic Martin Kramer, a hardline Zionist who is associated with Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum and is a vehement opponent of Qaradawi, balked at this particular stitch-up.

“I abhor the views of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi”, Kramer wrote, “… but I’m not happy with what the London Telegraph did to him this morning. It attributed to Qaradawi an accusatory view of rape victims: ‘To be absolved from guilt, the raped woman must have shown some sort of good conduct.’ These words actually belong to someone else, a consultant to the website Islamonline. Even if Qaradawi is ostensible head of the committee that oversees this website, a Muslim jurist can only be deemed responsible for his ownfatwas… Today’s Telegraph article establishes nothing.” (“Qaradawi non-quote”, Sandbox, 11 July 2004)

If Gilligan can find a quotation from Qaradawi himself implying that women deserve to be raped if they dress immodestly, we would be happy to reproduce it here at Islamophobia Watch. We can guarantee that he won’t be able to come up with a single one.

A reply to George Readings on Qaradawi

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Crossposted from Socialist Unity

The Quilliam Foundation claims to be a think-tank combating extremism, particularly within the Muslim community. However, as the recently leaked briefing document “Preventing terrorism: where next for Britain?” has demonstrated, Quilliam’s real objective is to misrepresent and smear those mainstream Muslim organisations and individuals who are the leading forces in countering extremist interpretations of their faith.

An article at Left Foot Forward (“Livingstone: Al-Qaradawi is a ‘leading progressive voice’ in Muslim world”) by George Readings, who holds the post of Communications Officer and Research Fellow at the Quilliam Foundation, is exactly the sort of dishonest hatchet-job against a leading Muslim figure we have come to expect from the organisation that employs Readings. Predictably, he completely ignores the actual role played by Yusuf al-Qaradawi across the Muslim world and in the Arabic-speaking Middle East in particular.

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Pink News misrepresents Qaradawi’s views on homosexuality

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Qaradawi and Mayor 2There’s a report published today at Pink News entitled “Ken Livingstone promises new gay rights measures if elected London mayor”. Having given a sympathetic account of Ken’s newly announced policies in support of the LGBT community, the article ends:

“He has a good gay rights record, implementing the first civil partnerships register for gay couples in London in 2001. However, he was criticised in 2005 for inviting to London and embracing the homophobic Islamist cleric Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has called for gays and lesbians to be killed.”

Leaving aside the fact that Ken didn’t invite Qaradawi to London, and that the visit took place in 2004, let us state one more time: Qaradawi does not call for “gays and lesbians to be killed”.

The source for this accusation is a passage in his book The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam, which was written in the late 1950s when Qaradawi was a young, orthodox, Al-Azhar trained scholar who had not yet developed his own distinctive interpretations of Islam, and in that book he restricted himself to providing a summary of traditional rulings by Islamic jurists on a range of issues.

The offending passage on homosexuality reads as follows: “The jurists of Islam have held differing opinions concerning the punishment for this abominable practice. Should it be the same as the punishment for fornication, or should both the active and passive participants be put to death? While such punishments may seem cruel, they have been suggested to maintain the purity of the Islamic society and to keep it clean of perverted elements.”

On the face of it, this does sound horrendous. If Qaradawi was not himself calling for homosexuals to be executed, he was apparently unwilling to criticise Islamic scholars who did. But this is to misunderstand the nature of the punishments that Qaradawi was referring to.

Under the various schools of sharia law homosexuality is treated as a sub-section of adultery. The Islamic jurists who formulated the legal position on this issue in the years following the Prophet’s death were trying to put a stop to the barbaric practices associated with a backward tribal society which did lead to individuals (mainly women) being killed in order to defend the “honour” of the family or community.

These early jurists ruled that it wasn’t adultery, and by extension homosexuality, that was a crime but rather the sexual act itself, and further that four independent witnesses to the sexual act were required for a conviction. The result was to preserve the draconian punishments – stoning etc – as a symbol of extreme social disapproval while raising the evidential requirements so high that in practice it was impossible to sentence anyone to those punishments.

So when Qaradawi was discussing the penalties for gay sex in The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam it was these symbolic punishments he was referring to.

In a 2006 interview on Al Jazeera, when asked about the Islamic position on homosexuality, Qaradawi again summarised the views of the early Islamic jurists:

“The schools of thought differed over the punishment. Some of them would punish as they would the fornicator/adulterer, so distinguishing between married and unmarried men, and between married and unmarried women. And some of them said the punishment of the two is equal. And some of them said we throw them from a high place, like our Lord did to the People of Lot. And some of them said we burn them.”

But Qaradawi continued: “There is disagreement, so it is possible for us to choose from them in our era what is most appropriate, and what is lightest, recognising how widespread the tribulation is: because tribulations and sins being widespread is something in Islamic legal theory that causes things to be lightened.”

So it would appear that Qaradawi’s view now is that in the modern world the draconian punishments are no longer applicable, even symbolically, to the “crime” of gay sex.

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Qaradawi calls for peaceful protests against Burn a Koran Day

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Qaradawi2The International Union of Islamic Scholars has urged Muslims to react peacefully to the planned burning of copies of the Holy Quran by a small church in the US on the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on Saturday.

The head of the Union, Dr Yusuf Al Qaradawi, in a statement yesterday called on fellow Muslims to protest in a peaceful manner and seek legal recourse against the group. “The man who has given the deplorable call and his group must be prosecuted,” said Dr Qaradawi. “The call is against the teachings of Christianity.”

The Doha Centre for Interfaith Dialogue has also condemned the call and said it reflected extremism and ignorance and ran contrary to the basic tenets of Christianity. “Christianity preaches peace and peaceful coexistence,” said Dr Ibrahim Al Nuaimi, the centre’s chairman.

The Peninsula, 9 September 2010

The problem with Qaradawi’s proposal that pastor Terry Jones should be prosecuted is that the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees the right to free speech, has been used to prevent the introduction of laws against incitement to hatred. Indeed, in the US it is possible to incite not only hatred but even violence against Muslims, as long as the call to violence remains generalised. So opponents of Jones’s vile behaviour do not in fact have any legal recourse.

It’s also worth considering what would happen in the UK if someone were to repeat Jones’s actions here. The reality is that a successful prosecution would be impossible under the existing religious hatred law, as it would be necessary to prove that the individual intended to incite hatred against Muslims, which they would certainly deny, and that the words and actions should be threatening, which they would not be.

On the other hand, if someone were to incite hatred against the Jewish community in the UK by erecting signs reading “Judaism is of the Devil”, burning copies of the Torah and claiming that Jews are the agents of Satan, then that individual could be successfully prosecuted – because Jews are defined as a mono-ethnic faith group and are therefore covered by the law against incitement to racial hatred, which requires neither proof of intent nor that incitement should take the form of threats.

Islamism, Ramadan and Qaradawi: why Paul Berman is wrong

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Marc_LynchIn The Flight of the Intellectuals, Paul Berman argues that it is not violent Islamists who pose the greatest danger to liberal societies in the West but rather their so-called moderate cousins, such as Tariq Ramadan.

Such a reading of contemporary Islamism, however, misses the many nuances of the movement and the real battles between reformers and Salafists.

The ever-excellent Marc Lynch takes on Berman over Islamism, Tariq Ramadan and Qaradawi.

Foreign Affairs, July-August 2010

Islam’s plot to conquer the West (part 687)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Grand Jihad coverAndrew C. McCarthy outlines the thesis of his new book The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America in an interview with Jamie Glazov of FrontPageMag:

“Islamists consider themselves to be in a ‘civilizational jihad’ – their words, not mine – against the West. They use terrorism to great effect, but the battle proceeds on every conceivable front in our society: the media, the academy, and our politics, law and culture. And their aim is nothing less than the ‘destruction of the West’ – as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide (and probably the most influential Sunni cleric in the world), puts it, ‘to conquer America’ and ‘conquer Europe’….

“The very title of the book, ‘The Grand Jihad’ and the invocation of ‘sabotage’ in the subtitle, is taken from a 1991 internal Muslim Brotherhood memorandum in which the group’s leadership in the U.S. explains to its global leadership in Egypt that the Brothers (or the Ikhwan) consider their work in North America as a ‘grand jihad’ aimed at ‘eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within’ by ‘sabotage’.”

Glazov chips in: “Sounds like something the Left would embrace. That’s why you argue that Islamists work together with the Left to sabotage America, right?” McCarthy replies: “Exactly.”

McCarthy does, however, exempt some liberals and leftists from his attack – “not all of what might generally be called ‘the Left’ is part of what I am homing in on” – which is fair enough, given the prevalence of liberal Islamophobia and the role played by the likes of Christopher Hitchens. McCarthy’s target is “the hard Left – in America, the Obama Left or the Alinskyite Left – pushing to change our society radically”.