06-17-2006, 06:45 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Democracy, Dar al-Harb and Dar al-Islam</b>
Quadrant
3/1/2006
Stenhouse, Paul
THE MYRIAD FACES that Islam presents to the non-Islamic world reflect the vastly differing racial, cultural, linguistic and social origins of Muslims, and the fact that Islam is itself in a state of unprecedented flux and reappraisal.
This ethnic and cultural diversity within Islam partially explains the differing reactions among Muslims to the bloody aftermath of the return of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Iran in 1979, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in the USA, and to the Bali bombings on October 12, 2002 and October 1, 2005. A minority of extremist Islamists or "fundamentalists"--both Sunni and Shi'i--openly rejoiced at "victory" over the "Great Satan"; while a majority of moderate Muslims less audibly deplored the violence and tried to dissociate themselves from its perpetrators.
The world, according to Islamic law, is divided between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. The Dar al-Islam--the house, abode or country of submission--is that part of the world where Muslim governments and Islamic law prevail; and the Dar al-Harb--the house, abode or country of war--is the rest of the world. Islam's much-publicised anti-democratic face has provoked speculation among Muslims and non-Muslims concerning the role of the Shari'a in general, and the Koran in particular, in justifying terrorism and anarchy in allegedly un-Islamic Muslim countries, and in democratic countries.
Speculation has extended to the possibility of Islamic fundamentalists using democratic processes, or playing by the rules of constitutional law in unsuspecting secular Western democratic societies, in order to take over the system, and eventually to change it, and impose Shari'a, or Islamic, law.
Until the end of the First World War, Muslims in Turkey, Arabia, Yemen and the Horn of Africa lived under Islamic rulers in countries known since the seventh century as "countries of submission". In these countries, Shari'a law prevailed and non-Muslims (usually descendants of the original inhabitants) were "tolerated" minorities with minimal rights that could be withdrawn at the whim of the ruler. Migration of Muslims en masse to non-Islamic countries--Dar al-Harb or countries of war--was virtually unknown, and religiously proscribed.
Most other Muslims lived in what had formerly been Islamic countries under British, French, German, Spanish or Indonesian colonial, non-Islamic, rule. In these countries, the status of the Muslim inhabitants was much debated by Muslim jurists. These discussed whether--for example in India in 1870-71 when followers of the militaristic and heretical Wahhabi sect conspired to overthrow British rule--conditions existed for a "Crescentade", as the nineteenth-century English termed the jihad.
The answer, according to jurists, hinged on whether British India was a Dar al-Harb or a Dar al-Islam. The designation of a country as a Dar al-Harb is a logical progression from the idea of jihad ("holy war") once the Muslim 'umma (or "religious community") became a reality after the death of Muhammad. The Koran makes jihad a duty and a test of the sincerity of believing Muslims, and to be waged against unbelievers wherever they are to be found.
For purely pragmatic reasons, one suspects, the Indian Sunni, who belonged mainly to the Hanafi and the Shafi'i sects, agreed that as long as some of the prescriptions of the Shari'a were still enforced in a country, it remained a Dar al-Islam, and jihad could not be called, especially if there was no probability of victory for the armies of Islam. Actually the Hanafi and the Shafi'i were as frightened of the Wahhabis as were the British and realised that a jihad against British rule would be followed by a jihad against them.
If an Islamic country were to become a Dar al-Harb, all Muslims would, in theory, be obliged to leave it; and a wife who refused to accompany her husband in leaving would be ipso facto divorced.
A completely new situation, one never considered by classical Islamic jurists, arose after the Second World War. This saw mass and often voluntary migration by Muslims from Africa and the Magreb to the non-Islamic democracies of Europe and the United Kingdom, and from Turkey to Germany. Subsequent wars and social upheaval have resulted in significant movements of Muslims from the Middle East and Central and South-East Asia and from the Balkans to Europe, North America and to Australia.
While Islamic jurists paid minute attention to the status of non-Muslims (Dhimmis) living in a Dar al-Islam, little appears to have been written on the status of Muslims living in a Dar al-Harb. The situation hardly ever arose, apart from diplomats or merchants having to deal with non-Muslims in a Dar al-Harb for reasons of state or commerce.
The status of Muslims who live voluntarily in these non-Muslim countries is as complex as was the status of Muslims living in formerly Islamic societies under non-Islamic rule. As in the latter case, pragmatic solutions need to be found, and usually are found, when it is impossible to follow the letter of the law. Especially is this a difficulty for those Muslims who follow closely the injunctions of the Shari'a and now live in secular democratic societies.
Having permitted the participation of religious parties in democratic elections, secular democracies like Turkey find themselves confronted by the ambiguities and uncertainties of rule by Islamic minorities, with all the equivocation and challenges this presents.
Non-Islamic countries (Dar al-Harb) are similarly situated, with the added disability of having no prior experience of dealing with a minority whose religion regards secular law as blasphemous, and which requires its followers to do all they can to subvert or trivialise these laws in the name of their religion.
Democracies per se are political systems where sovereignty is claimed and held by the people who elect their rulers and hold them accountable to the ruled; where minority rights (including the right to become the majority) are protected, and political competition among individuals, parties and ideas is open and encouraged. For fundamentalist Muslims who believe God to be the sole arbiter and ruler in temporal matters, this claim of exclusive sovereignty (hakimiyya) by the people, which properly belongs to God, amounts to usurping God's role, and is blasphemy.
The status of Muslims in a Dar al-Harb (usually, but not always, a democracy) is governed, in principle, by those passages in the Koran that regulate the attitude to be adopted by Muslims towards the mushrikun (literally "polytheists"; usually a synonym for Christians and Jews), the kafirun (a generic term covering all "unbelievers") or the munafiqun ("hypocrites").
Close contact with unbelievers is forbidden to Muslims. Associating with them means becoming one of them. Believers are urged to fight against unbelievers until idolatry is no more and Allah's religion reigns supreme. Fighting is obligatory for them, much as they may dislike it. Believers should make war on the infidels who dwell around them, just as Muhammad was allegedly told by God to make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal sternly with them because hell is their home, and evil their fate. Only when one is in fear of one's life may one associate with them.
It is in this context that we usually find taqiyya ("dissimulation") and muwafaqa ("connivance") offered by some Sunni jurists as an option, and by Shi'ites as a duty, when one's life, or the good of Islam is at stake. "God gave the believers freedom of movement by takiyya [sic] therefore conceal thyself." On the subject of dissimulation a fourteenth-century commentary says: "If anyone is compelled and professes unbelief with his tongue, while his heart contradicts him, in order to escape his enemies, no blame falls on him, because God takes his servants as their hearts believe."
After the Spanish reconquest of Andalusia in the fifteenth century, the jurists of the predominant Sunni sect of Morocco and North Africa--the Maliki--insisted that all Muslims should leave Spanish territory because it was a grave sin for Muslims to live under non-Muslim rulers. Bernard Lewis quotes a Moroccan jurist, al-Wansharisi, who handed down a fatwa to a questioner on this very matter.
According to al-Wansharisi, migration from the Dar al-Harb to a Dar al-Islam is obligatory until the Day of Resurrection. For a Muslim to remain under infidel rule is as bad as eating carrion, or blood, or pork, or committing murder. The questioner then asked: "But if the Christian ruler is just and tolerant; what then?" The jurist replied that even if the Christians were just and tolerant, the Muslims must still leave.
CLEARLY THERE ARE no grounds to justify taqiyya or muwafaqa in non-Islamic democracies like the USA or Australia where Muslim refugees voluntarily seeking asylum, or skilled Muslim migrants freely seeking a fresh start, have been made welcome and offered citizenship. In freely requesting citizenship, these migrants from a Dar al-Islam have committed themselves to live in a law-abiding manner under the lawfully constituted authorities of the secular countries concerned. These newcomers to a democratic, non-Islamic society do not do so under duress from the host country, nor are they in fear of their lives from the host country. They are, on the contrary, quite free to practise their religion privately should they wish to do so.
The Kitab al-Jihad defines the ahl-al-harb or the harbi (the people who live in the Dar al-Harb) as those who refuse to be converted to Islam after having been invited to do so, and against whom "any kind of war is permissible, in keeping with the rules of sura IX".
Before the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, the Byzantine emperor (who had been invited by Muhammad to convert to Islam and declined) was designated routinely malik al-tagiya--a tyrannical king-and his empire was a Dar al-Harb--a country not (yet) subdued by Islam but destined to pass into Islamic jurisdiction either by conversion or by war. "All acts of war are permitted in the Dar al-Harb."
Ibn Warraq goes on: "Once the Dar al-Harb has been subjugated, the Harbi become prisoners of war. The imam can do what he likes to them according to the circumstances. Woe betide the city that resists and is then taken by the Islamic army by storm." In this case the inhabitants have no rights whatsoever, and as Sir Steven Runciman says in his Fall of Constantinople, 1453:
  The conquering army is allowed three days of  unrestricted pillage; and the former places of worship, with every other building, become the property of the conquering leader; he may dispose  of them as he pleases. Sultan Mehmet [after the fall  of Constantinople in 1453, allowed] his soldiers the three days of pillage to which they were entitled.  They ... slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women and children without discrimination.  The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets ...     but soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The  soldiers realised that captives and precious objects  would bring them greater profits. The fundamentalist dilemma facing J observant Muslims in Western democracies has been summed up by one of the leading figures in modern Islamism, the Pakistani Abu al-A'la al-Mawdudi (1903-79): "Wherever this system [democracy] exists we do not consider Islam to exist, and wherever Islam exists there is no room for this system [democracy]." For "Islam" read "submission [to God]". Mawdudi also declared: "Nothing can claim sovereignty, be it a human being, a family, a class or group of people, or even the human race in the world as a whole. God alone is the Sovereign and His Commandments are the Law."
The Egyptian Muslim Brother, Sayyid Qutb (1906-64), saw nationalism, secularism, socialism, communism, democracy and capitalism, along with polytheists, hypocrites, Jews and Christians, as conspiring to undermine the foundations of Islam, and as being in direct opposition to its message. Qutb was put to death in 1964 for his part in a plot to assassinate President Nasser, his prime minister and a number of other officials, as well as for setting up a network of militant Islamic cells to carry out acts of terrorism to paralyse life in Egypt, and to enable the radicals to seize political power.
Mawdudi in Pakistan and Qutb in Egypt both placed jihad at the forefront of religious duty for the observant Muslim, with the aim of replacing one government with another. Qutb rejected democracy as incompatible with Islam because it was ipso facto a form of polytheism, based on the verse from the Koran, "Judgment belongs to God alone."
Mawdudi, and Qutb who drew heavily upon him, are ranked by fundamentalist Muslims in the pantheon of radical Islamists, along with Hasan al-Banna (founder of the Muslim Brothers, born 1906 and assassinated in 1949), Jamal al-Din al-Afgani (1837-97) who died, apparently from poisoning, in exile in Turkey, and Muhammad Abduh (1847-1905). The influence of their writings should not be underestimated.
Ironically, the supremacy of international law governing nations is a given in most modern democratic societies, at a time when there are calls in Islamic countries for the imposition of Shari'a law and even in some non-Islamic countries for the acceptance of Shari'a law running parallel to civil law.
At a time when many oppressed Muslims look more and more to international law (through the World Court in The Hague) and international bodies (like the UN), oppressive Islamic regimes whose credibility is tied in with the imposition of Shari'a law regard such Western constructs as civil law and international law as threatening and blasphemous.
In order to justify rejection of calls for democratisation in Islamic countries, such fundamentalist governments rely on Islamic jurists' interpretation of the Koran and Shari'a law. This has led some writers to comment, "One of the few weapons that they have at their disposal to combat the appeal of human rights and democratisation is manipulation of religious sentiment."
This "manipulating of religious sentiment" may appear to be an ineffectual "weapon" to Western governments, and Western media, accustomed to deprecating and trivialising traditional Christian values and beliefs among their own peoples. A recent example of this "manipulation of religious sentiment" is the death threat from Islamists against veteran actor Omar Sharif. Sharif (born Michel Chaloub) became a Muslim in 1950 when he married the Egyptian actress Faten Hamama, from whom he is now divorced. He joins the author of The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie, the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, Egyptian intellectual Farag Foda (shot to death in June 1992), Egyptian Nobel laureate Naghib Mahfouz and many others who have been threatened with death or murdered at the whim of Islamic fundamentalists. Sharif's "crime" was playing the part of St Peter in a recent TV series produced by the Italian company Lux Vide on the life of the saint.
THE WEST WOULD also do well to consider the recent ease of Algeria, an emerging democracy in a Muslim society. On November 3, 1988, the Algerian Constitution was amended to allow multi-party (including Islamic religious parties) elections. The Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was founded on February 18, 1989, by Abbassi Madani, and a young imam, Ali Belhadj, who made aggressively radical speeches that attracted dissatisfied lower-class youth and alarmed non-Muslims, non-Islamists and people working for social equality.
Madani sometimes expressed support for multi-party democracy, whereas Belhadj denounced it as a potential threat to Shari'a law. Among other things Belhadj proclaimed, "There is no democracy in Islam" and "If people vote against the Law of God ... this is nothing other than blasphemy. The ulama will order the death of the offenders who have substituted their authority for that of God."
On June 12, 1990, FIS swept the local elections, receiving 54 per cent of votes cast and taking 46 per cent of town assemblies. Its rapid rise alarmed the government, which moved to curtail the powers of local government. On December 26, 1991, the FIS won the first round of parliamentary elections; with 48 per cent of the overall popular vote, they won 188 of the 231 seats contested in that round, putting them far ahead of rivals. The army viewed the apparent certainty of rule by the FIS as unacceptable. On January 11, 1992, it cancelled the electoral process, forcing President Bendjedid to resign and appointing the exiled independence fighter Muhammed Boudiaf as president. Madani and Ali Belhadj were imprisoned.
Many FIS members were arrested, including FIS number three leader Abdelkader Hachani. A state of emergency was declared, and the government officially dissolved FIS on March 4. The FIS activists took this as a declaration of war. Many took to the hills and joined guerrilla groups. The country inexorably slid into a civil war which would claim more than 100,000 lives, from which it only began to emerge at the end of the 1990s.
Some Australians for their part seem unaware that there are people in their midst who, having voluntarily migrated to this country, or been born in it, describe Dar al-Harb (in this instance, Australia) as "water brought up from the bottom of a suburban sewer. If even a drop of the filthy water enters the clear water, the clarity diminishes. Likewise, it takes only a drop of the filth of disbelief to contaminate Islam in the west." Dar al-Islam--the Islamic society the author or his forebears presumably left as refugees or migrants--is, predictably, the "fresh, clear spring water".
The same author--Emir Abdullah (a nom-deplume?)--also deplores the fact that
  A major component of the education system is to  turn students into "good Australians". To be a good  Australian means to obey the laws of the land even  if they conflict with the laws of Allah. We see this  from the earliest stages of the child's education in  the form of flag-raising ceremonies each morning in which the children sing the national anthem and stand in respect as the flag of non-Muslims is raised  over their heads ...  If a Muslim associates with the Kuffar ["unbelievers", non-Muslim Australians) he will  make efforts to "fit in" with this group. In order to "fit in" we must act like Australians. Fitting in  typically consists of adjusting our Islam to a  religion more acceptable to the Kuffar we are  associating with so intimately. It is this that gives rise to what Sayyid Qutb would call an apologetic  mindset. Where Muslims feel inclined to explain  [away] every "strange behaviour" to the disbelievers: "Well, those people who blow up  busses [sic] in Israel ... they are not real Muslims." It is clear where the author stands: "real Muslims" blow up buses and kill innocent bystanders in Israel; and the teachings of the Islamist, and architect of Islamic terrorism, Sayyid Qutb, are respected in some Muslim circles in Australia.
All the above have a bearing on the appropriateness or otherwise of ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope's unauthorised publishing of the federal government's proposed new anti-terrorism laws--in a Canberra mosque. In his press release he declared, "It is time as a community we were honest about some of the issues local Muslims tell me cause the greatest anxiety and anger among those of their faith--including the West's lip-service to statehood for Palestine and the invasion of Iraq." This statement proves how necessary it is for politicians in secular societies to exercise caution before acting or speaking out on issues as complex as safeguarding our fragile democratic values.
Many Muslim Australians wanting to put down roots in democratic Australia, and to live in harmony with their fellow Australians, would find the comments by Stanhope a greater cause for anxiety, confusion and anger, than the issues he lists, having come to Australia precisely to escape the violence and terror generated by Islamic fundamentalists in their countries of origin.
To imply as Stanhope does that the scapegoating of innocent Muslims is likely to be "tolerate[d]" is gratuitous and dangerous grandstanding. He claims that the "clear association of this terrorism with Islam has left many law-abiding and peaceful Muslims feeling under siege in their own community". He is oblivious, evidently, of the fact that many Muslims are under siege in their communities from radical Islamists whom the Chief Minister would also be prudent to fear.
As I write this, Iraq's referendum on its new constitution has been completed. It has been hailed as a milestone towards democracy in that war-tom country. Serious reservations have been expressed by non-Muslim minorities in the newly "liberated" Iraq. The Catholic Patriarch of Baghdad of the Chaldeans, Emmanuel III Delly, said that while Articles 2.1 (b) and 2.2 defend freedom and religious rights, article 2.1(a) states: "No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam."
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, at the request of the Patriarch and other Christian leaders in Iraq, appealed to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw for a last-minute intervention but to no avail. Mr Straw replied that the bishops were misinterpreting the constitution and that in its present form the document guaranteed minority religious rights.
It may be a truism, but it seems to need repeating, that, as William Zartman has written, "one of the Achilles heels of democracy is its vulnerability to challengers who would use the opportunity offered by its own rules, to annul it".
Dr Paul Stenhouse MSC is the editor of Annals Australasia.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Quadrant Magazine Company, Inc.
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Quadrant
3/1/2006
Stenhouse, Paul
THE MYRIAD FACES that Islam presents to the non-Islamic world reflect the vastly differing racial, cultural, linguistic and social origins of Muslims, and the fact that Islam is itself in a state of unprecedented flux and reappraisal.
This ethnic and cultural diversity within Islam partially explains the differing reactions among Muslims to the bloody aftermath of the return of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Iran in 1979, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in the USA, and to the Bali bombings on October 12, 2002 and October 1, 2005. A minority of extremist Islamists or "fundamentalists"--both Sunni and Shi'i--openly rejoiced at "victory" over the "Great Satan"; while a majority of moderate Muslims less audibly deplored the violence and tried to dissociate themselves from its perpetrators.
The world, according to Islamic law, is divided between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. The Dar al-Islam--the house, abode or country of submission--is that part of the world where Muslim governments and Islamic law prevail; and the Dar al-Harb--the house, abode or country of war--is the rest of the world. Islam's much-publicised anti-democratic face has provoked speculation among Muslims and non-Muslims concerning the role of the Shari'a in general, and the Koran in particular, in justifying terrorism and anarchy in allegedly un-Islamic Muslim countries, and in democratic countries.
Speculation has extended to the possibility of Islamic fundamentalists using democratic processes, or playing by the rules of constitutional law in unsuspecting secular Western democratic societies, in order to take over the system, and eventually to change it, and impose Shari'a, or Islamic, law.
Until the end of the First World War, Muslims in Turkey, Arabia, Yemen and the Horn of Africa lived under Islamic rulers in countries known since the seventh century as "countries of submission". In these countries, Shari'a law prevailed and non-Muslims (usually descendants of the original inhabitants) were "tolerated" minorities with minimal rights that could be withdrawn at the whim of the ruler. Migration of Muslims en masse to non-Islamic countries--Dar al-Harb or countries of war--was virtually unknown, and religiously proscribed.
Most other Muslims lived in what had formerly been Islamic countries under British, French, German, Spanish or Indonesian colonial, non-Islamic, rule. In these countries, the status of the Muslim inhabitants was much debated by Muslim jurists. These discussed whether--for example in India in 1870-71 when followers of the militaristic and heretical Wahhabi sect conspired to overthrow British rule--conditions existed for a "Crescentade", as the nineteenth-century English termed the jihad.
The answer, according to jurists, hinged on whether British India was a Dar al-Harb or a Dar al-Islam. The designation of a country as a Dar al-Harb is a logical progression from the idea of jihad ("holy war") once the Muslim 'umma (or "religious community") became a reality after the death of Muhammad. The Koran makes jihad a duty and a test of the sincerity of believing Muslims, and to be waged against unbelievers wherever they are to be found.
For purely pragmatic reasons, one suspects, the Indian Sunni, who belonged mainly to the Hanafi and the Shafi'i sects, agreed that as long as some of the prescriptions of the Shari'a were still enforced in a country, it remained a Dar al-Islam, and jihad could not be called, especially if there was no probability of victory for the armies of Islam. Actually the Hanafi and the Shafi'i were as frightened of the Wahhabis as were the British and realised that a jihad against British rule would be followed by a jihad against them.
If an Islamic country were to become a Dar al-Harb, all Muslims would, in theory, be obliged to leave it; and a wife who refused to accompany her husband in leaving would be ipso facto divorced.
A completely new situation, one never considered by classical Islamic jurists, arose after the Second World War. This saw mass and often voluntary migration by Muslims from Africa and the Magreb to the non-Islamic democracies of Europe and the United Kingdom, and from Turkey to Germany. Subsequent wars and social upheaval have resulted in significant movements of Muslims from the Middle East and Central and South-East Asia and from the Balkans to Europe, North America and to Australia.
While Islamic jurists paid minute attention to the status of non-Muslims (Dhimmis) living in a Dar al-Islam, little appears to have been written on the status of Muslims living in a Dar al-Harb. The situation hardly ever arose, apart from diplomats or merchants having to deal with non-Muslims in a Dar al-Harb for reasons of state or commerce.
The status of Muslims who live voluntarily in these non-Muslim countries is as complex as was the status of Muslims living in formerly Islamic societies under non-Islamic rule. As in the latter case, pragmatic solutions need to be found, and usually are found, when it is impossible to follow the letter of the law. Especially is this a difficulty for those Muslims who follow closely the injunctions of the Shari'a and now live in secular democratic societies.
Having permitted the participation of religious parties in democratic elections, secular democracies like Turkey find themselves confronted by the ambiguities and uncertainties of rule by Islamic minorities, with all the equivocation and challenges this presents.
Non-Islamic countries (Dar al-Harb) are similarly situated, with the added disability of having no prior experience of dealing with a minority whose religion regards secular law as blasphemous, and which requires its followers to do all they can to subvert or trivialise these laws in the name of their religion.
Democracies per se are political systems where sovereignty is claimed and held by the people who elect their rulers and hold them accountable to the ruled; where minority rights (including the right to become the majority) are protected, and political competition among individuals, parties and ideas is open and encouraged. For fundamentalist Muslims who believe God to be the sole arbiter and ruler in temporal matters, this claim of exclusive sovereignty (hakimiyya) by the people, which properly belongs to God, amounts to usurping God's role, and is blasphemy.
The status of Muslims in a Dar al-Harb (usually, but not always, a democracy) is governed, in principle, by those passages in the Koran that regulate the attitude to be adopted by Muslims towards the mushrikun (literally "polytheists"; usually a synonym for Christians and Jews), the kafirun (a generic term covering all "unbelievers") or the munafiqun ("hypocrites").
Close contact with unbelievers is forbidden to Muslims. Associating with them means becoming one of them. Believers are urged to fight against unbelievers until idolatry is no more and Allah's religion reigns supreme. Fighting is obligatory for them, much as they may dislike it. Believers should make war on the infidels who dwell around them, just as Muhammad was allegedly told by God to make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal sternly with them because hell is their home, and evil their fate. Only when one is in fear of one's life may one associate with them.
It is in this context that we usually find taqiyya ("dissimulation") and muwafaqa ("connivance") offered by some Sunni jurists as an option, and by Shi'ites as a duty, when one's life, or the good of Islam is at stake. "God gave the believers freedom of movement by takiyya [sic] therefore conceal thyself." On the subject of dissimulation a fourteenth-century commentary says: "If anyone is compelled and professes unbelief with his tongue, while his heart contradicts him, in order to escape his enemies, no blame falls on him, because God takes his servants as their hearts believe."
After the Spanish reconquest of Andalusia in the fifteenth century, the jurists of the predominant Sunni sect of Morocco and North Africa--the Maliki--insisted that all Muslims should leave Spanish territory because it was a grave sin for Muslims to live under non-Muslim rulers. Bernard Lewis quotes a Moroccan jurist, al-Wansharisi, who handed down a fatwa to a questioner on this very matter.
According to al-Wansharisi, migration from the Dar al-Harb to a Dar al-Islam is obligatory until the Day of Resurrection. For a Muslim to remain under infidel rule is as bad as eating carrion, or blood, or pork, or committing murder. The questioner then asked: "But if the Christian ruler is just and tolerant; what then?" The jurist replied that even if the Christians were just and tolerant, the Muslims must still leave.
CLEARLY THERE ARE no grounds to justify taqiyya or muwafaqa in non-Islamic democracies like the USA or Australia where Muslim refugees voluntarily seeking asylum, or skilled Muslim migrants freely seeking a fresh start, have been made welcome and offered citizenship. In freely requesting citizenship, these migrants from a Dar al-Islam have committed themselves to live in a law-abiding manner under the lawfully constituted authorities of the secular countries concerned. These newcomers to a democratic, non-Islamic society do not do so under duress from the host country, nor are they in fear of their lives from the host country. They are, on the contrary, quite free to practise their religion privately should they wish to do so.
The Kitab al-Jihad defines the ahl-al-harb or the harbi (the people who live in the Dar al-Harb) as those who refuse to be converted to Islam after having been invited to do so, and against whom "any kind of war is permissible, in keeping with the rules of sura IX".
Before the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, the Byzantine emperor (who had been invited by Muhammad to convert to Islam and declined) was designated routinely malik al-tagiya--a tyrannical king-and his empire was a Dar al-Harb--a country not (yet) subdued by Islam but destined to pass into Islamic jurisdiction either by conversion or by war. "All acts of war are permitted in the Dar al-Harb."
Ibn Warraq goes on: "Once the Dar al-Harb has been subjugated, the Harbi become prisoners of war. The imam can do what he likes to them according to the circumstances. Woe betide the city that resists and is then taken by the Islamic army by storm." In this case the inhabitants have no rights whatsoever, and as Sir Steven Runciman says in his Fall of Constantinople, 1453:
  The conquering army is allowed three days of  unrestricted pillage; and the former places of worship, with every other building, become the property of the conquering leader; he may dispose  of them as he pleases. Sultan Mehmet [after the fall  of Constantinople in 1453, allowed] his soldiers the three days of pillage to which they were entitled.  They ... slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women and children without discrimination.  The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets ...     but soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The  soldiers realised that captives and precious objects  would bring them greater profits. The fundamentalist dilemma facing J observant Muslims in Western democracies has been summed up by one of the leading figures in modern Islamism, the Pakistani Abu al-A'la al-Mawdudi (1903-79): "Wherever this system [democracy] exists we do not consider Islam to exist, and wherever Islam exists there is no room for this system [democracy]." For "Islam" read "submission [to God]". Mawdudi also declared: "Nothing can claim sovereignty, be it a human being, a family, a class or group of people, or even the human race in the world as a whole. God alone is the Sovereign and His Commandments are the Law."
The Egyptian Muslim Brother, Sayyid Qutb (1906-64), saw nationalism, secularism, socialism, communism, democracy and capitalism, along with polytheists, hypocrites, Jews and Christians, as conspiring to undermine the foundations of Islam, and as being in direct opposition to its message. Qutb was put to death in 1964 for his part in a plot to assassinate President Nasser, his prime minister and a number of other officials, as well as for setting up a network of militant Islamic cells to carry out acts of terrorism to paralyse life in Egypt, and to enable the radicals to seize political power.
Mawdudi in Pakistan and Qutb in Egypt both placed jihad at the forefront of religious duty for the observant Muslim, with the aim of replacing one government with another. Qutb rejected democracy as incompatible with Islam because it was ipso facto a form of polytheism, based on the verse from the Koran, "Judgment belongs to God alone."
Mawdudi, and Qutb who drew heavily upon him, are ranked by fundamentalist Muslims in the pantheon of radical Islamists, along with Hasan al-Banna (founder of the Muslim Brothers, born 1906 and assassinated in 1949), Jamal al-Din al-Afgani (1837-97) who died, apparently from poisoning, in exile in Turkey, and Muhammad Abduh (1847-1905). The influence of their writings should not be underestimated.
Ironically, the supremacy of international law governing nations is a given in most modern democratic societies, at a time when there are calls in Islamic countries for the imposition of Shari'a law and even in some non-Islamic countries for the acceptance of Shari'a law running parallel to civil law.
At a time when many oppressed Muslims look more and more to international law (through the World Court in The Hague) and international bodies (like the UN), oppressive Islamic regimes whose credibility is tied in with the imposition of Shari'a law regard such Western constructs as civil law and international law as threatening and blasphemous.
In order to justify rejection of calls for democratisation in Islamic countries, such fundamentalist governments rely on Islamic jurists' interpretation of the Koran and Shari'a law. This has led some writers to comment, "One of the few weapons that they have at their disposal to combat the appeal of human rights and democratisation is manipulation of religious sentiment."
This "manipulating of religious sentiment" may appear to be an ineffectual "weapon" to Western governments, and Western media, accustomed to deprecating and trivialising traditional Christian values and beliefs among their own peoples. A recent example of this "manipulation of religious sentiment" is the death threat from Islamists against veteran actor Omar Sharif. Sharif (born Michel Chaloub) became a Muslim in 1950 when he married the Egyptian actress Faten Hamama, from whom he is now divorced. He joins the author of The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie, the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, Egyptian intellectual Farag Foda (shot to death in June 1992), Egyptian Nobel laureate Naghib Mahfouz and many others who have been threatened with death or murdered at the whim of Islamic fundamentalists. Sharif's "crime" was playing the part of St Peter in a recent TV series produced by the Italian company Lux Vide on the life of the saint.
THE WEST WOULD also do well to consider the recent ease of Algeria, an emerging democracy in a Muslim society. On November 3, 1988, the Algerian Constitution was amended to allow multi-party (including Islamic religious parties) elections. The Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was founded on February 18, 1989, by Abbassi Madani, and a young imam, Ali Belhadj, who made aggressively radical speeches that attracted dissatisfied lower-class youth and alarmed non-Muslims, non-Islamists and people working for social equality.
Madani sometimes expressed support for multi-party democracy, whereas Belhadj denounced it as a potential threat to Shari'a law. Among other things Belhadj proclaimed, "There is no democracy in Islam" and "If people vote against the Law of God ... this is nothing other than blasphemy. The ulama will order the death of the offenders who have substituted their authority for that of God."
On June 12, 1990, FIS swept the local elections, receiving 54 per cent of votes cast and taking 46 per cent of town assemblies. Its rapid rise alarmed the government, which moved to curtail the powers of local government. On December 26, 1991, the FIS won the first round of parliamentary elections; with 48 per cent of the overall popular vote, they won 188 of the 231 seats contested in that round, putting them far ahead of rivals. The army viewed the apparent certainty of rule by the FIS as unacceptable. On January 11, 1992, it cancelled the electoral process, forcing President Bendjedid to resign and appointing the exiled independence fighter Muhammed Boudiaf as president. Madani and Ali Belhadj were imprisoned.
Many FIS members were arrested, including FIS number three leader Abdelkader Hachani. A state of emergency was declared, and the government officially dissolved FIS on March 4. The FIS activists took this as a declaration of war. Many took to the hills and joined guerrilla groups. The country inexorably slid into a civil war which would claim more than 100,000 lives, from which it only began to emerge at the end of the 1990s.
Some Australians for their part seem unaware that there are people in their midst who, having voluntarily migrated to this country, or been born in it, describe Dar al-Harb (in this instance, Australia) as "water brought up from the bottom of a suburban sewer. If even a drop of the filthy water enters the clear water, the clarity diminishes. Likewise, it takes only a drop of the filth of disbelief to contaminate Islam in the west." Dar al-Islam--the Islamic society the author or his forebears presumably left as refugees or migrants--is, predictably, the "fresh, clear spring water".
The same author--Emir Abdullah (a nom-deplume?)--also deplores the fact that
  A major component of the education system is to  turn students into "good Australians". To be a good  Australian means to obey the laws of the land even  if they conflict with the laws of Allah. We see this  from the earliest stages of the child's education in  the form of flag-raising ceremonies each morning in which the children sing the national anthem and stand in respect as the flag of non-Muslims is raised  over their heads ...  If a Muslim associates with the Kuffar ["unbelievers", non-Muslim Australians) he will  make efforts to "fit in" with this group. In order to "fit in" we must act like Australians. Fitting in  typically consists of adjusting our Islam to a  religion more acceptable to the Kuffar we are  associating with so intimately. It is this that gives rise to what Sayyid Qutb would call an apologetic  mindset. Where Muslims feel inclined to explain  [away] every "strange behaviour" to the disbelievers: "Well, those people who blow up  busses [sic] in Israel ... they are not real Muslims." It is clear where the author stands: "real Muslims" blow up buses and kill innocent bystanders in Israel; and the teachings of the Islamist, and architect of Islamic terrorism, Sayyid Qutb, are respected in some Muslim circles in Australia.
All the above have a bearing on the appropriateness or otherwise of ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope's unauthorised publishing of the federal government's proposed new anti-terrorism laws--in a Canberra mosque. In his press release he declared, "It is time as a community we were honest about some of the issues local Muslims tell me cause the greatest anxiety and anger among those of their faith--including the West's lip-service to statehood for Palestine and the invasion of Iraq." This statement proves how necessary it is for politicians in secular societies to exercise caution before acting or speaking out on issues as complex as safeguarding our fragile democratic values.
Many Muslim Australians wanting to put down roots in democratic Australia, and to live in harmony with their fellow Australians, would find the comments by Stanhope a greater cause for anxiety, confusion and anger, than the issues he lists, having come to Australia precisely to escape the violence and terror generated by Islamic fundamentalists in their countries of origin.
To imply as Stanhope does that the scapegoating of innocent Muslims is likely to be "tolerate[d]" is gratuitous and dangerous grandstanding. He claims that the "clear association of this terrorism with Islam has left many law-abiding and peaceful Muslims feeling under siege in their own community". He is oblivious, evidently, of the fact that many Muslims are under siege in their communities from radical Islamists whom the Chief Minister would also be prudent to fear.
As I write this, Iraq's referendum on its new constitution has been completed. It has been hailed as a milestone towards democracy in that war-tom country. Serious reservations have been expressed by non-Muslim minorities in the newly "liberated" Iraq. The Catholic Patriarch of Baghdad of the Chaldeans, Emmanuel III Delly, said that while Articles 2.1 (b) and 2.2 defend freedom and religious rights, article 2.1(a) states: "No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam."
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, at the request of the Patriarch and other Christian leaders in Iraq, appealed to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw for a last-minute intervention but to no avail. Mr Straw replied that the bishops were misinterpreting the constitution and that in its present form the document guaranteed minority religious rights.
It may be a truism, but it seems to need repeating, that, as William Zartman has written, "one of the Achilles heels of democracy is its vulnerability to challengers who would use the opportunity offered by its own rules, to annul it".
Dr Paul Stenhouse MSC is the editor of Annals Australasia.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Quadrant Magazine Company, Inc.
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