Thanks to [MM] and others for reactions to this posting on the UAE Islamic law conference and the issue of suicide bombings.



War is a very messy thing, and attempts to think about it in terms of legalities have been dogged by inconsistencies and difficulties of implementation. Nevertheless, war crimes are recognized as a legal category and war crimes trials have been held, including, recently, that of Slobodan Milosevic.



I believe that the medieval Muslim jurists (and before them the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad) who laid down the laws of war were engaged in an ethical task that has clear similarities to that of the framers of the Geneva Conventions. They were attempting to specify what actions were licit during war. What they held was that warriors fight warriors. Muslim warriors were not to slaughter innocent women and children belonging to the enemy side.



Medieval Muslim thinkers quoted a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, ""Set out for Jihad in the name of Allah and for the sake of Allah. Do not lay hands on the old verging on death, on women, children and babes. Do not steal anything from the booty and collect together all that falls to your lot in the battlefield and do good, for Allah loves the virtuous and the pious."



Likewise, Sahih Bukhari gives an anecdote about the Prophet being dismayed when a woman was killed in battle, and forbidding it. Now, the pagan Meccans had chased the Prophet and his companions out of Mecca, and so were in the position of occupiers of that region, and were actively trying to kill Muslims. They had tried to assassinate the Prophet himself! Yet the Prophet was disturbed at the idea of Muslims killing pagan Meccan women in the course of battles, and he forbade it.



I therefore find al-Qaradawi's position illogical and un-Islamic, since he holds that occupation of Muslim lands justifies the deliberate killing of innocents among the enemy. I know of no classical Islamic jurisprudential grounds for such a position, and it contradicts the sunna of the Prophet. I think Dr. Hasan Safar's position makes far more sense within the Islamic legal tradition. (It is Safar with a sin, by the way, not al-S.affar).



Likewise the hadith corpus makes it clear that Muslims are to avoid creating an aversion to Islam. Thus, again from Bukhari: "It has also been narrated by Sa'd b. Abu Burda through his father through his grandfather that the Prophet of Allah (may peace be upon him) sent him and Mu'adh (on a mission) to the Yemen, and said (by way of advising them): Show leniency (to the people) ; don't be hard upon them; give them glad tidings (of Divine favours in this world and the Hereafter) ; and do not create aversion. Work in collaboration and don't be divided."



Since for Muslims to blow up babies in their strollers, kids in dance clubs, patrons in pizzerias, and college students in cafeterias creates an aversion to Islam, I should think it would be contrary to Islamic law simply on those grounds.



Obviously, it is possible that in the course of fighting a just war, women and children will be killed accidentally. This was recognized in Islamic law and excused as long as there had been no deliberate intent to harm innocents. In ethics, everything is a matter of intent. Once you admit that there are just wars, then you are simply going to have to live the with likelihood that some innocents will be killed. This is different from deliberately setting out to kill innocents, and even to kill mainly innocents.



Both in Islamic law and in the Geneva conventions, the deliberate targeting of civilians is condemned. (By the way, if the comparison is the US campaign in Afghanistan, it is deeply flawed. The New York Times was unable to document more than 450 non-combatant deaths in that war, which overthrew the tyrannical rule of 60,000 Taliban who had harbored international terrorists on a large scale. All of those casualties are highly regrettable, but they were not intentional).



Al-Qaradawi's attempt to distinguish between killing Israeli civilians and killing other civilians seems to me untenable. Let us say a group of American civilians goes to Kabul. And let us say that al-Qaida remnants believe Kabul is under American occupation. Is it all right for them to blow up the American civilians? How would such an act be different from Hamas blowing up Israeli civilians? Al-Qaradawi's position is a slippery slope that leads inexorably to terrorism. For, of course, the US according to al-Qaida was in "occupation" of Eastern Arabia, which then monstrously authorized September 11 in their eyes.



I am a little surprised that MM frames his response in part by questioning my ethical balance in not condemning the deliberate killing of civilians by parties other than Muslims. I actually think I have been consistent in this regard (and this goes back to my college-era protests against the Vietnam war). He clearly has not been reading my weblog at www.juancole.com .



The discussion at this particular panel at UAE conference was not about just war or the Palestinian right of self-defense (i.e. fighting Israeli *soldiers*). It was about the Islamic validity of deliberately targetting primarily civilians.

Asharq al-Awsat reports today that a contentious debate broke out in the UAE at the 14th Annual conference of the International Congress for Islamic Law concerning the permissibility of suicide bombings. A scholar named Hasan Safar argued that while individual efforts against an enemy army are approved by medieval jurists, the Islamic legal tradition condemns such actions where they harm innocents in markets and so on. He further argued that the suicide bombings carried out by Palestinians in Israel have been not only un-Islamic but also politically inept insofar as they allowed the Israelis to delegitimize the Palestinian movement as terrorist in nature.



(There is a Hasan Safar from Kuwait listed at UNESCO. Does anyone know if this is the same man?)



The Egyptian Islamist Yusuf al-Qaradawi (Azharite and old-time Muslim Brotherhood activist) was there, and expressed amazement at Dr. Safar's position. He agreed that hijacking an airplane full of innocents is forbidden in Islamic law. But he upheld suicide bombings against a power that was occupying Muslim land, as in Palestine. He identified this sort of action as "defensive jihad," and condemned the idea that it is terrorism. Asharq al-Awsat's reporter felt that his view probably prevailed among participants.



Qaradawi, who is enormously influential, has stated this position in the past. He condemned unreservedly both September 11 and the bombing of a synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia, which also killed German tourists. But he insists that virtually anything can be done to "resist occupation of Muslim lands." In his youth he was active in Muslim Brotherhood attacks on the British positions at the Suez Canal.

See http://www.islamonline.net/english/News/2002-06/23/article02.shtml



Qaradawi's rulings in Islamic law have a very wide following: http://www.qaradawi.net/site/topics/index.asp?cu_no=2



Qaradawi's position is at the least widely shared. Last summer the Saudi Ambassador to the UK revealed that he had had a private poll taken of British Muslims (who number about 1.5 million) and found that 80% of them support the Palestinian bombing operations. He suspected that support in the Middle East if anything would be higher. See http://www.ain-al-yaqeen.com/issues/20020719/feat7en.htm



I have to say that I see a logical contradiction (not to mention a moral lapse of huge proportions) in Qaradawi's position. Innocents are innocents. You can't logically speaking accuse a baby of being an "occupier" and deserving of being blown up for this reason. Medieval Muslim thinking on warfare always had special rules for the treatment of enemy women and children, who were to be safeguarded unless they were *active* combatants, in which case they would be treated like enemy soldiers. I am unaware of any support in classical Islamic legal thinking for denying to innocents the status of innocents merely because the soldiers of their people had managed to conquer land away from Muslims. I'm afraid that there has been a romance with terrorism on the part of the hardline Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots that goes all the way back to the 1940s. Western imperialism doesn't excuse everything.

Palestinian Childrens' Health Declines under Sharon

According to Asharq al-Awsat, a just-released Palestinian study reports that 33% of Palestinian elementary school children in the Gaza Strip under Israeli occupation are suffering from anemia. This is a tripling of the rate from before the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising two and a half years ago. Data indicates a strong link between this outbreak of anemia and the poverty imposed on the population by the Israeli blockade and the consequent unemployment. (The Gaza Strip is an economic black hole on its own; a third of its best land has been usurped by a few thousand Zionist settler-colonialists, and its borders are completely controlled by Israel, so that the blockade has essentially caused it to implode economically, with tragic results for children).



To help Palestinian children see the Palestine Children's Welfare Fund and the Palestine Children's Relief Fund. Save the Children also has a program in Palestine. Those little first-graders have not done anything to deserve being starved. And, I have to say, that Ariel Sharon doesn't look to me like he's missed too many meals.

Did the Reagan Administration Give Saddam Smallpox Samples?

I have a question for the biologically informed. We have all

been scratching our heads for some time as to why exactly the hawks in the

Bush administration have been so desperate to go to war with Iraq.

Opinion polls show that a majority of the American public thinks they have

not made their case.



I don't personally think control of petroleum sufficiently explains it

all. Petroleum is relatively inexpensive and Saudia remains the swing

producer, able virtually to set prices. It might be nice for the US to

have a base in southern Iraq or to have more assurance about stability in

Gulf affairs, but is the situation dire enough to go to war over?



It cannot possibly be that they are impelled by fears that Iraq has or is

anywhere near to having a nuclear weapon, since a) there is not good

evidence that this is so and b) the Bush administration is treating North

Korea (or for that matter Pakistan and India) completely differently.

The difficulties that the anthrax terrorist had in effectively delivering

his spores to any significant numbers of people also make me skeptical

that anthrax or anything like anthrax is the real worry.



I have begun wondering if smallpox is driving all this to some large

extent. That is, the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" and the talk of

nukes may be euphemisms for smallpox. According to wire reports, "A 1994

investigation by the Senate Banking Committee found that dozens of

biological agents were later shipped to Iraq [in the '80s] under licence from

the US Commerce Department." On Dec. 30 the Washington Post leaked

a Reagan-era memo from the early 1980s that showed determination to do

"whatever was necessary" to prevent Iraq from losing its war with Iran.

Presumably this was the context of Donald Rumsfeld's 1983 visit to Baghad and

the preparations for the restoration of diplomatic ties between the two

countries.



In early Nov., 2002, the Washington Post reported a CIA survey that

determined that four other nations have smallpox samples: France, Russia, Iraq

and North Korea. The last known case of smallpox in Iraq was in 1976, and

it seems to me highly unlikely that the Iraqi authorities cultured it at

that time. Since about 1980 the world has been free of it. The US and

the USSR had samples in their labs (we used to think they were the only

ones). So, one question is, where did these other three countries get the

samples from? Apparently France's stock had not been known before the CIA

announcement.



Ken Alibek has alleged that the Soviets had a program to weaponize

smallpox. Although there have been shadowy allegations that the Soviets

gave Iraq smallpox, these seem highly unlikely to be true. It is not as

if the two regimes were that close. Why not give it to East Germany

instead?



A related question is, did the United States give Saddam smallpox samples

during the Iran-Iraq war as part of its support for Saddam?



Unlike anthrax, smallpox wouldn't be hard to get started among an enemy

army or even population. It kills thirty percent of its victims. And

since no populations are any longer innoculated for smallpox, it would be

absolutely devastating.



This question leads to another one. Did Khomeini give up the war against

Baghdad in 1988 because the US gave Saddam smallpox samples, and Saddam in

turn credibly threatened behind the scenes to use them against Iran?

Khomeini was a determined individual and why he gave up so suddenly has

always been a mystery. He clearly regretted having to do so. If Iraq had

samples and Iran did not, Iraq could hope to innoculate its population and

troops. Iraq had already demonstrated its ruthlessness by using chemical

weapons on Iranian troops and on the Kurds.



Did Bush senior avoid invading Iraq in the first Gulf War because he knew

Saddam had smallpox and might be tempted to deploy it if it seemed he was

in danger of being conquered?



Has US or Israeli intelligence gotten wind in the past few years of Iraqi

contingency planning for use of smallpox to achieve strategic goals? Is

that what Israel is really worried about and what drives the neocons?



The costs to the US public of mass innoculation against smallpox, which

President Bush says he favors, would be substantial. There will be some

loss of life, especially among children, and some will get sick. The

monetary costs are not insignificant. Is this necessary precisely because

the administration knows the US gave smallpox samples to Iraq 17 years

ago?



Did North Korea in turn gets its stock of smallpox from Iraq?



If (and I stress the "if") Reagan-era officials deliberately packed up and

shipped small pox samples off to Saddam Hussein in the mid-1980s,

shouldn't the American people know who exactly made that decision? Maybe

some of the same people taking us into war against Iraq now? Is there to

be any accountability?



I stress that all this is mere speculation. But I think someone should

get to the bottom of it.

The Koran and Fighting Unbelievers

Professor XXXXX wrote:





"It is my turn to be astonished by Prof. Cole. The following link:



http://www.geocities.com/pnoak/some.html



includes 24 passages from the Koran enjoining believers to fight

unbelievers. The one closest to the words I used is no. 21, although, to

be completely accurate, it refers only to Jews and Christians, not all

unbelievers."



This argument and this citation are perfect examples of why it is so dangerous to get one's information from an amateur web site at geocities. The passages cobbled together here are from the 1930s translation by Marmaduke Pickthall, a British upper crust convert who simply was not an academic and often translates infelicitously. The verses listed are a hodgepodge, lacking any context and failing to make any distinctions.



The word usually translated as "infidel" or "unbeliever" in English is the Arabic kafir, pl. kuffar. It literally means "ingrate," and often refers to human ingratitude in not recognizing the one God or in persecuting the prophet or Muslims. It almost always refers to the Meccan idolators, who are characterized by kufr or the ingratitude of active disbelief. The Koran enjoins Muslims to fight back against the idolatrous Meccans who were attacking Medina.



Ordinary Jews and Christians are not kafirs in this sense in the Koran, but rather are "people of the book" with their own, valid, divinely revealed scripture.

Koran 5:82 says (Arberry): "Surely they that believe, and those of Jewry, and the Christians, and those Sabeaans, whoso believes in God and the Last Day, and works righteousness--their wage waits them with their Lord, and no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow."



The Koran thus considers Judaism and Christianity true religions, in whose scriptures there is "light and guidance." It says that Christians are "closest in love" to Muslims. Muhammad made alliances with the Medinan Jews against the Meccans, and some at least of those alliances survived all the way through. It is true that some Jewish tribes fell out with the Muslims, and one appears to have gone over to the Meccan idolators to fight against monotheists. This betrayal caused bitterness toward those specific Jews, but not toward Judaism or Jews in general, who continue to be praised as in 5:82 above.



Anyone, of course, can become an "ingrate" toward God if they do the wrong thing. So Koran 2:105 speaks of "those who committed kufr from among the people of the Book." The locution of this verse demonstrates conclusively that most Jews and Christians (people of the book) have not committed kufr and are therefore not kafirs or infidels in the eyes of the Koran.



The verse Professor Kaiser refers to most specifically is 9:29-30. Arberry gives it as: "Fight those who believe not in God and the Last Day and do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden--such men as practise not the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book--until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled." The verse cannot possibly be referring to Christians and Jews in general, since as we have seen in verse 5:82, they are considered to believe in God and the last day and to be deserving of recompense with God in the afterlife. The reference is probably rather to Christians or Jews who threw in with the Meccan idolaters, thus effectively resigning from the ranks of the monotheists, or committed other enormities such as to bring into question their status as people of the book.



The great scholar Claude Cahen writes of this verse and the meaning of "tribute" (jizya) here in the Encyclopedia of Islam:



"The word jizya, which is perhaps connected with an Aramaic original, occurs in the Qur'an, IX, 29, where, even at that time, it is applied to the dues demanded from Christians and Jews, but probably in the somewhat loose sense, corresponding with the root, of "compensation" (for non-adoption of Islam), and in any case as collective tribute, not differentiated from other forms of taxation, and the nature of its content being left uncertain (the examples given in the works on the biography of the Prophet are very variable; tribute was adapted to the individual conditions of each group concerned). It is possible that, mutatis mutandis, precedents can be found in pre-Islamic Arabia outside the religious sphere, in the conditions of submission of inhabited oases to more powerful tribal groups, in return for protection; but as a result of their conquests the Arabs, heirs of the Byzantine and Sasanid regimes, were to be faced with new practical problems."



I actually prefer a Persian origin for the term jizya. And I think it is anachronistic to read back into 9:29 the meaning of "poll tax" that was paid by all Jews and Christians in the later Muslim empires. I think Cahen is closer to the mark when he sees its payment as simply a mark of clientelage or subsidiary alliance in a tribal society. Muslims also paid "tribute" to the Muslim city-state, by the way. The khums or "one-fifth" on certain kinds of income is an example.



I contend that virtually the only Koran verses that commend violence are referring to the need to defend against the Meccan siege of Medina and the machinations of the Meccans' allies. Since the pagan Meccan civilization no longer exists and since aggressive Meccan polytheism is not a force in today's world, it is not clear that any of these verses have any relevance whatsoever any more. There are no Koran verses that commend violence against anyone but the Meccan pagans and their allies. Jews, Christians, even the Mandaean gnostic sect of the Sabeans, are all granted freedom to practice and to live in peace.



I would be the first to admit that an abstract understanding of the Koran is different from contemporary Muslim interpretations of it, which are various. (Note, however, that 99.9 percent of Muslims are not falling upon their non-Muslim neighbors). But the latter are not the grounds on which this debate was waged. Rather, it was asserted that the *Koran* prescribes belligerancy toward non-Muslims, including Jews and Christians in general. This allegation is simply untrue. I have been studying the Koran in Arabic for 30 years, and I am saddened that anyone should have held this misconception.

Pakistan has arrested 500 suspected al-Qaida operatives in the past year, and has turned 443 over to the US authorities, according to Pakistani officials, as reported today in the Pakistani press. Now, there probably weren't more than 5000 "Arab Afghans" in Afghanistan before 9/11, and some large number was killed by AC-130s or by massive bombing. Others escaped through Iran. I saw one estimate that about a thousand went to Pakistan. If that were true, than Pakistan has captured half of all the al-Qaida operatives that escaped there from Pakistan, and has captured ten percent of all the Afghan Arabs that had been guests of the Taliban. Of course, a lot of them are probably lower-level camp attendees and so forth, but this is a pretty impressive number.



Pakistani military intelligence says that those captured came from 18 countries, including "Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, Morocco, Chechnya and France." Most were Arab nationals and the biggest group came from Yemen.



The ongoing manhunt has caused friction with the new Islamist government of the Northwest Frontier Province, which wants it stopped. Since the Pakistani military is actually still in control of the country behind the scenes, however, the manhunt will continue as long as the top officers want it to.



There has been a lot of friction between the US troops in Afghanistan and Pakistani border guards the past few days, after an angry border guard took a shot at an American. It is still not clear exactly why he did so. The US announced that it had the right of hot pursuit of al-Qaida and Taliban elements into Pakistan. Pakistan denounced this statement and denied that any such permission had been given. Apparently the practice was secretly acknowledged tacitly by both Musharraf and Colin Powell, who talked yesterday, but it was a faux pas for the US military to state it so baldly. Of course, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, leader of the fundamentalist Jama`at-i Islami, used the incident to whip up anti-American feeling in Pakistan, even though there hasn't actually been much real hot pursuit anyway. The US military hasn't had much look with search and destroy missions on the Afghanistan border lately.

A huge tiff is going on between India and Pakistan in the wake of this week's comments on nuclear war by General Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf said earlier this week that he was ready to use nuclear weapons had India crossed the Pakistan border last summer. Although his spokesman tried to retract the statement, it seemed clear enough when he said he had avoided war without committing conventional forces (i.e. just by the nuclear threat). Indian government officials have been sputtering ever since that they were not deterred by any Pakistani nuclear capability, and would not hesitate to go to war against Pakistan if they felt it necessary. The Indian novelist Arundhati Roy has said recently that at first she had protested the Western discourse about South Asian nuclear arms being in the hands of immature third world governments. Then she saw the governments of India and Pakistan behave childishly on the issue and began to be worried herself.



I don't think the tiff has anything to do with maturity in the sense of character. As if Kennedy, Nixon, Kruschev and Brezhnev were mature!. It is simply that the nuclear capability of both sides in South Asia is still minimal and their ability actually to deliver a warhead is not entirely assured. So we don't yet have MAD--mutually assured destruction--only LAD, likely assured destruction. That uncertainty gives the generals wriggle room to consider conventional war. When the nuclear capability expands, there will be less opportunity, even if the drum beating continues.



The rest of us should just demand an independent Kashmir and settle the damn thing before we get strontium 90 blown into our childrens' milk.



Recommended reading of the day: Amir Tahiri on French plans to centralize and liberalize the French Muslim community and why they are likely to fail. (The link is clickable).