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Martyrdom debate points to harder Islamic line
By James Drummond in Cairo
Published: April 4 2002 21:38 | Last Updated: April 4 2002 21:50
FT.Com
When Ahmed al-Tayeb was appointed as the new mufti of Egypt last month, it was widely presumed that his predecessor, Farid Nasser Wassel, had overstepped the mark.
Mr Wassel famously ruled that smoking was sufficient grounds for divorce, but among other judgments he had also praised all Palestinian suicide bombers, no matter what target they chose, as 'martyrs'.
In the eyes of most analysts, this was too extreme a position for the Egyptian regime of President Hosni Mubarak, who appointed him.
Yet this week, the newly appointed Mr Tayeb said in a message carried in the semi-official al-Ahram newspaper that suicide bombings carried out by Palestinians against Israeli settlers, including non-combatants, in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip were 'one of the highest levels of martyrdom'.
The debate over suicide attacks, the only consistently effective military weapon in the Palestinian armoury against Israel, is indicative of an increasingly hardline attitude in the Muslim world that has emerged over the 18 months of the Palestinian uprising.
Mr Tayeb, who was appointed directly by Mr Mubarak's government, is the second highest religious authority in Egypt. His authority is formally exceeded only by that of Muhammed Sayyid Tantawi, a well-known moderate who is the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, head of the mosque-university that is the highest centre of religious learning in the Sunni Muslim world.
While political leaders such as Mr Mubarak and Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, have condemned attacks carried out by Palestinian militants on Israeli civilians, some influential religious leaders have ruled that all Israelis are legitimate targets.
Previously the Sheikh al-Azhar, also a political appointee, had ruled that all attacks on civilians were forbidden. He received support from the most senior cleric in Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz Al ash-Sheikh, who has ruled that most of the kamikaze attacks carried out by Palestinians and others are suicidal in nature.
Islam of whatever stripe is explicit in forbidding suicide. Only God can give and take away life. As such, the attacks are haram or forbidden, according to Mr Al ash-Sheikh.
But last December, one of the most influential clerics in modern Sunni Islam, Yussif al-Qardawi, an Egyptian who now lives in the Gulf state of Qatar and broadcasts on the pan-Arab al-Jazeera TV channel, publicly berated Mr Tantawi, and implicitly the mufti of Saudi Arabia, declaring that all Israelis were in effect military targets.
One of the reasons why there are no clear rulings on the issue of suicide attacks is that they are a relatively new phenomenon in Sunni Islam.
'If a young man is fighting . . . on behalf of his country or his family, then his death is considered not as suicide but as martyrdom,' says Fahmi Howeidi, a prominent Islamist writer and columnist in Egypt's al-Ahram newspaper.
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