Scholars say Osama Bin Laden is beyond the bounds of Islamic teaching on war

By Richard N. Ostling

Associated Press

The concept of jihad has many shades of meaning, but the way Osama bin Laden has applied it to political violence has moved beyond the bounds of Islamic teaching on warfare, scholars say.

“Everybody who has war experience understands that sometimes civilians are going to be killed during legitimate military action,” says John Kelsay, religion chairman at Florida State University and the author of “Islam and War.” “But direct, intentional targeting of civilians is just off the charts.”

While bin Laden, Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers and other Muslims have used the term jihad to mean “holy war,” Cambridge University scholar Akbar S. Ahmed writes that “in fact jihad means struggle and there are various forms of it; physical confrontation is just one.”

The phrase “holy war” does not appear in the Quran, the Muslim holy book, says Jamal Badawi of St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Badawi contends the phrase does not even make sense because Islam regards war as a necessary evil, not something that is holy in itself.

Muslims say the “greater jihad” is the personal “struggle with one’s lower nature, the tendency to do wrong,” while external struggles are merely the “lesser jihad,” according to Jane I. Smith, co-director of the Islamic studies center at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.

The lesser jihad includes spreading the faith through persuasion and work for social justice, as well as warfare.

Islam has never been a pacifist creed. Unlike Jesus or Buddha, the Prophet Muhammad was at times a military leader.

But in the legal traditions of the Sunni branch, which dominates in most places except Iran, combat must be undertaken for the right reasons – similar to those in Christianity’s “just war” tradition – ordered by competent authority and conducted through moral means.

On the means of warfare, one key text is the farewell instructions of Muhammad’s immediate successor, the Caliph Abu Bakr, as his army headed for Syria.

He forbade the killing of children, women, the aged and the clergy, which is understood to mean protection for all civilians. Abu Bakr even said his troops shouldn’t destroy the enemy’s plants and animals.

That ideal is not always attainable, Kelsay says. But when bin Laden issued a 1998 fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims to kill Americans and their allies without any distinction between civilians and soldiers, he went far outside Muslim tradition, Kelsay says.

Badawi compares bin Laden’s concept of jihad with Christians who kill doctors who perform abortions, or the inquisitions of medieval times, which are regarded as aberrations rather than “true Christianity.”

Badawi also notes that, in the Islamic system, bin Laden had no right to issue a fatwa. That authority is reserved for a relative handful of esteemed scholars, and particularly so when such a novel interpretation is proposed.

Similar issues of legitimacy arise when guerrillas make war, since classic Islamic writings reserve the right for rulers of a country.

Prior to Sept. 11, the issue of Muslim suicide attacks had arisen largely in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Last April, Abdul-Aziz Abdullah Al Sheik, Saudi Arabia’s chief religious authority, declared tactics of war cannot violate religious law, so suicide is illicit.

In the resulting debate, imams who favored the Palestinian cause interpreted suicide bombings as a form of martyrdom. But Smith insists that suicide is “absolutely forbidden” in Islam.

Kelsay says there’s justification in Islamic tradition for Afghanistan declaring jihad against the United States, because the Afghans would be acting in self-defense against invasion.

The Taliban regime is also “appealing to standard Islamic rules” when it requires evidence of bin Laden’s responsibility for the U.S. attacks, Kelsay says.

“They are not admitting his guilt or their own responsibility,” he says. “In Islam, if you harbor a person who is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, then you would be responsible, too.”