It’s not quite a fatwa but Iran’s Supreme Leader has spoken through his representative in London. Ayatollah Abdolhossein Moezi, director of the Islamic Centre of England, has called on Muslim immigrants to be “better Muslims” and not to join the West’s armed forces. It is un-Islamic, he says, for them to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The wonder is that the directive was so long in coming. It needed the tragedy of Maj Nidal Malik Hassan, the American-born military psychiatrist son of Palestinian refugees, who ran amok and killed 13 people, to remind Ayatollah Khamenei of the conflict of loyalties that Muslims in the West face. A contributory factor may have been reports from The Hague, where Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader indicted on 11 charges including genocide, has succeeded in bullying the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia into postponing his trial. But not before the court heard transcripts of his telephone conversations warning of “a black cauldron where 300,000 Muslims will die”.
Karadzic’s troops besieged and captured the United Nations safe haven of Srebrenica. Nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys were tortured, machine-gunned and bulldozed into mass graves while their womenfolk were abused, raped and forced to defile the Quran. The Bosnian leader himself was quoted in court as saying, “They will disappear from the face of the earth.”
Those revelations, coinciding with Maj Hassan’s murderous spree, may have convinced the Ayatollah of the need for Muslims in the West to take a stand. But the dilemma is not confined to the diaspora. The Governments of Jordan, Egypt, the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia ostensibly support the US and Nato in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, significantly, they dare not send troops to wage the so-called war on terror. It also bears noting that the ruling regimes in some of these countries have also been targeted by jihadis. Pakistan is sui generis for it is as much at war with itself as it is under attack. Lines are blurred because religious extremism is also a feature of the continuing internal struggle for political power.
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9:14 PM
Moderate Islamist here
