Time Mag says Boko Haram un-Islamic, ignores Qur’an verses on sex slavery

MEMRI is reporting that even  Pakistani writers have “questioned liberal ‘apologists’ for failing to understand the links between Islamic sharia and incidents such as the abduction of more than 200 teenage girls from a school by Nigerian jihadi group Boko Haram or the Pakistani Taliban’s 2012 attack on liberal youth icon Malala Yousafzai and the sharia justification given for it.”

Kidnapping and enslaving girls as sex slaves is sanctioned by the Qur’an in multiple places — not one of the Muslim groups’ condemnations of the abductions addresses that or explains how it is a misunderstanding of Islam. Neither do their clueless leftist apologists.

“Time Mag says Boko Haram un-Islamic, ignores Qur’an verses on sex slavery” By Robert Spencer

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Here is yet another article (remarkably poorly edited for a major magazine) purporting to show that Boko Haram is violating the teachings of Islam, while ignoring the passages of the Qur’an and Hadith that Boko Haram uses to justify its actions. The problem with such pieces is that they do nothing to refute the jihadist claims and thus do nothing to blunt the jihadist justification for their actions, so all they really accomplish is to lull the Infidels into complacency. Is that the objective? “5 Reasons Boko Haram is Un-Islamic,” by Carla Power, Time, May 15, 2014:

The official name of Boko Haram, the Nigerian group apparently responsible for the kidnapping of over 200 schoolgirls, is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad. That translates into English as “People Committed to the Propogation [sic] of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.” The name is wholly inappropriate. With their sustained campaign of murders and kidnappings, the members of Boko Haram conduct themselves in a manner that could barely be more alien to the Prophet Muhammad teachings [sic]. Earlier this week, Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti, Sheikh Abdulaziz Al [sic] al-Sheikh, declared Boko Haram was “set up to smear the image of Islam.” The secretary-general of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the world’s largest bloc of Muslim countries, told the Associated Press that violent extremists like Boko Haram “not only disavow their Islam, but their humanity.”

It’s always dangerous to generalize about a faith observed by 1.6 billion people – there’s a lot of room for interpretation between that many people – but it’s clear that Boko Haram’s atrocities go against the mainstream teachings of Islam. Here are five reasons why Boko Haram’s actions are fundamentally un-Islamic:

1. Boko Haram targets educational establishments.

In the local Hausa language, “Boko Haram” translates roughly as “Western education is forbidden.” In 2012, the group began targeting government schools with home-made firebombs. Over the last two years, reports Amnesty International, attacks by armed groups have forced over 60 schools in northern Nigeria to close, with Boko Haram claiming responsibility for some of the attacks.

Boko Haram’s hostility to education stems from its suspicion of what it views as the government’s secular education system. But that hostility strongly contravenes the teachings of Islam, a faith whose first revelation to the Prophet Muhammad was the word “Read,” whose scripture repeatedly enjoins Muslims to reflect, and whose traditions enjoin all Muslims – regardless of gender – to pursue education.

Boko Haram’s objection is not to education as such, but to education that is not Islamic and Qur’an-based. The Taliban also attacks schools, for the same reasons.

2. It claims to be waging jihad.

Boko Haram’s formal name makes it clear that the group is pursuing jihad. There’s debate among Islamic scholars as to what constitutes a “just” jihad, but mainstream scholars agree that jihad can only be led by a legitimate leader of a Muslim community, not self-appointed leaders like Osama bin Laden or Boko Haram’s Abubakar Shekau, who has led the group since 2009. Even if the conditions for jihad are met, the Prophet Muhammad banned targeting non-combatants. Boko Haram has repeatedly flaunted that ban. In February, the group killed over 50 schoolboys, opening fire on a boarding school in northeastern Nigeria before burning it down. Last fall, Boko Haram gunmen shot 40 students at an agricultural training college as they lay asleep in their dorms. According to the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings, women and children, rabbis and priests and other noncombatants are to be spared. Warriors cannot burn down property, destroy trees or fields, or commit atrocities.

Power here ignores the fact that in Islamic theology, jihad warfare is fard kifaya, an obligation of the community as a whole but not of every individual believer. Jihad becomes fard ayn, obligatory on every individual Muslim to aid in some way, when a Muslim land is attacked. In Sunni Islam, only the caliph is authorized to declare offensive jihad, and there has been no caliph since 1924, so if Boko Haram were waging offensive jihad, her point would hold that ” jihad can only be led by a legitimate leader of a Muslim community.” But defensive jihad remains a universal obligation that, according to Islamic theology can and should be waged by everyone, since it is an individual obligation of every believer. Hence every jihad today has to be cast as defensive, and Boko Haram’s leader Abubakar Shekau did that in 2012 when he claimed that the group’s attacks on Christians were “revenge” for supposed enormities they committed against Muslims in Nigeria: “We are also at war with Christians because the whole world knows what they did to us,” he said. “They killed our fellows and even ate their flesh in Jos.” He thereby situated his jihad as defensive.

3. It has declared war against Christians.

In a rambling video released May 5, Shekau declared war “against Christians generally.” He included in that group President Barack Obama, French President Francois Hollande, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon “and any unbeliever.” But the Quran tells Muslims to respect their fellow monotheists, specifically the Christians and the Jews, who are “People of the Book.” The Quran says: “Those who believe [Muslims], the Jews, the Christians….whosoever believe in God and the Last day and do good deeds, they shall have their reward from their Lord, shall have nothing to fear, nor shall they come to grief.”

This is outstandingly disingenuous. Does Power actually not know that the Qur’an also says this? “Fight those who believe not in God nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by God and His Apostle, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” (9:29) “People of the Book” is the Qur’an’s designation for Jews, Christians and some others.

4. It forcibly converts people.

The May 12 video of the kidnapped schoolgirls purports to show some Christian girls speaking their new Muslim names. The girls had been “liberated,” claimed Shekau, by having converted from Christianity to Islam. But he’s flouting a key teaching of Islam. “Let there be no compulsion in religion,” states the Quran. The verse, notes Usama Hasan, senior researcher at the Quilliam Foundation, a U.K.-based counter-extremism think-tank, was revealed to Muhammad after some of the earliest Muslims’ children converted to Judaism and Christianity. Nobody can force anyone to convert to Islam, say scholars. Embracing the faith is a matter between individuals and their God.

Certainly the Qur’an says that (2:256), but what constitutes “compulsion” is in the eye of the beholder. After all, the institutionalized subjugation of the dhimma, with its regular humiliation and harassment, from which one can be freed for the simple price of converting to Islam, is not considered compulsion. Remember Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, the journalists who were kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam — even though their conversions were obviously coerced, their captors made them say that they were converting freely, and the captors probably believed that themselves. After all, the journos could have chosen to be killed instead.

5. It espouses forcing girls and women into marriage.

In the May 5 video, Shekau says the kidnapped schoolgirls should be married off. But Islam does not allow anyone – male or female – to be married without his or her own consent. According to one hadith – hadiths are the words or deeds of the Prophet Muhammad that, along with the Quran, constitute the basis of Islamic law – one day a girl married off against her will came crying to Muhammad, saying she hadn’t agreed to the marriage. Muhammad promptly declared the marriage invalid.

Here again we see an Islamic apologist ignore the verses that Muslims like Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau point to in order to justify kidnapping young girls and selling them into sexual slavery — even to offer a mitigating explanation of them:

“If you fear that you will not act justly towards the orphans, marry such women as seem good to you, two, three, four; but if you fear you will not be equitable, then only one, or what your right hands own; so it is likelier you will not be partial.” (Qur’an 4:3)

And:

“And also prohibited to you are all married women except those your right hands possess.” (Qur’an 4:24)

See also 33:50-52 and 70:29-30.

The members of Boko Haram certainly consider themselves Muslims but their actions make them traitors to their faith. We should start referring to them as a criminal group rather than an Islamist group. Their sickening deeds and rhetoric repeatedly demonstrate that not only do they lack kinship with the vast majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, but they lack respect for the religion they claim to fight for.

The problem with stopping referring to them as an “Islamist” or Muslim group is that ignoring the Islamic justifications for their actions, instead of confronting them and working for genuine reform, only ensures that other Islamic jihadists will use them to justify similar actions later.

 

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