Ironic Surrealism II

Kevin Jaques: U.S. response to 9/11 should conform to sharia
law

Dr. Kevin Jaques is one of the Three
Mosqueteers. Of the three academics who are helping architect Paul
Murdoch to plant a terrorist memorial mosque on the Flight 93 crash
site, Jaques was most central to the Park Service’s fraudulent internal
investigation.

He has also left a revealing paper trail. Shortly after 9/11,
Indiana University School of Law sponsored a forum on the likely legal
fallout from the attacks: consequences for immigration law, civil rights,
etcetera. As the university’s resident expert on Islamic (sharia) law,
Jaques was invited to say something about our looming engagement with the
Islamic world and their systems of law.

He chose to write a prescriptive
article, urging the United States to frame its response in
conformity with traditional sharia requirements:

In formulating an American response to the acts of terror, it is
necessary to define them according to the provisions of Islamic law.

Whitewashing sharia

Jaques makes the basic arguments for submission that any anti-war
multiculturalist might make. He offers an appeasement pitch:

If the United States wishes to approach the fight against terrorism
to limit future revivalist terror groups from forming and attacking
American citizens and interests, it will be necessary to craft a response
that conforms to the realities of Islamic law.

And he offers a when-in-Rome pitch:

Muslim religious leaders think of the world in legal terms and will
react to U.S. policies according to how these policies conflict or
adhere to Islamic legal principles.

Of course we should avoid gratuitous offense, when in Rome
(just as we should practice it as a pastime at home). But should we
really submit to sharia law?

Nowhere does Jaques even acknowledge that world-wide submission to
sharia law is the ultimate goal of the 9/11 terrorists. That is a pretty glaring omission
for someone who is advocating adherence to sharia law, but Jaques does
more than just elide the point. He actively misleads, going to great
lengths to pretend that the terrorists reject the whole idea of sharia
law:

[R]evivalist movements around the Islamic world are
articulating new and exciting systems of legal interpretation that, in real
terms, are similar to traditional legal norms. Only the violent
fringe—approximately 1 percent to 2 percent of Muslims worldwide—would disparage
any discussion of Islamic law as being reflective of the kinds of
non-Islamic ideas that they claim have contaminated Islam since the very
first centuries of Islamic history.

Talk about a whitewash! To paint sharia as benign, Jaques pretends
that the “violent fringe” is opposed to it, and this is no offhand
comment. The whole first third of Jaques’ discussion is spent setting up
this punch line.

Qutb did you say?

Jaques begins by describing how Islamic jurisprudence has
historically proceeded by working out consensus views of the meaning of “texts of
revelation”: the Koran and the sunnah (Muhammad’s biography). He then
discusses the trend toward “revivalism,” starting in the 14th century,
which sought to purify Islamic jurisprudence by purging all influences
other than Koran and biography.

The modern phase of this revivalism is the work of Wahhab and Qtub,
the sources of today’s bin Ladenist doctrines of maximally aggressive
conquest. Wahhab dismissed the requirement for consensus, insisting that
anyone can read the Koran for themselves, and Qtub carried this
innovation in a particularly violent direction:

Qutb advocated a radicalized form of Wahhabi extremism as the only
means of driving foreign (meaning U.S. and Israeli) influences out of
the Islamic world. His writings have become the basic texts of
contemporary violent fringe movements around the Islamic world.

Jaques identifies the “violent fringe” with Qutb while claiming that
the violent fringe “disparage[s] any discussion of Islamic law.” But
Qutb did not shun sharia law. Just the opposite. He declared
that any Muslim ruler who failed to impose sharia should be killed as an
apostate.

This is detailed in Lawrence Wright’s book The
Looming Tower. Flopping Aces posted an excerpt
last year:

Sayyid Qutb had pointed the way by declaring that a leader who does
not impose Sharia on the country must be an apostate. There is a well
known saying of the Prophet that the blood of Muslims cannot be shed
except in three instances: as punishment for murder, or for marital
infidelity, or for turning away from Islam. The pious Anwar Sadat was the
first modern victim of the reverse logic of takfir.

Jaques takes the 20th century’s foremost advocate for imposing
sharia by violent means across the entire globe and suggests that he and his
followers “would disparage any discussion of Islamic law.”

Whitewashing Wahhabism

Pretending that the violent fringe spurns sharia allows Jaques to
whitewash, not just sharia, but also the mainstream revivalist movements
that, as Jaques acknowledges, fully embrace sharia:

… revivalist movements around the Islamic world are articulating new
and exciting systems of legal interpretation that, in real terms, are
similar to traditional legal norms.

The mainstream of revivalism is Saudi Wahhabism, the state sponsored
doctrine of violent aggressive conquest whose “fringe” elements
attacked us on 9/11. As Jaques notes, these revivalists are thoroughly
traditional in their interpretations of sharia law. All of them look
backwards to the purity of 7th century Islam. Not much “new” there, however
“exciting” to a person of Jaques’ evident sympathies.

Doctrinally, there is no gap between the “violent fringe” of bin
Ladenists and the larger Wahhabi sect that spawned them. At most there are
questions about whether bin Laden has been a good general, whose
strategies effectively serve the Wahhabi goal of world domination.
Mainstream Wahhabism completely embraces all of bin Laden’s objectives.

Honest about one thing: how sharia limits infidel
responses

When he turns to the question of how we could frame a military
response that is consistent with sharia law, Jaques takes the subject
seriously, and is commendably forthright, acknowledging sharia as the law of
Islamic conquest:

The laws of war that developed in the earliest periods divide the
world into two halves, dar al-Islam, or the “land of submission”
and dar al-harb, the “land of war.” Dar al-Islam
refers to any territory that is under the control of Muslims and thus
forms an Islamic commonwealth. Legal texts imply that the term is meant to
denote a political designation of submission to Muslim political
authority. … All areas outside of Muslim political authority are considered
to be in a potential state of war with the Muslim state. All relations
between the areas of submission and the areas of war are regulated by
the concept of jihad … an obligatory “struggle” against
non-believers who are not already under Muslim rule.

Any cessation in hostilities is purely strategic, until Muslims can
get back to a position of strength from which to continue to fight:

The law outlines, in most cases, rules for the cessation of struggle
(hudnah) when it is deemed by the Imam or his surrogates that
it is to the advantage of the Muslims to do so, or out of a need due
to Muslim weakness. In cases where Muslims simply seek some advantage in
the cessation of hostilities, hudnah is limited to a period
of four months. If the cessation of hostilities is due to Muslim
weakness, hudnah can last for a period of up to 10 years.

Jaques also acknowledges that under Islamic law, infidels have no
legal rights to fight back against Muslims at all:

…reaction by the United States becomes problematic since the rebels
are still defined as Muslim and the law expressly forbids non-Muslims
from attacking Muslims in a Muslim land.

Yes, well, that is the problem with conforming to the law
of Islamic supremacism. It’s called “surrender.”

Takfir squared, or Qutbed

So we must submit to Islamic law, says Jaques, yet according to
Islamic law, we are not allowed to fight back. What to do? What to do?

Jaques, expert in the nuances of Islamic law, offers us a way out.
We can embrace Qutb’s innovation and declare the bin Ladenists
apostates! (The strategy of takfir.)
Then we would be allowed to kill them. But of course we have to get
Muslim jurists to okay this first:

American responses to the attacks will be greatly assisted if Muslim
jurists are willing to define the attacks as riddah
(apostasy) and not as bughat (rebellion), or simple homicide
(qatl). In the latter two categories, the perpetrators remain Muslim and
any effort by non-Muslims to punish them will expressly violate
provisions in Islamic law that prevents non-Muslims from killing Muslims.
Only apostates may be killed by non-Muslims, and in some interpretations,
Muslims may ask non-Muslims for assistance in bringing apostates to
justice.

The only way Jaques is able to make this Qutbian strategy seem like
a real possibility is through his earlier deception, pretending that
the “violent fringe” is hostile to sharia law. Since there is not
actually any doctrinal divide between the bin Ladenists and the traditional
Islam, there is no way for traditional jurists to declare them
apostates.

Jaques himself makes clear that the complaint about bin Laden from
the point of view of traditional Islam is that he acted without
consensus, and that he seems to be a bad general, engaging in acts that weaken
rather than strengthen the Muslim position:

Defining the acts as contraventions of ijma would not hinge
just on the enormity of the acts (simple murder contravenes
ijma but is not defined as apostasy), but also on the idea that they
endanger the Muslim community because of what they suggest about
structures of legal authority. Encouraging others to commit suicide, claiming
the right to declare jihad, to kill thousands (including many
Muslims) and destroy billions of dollars of property without proper
consent, and to risk the lives of Muslims due to Western military and
economic retaliations challenges the authority of the community of jurists
and of every principle of law that, by consensus, seeks to promote the
welfare of the Muslim community.

But if bin Laden is just a bad general, acting without proper
authority, how exactly is he supposed to be declared an apostate? Under
sharia, the terror attacks might at most be viewed as rebellion (for which
infidels have no recourse), but as Jaques notes, the demise of the
caliphate makes it impossible even to establish bin Laden as a rebel. Who is
he rebelling against?

Defining the acts as bughat [rebellion] is complicated by
the fact that there is no universally recognized Muslim leader in any
area of the Muslim world and has not been for more than 700 years. Many
jurists argue that since this is the case, rules for bughat are
not applicable today.

The bin Ladenists are trying to rectify this lack of a recognized
Muslim leader by establishing a new caliphate. That hardly makes them
apostates.

First Jaques pretends that the terrorists are hostile to sharia law.
Then he pretends that sharia law is hostile to the terrorists. All the
while neglecting to mention that the terrorists’ explicit goal is
world submission to sharia law. That is quite a concatenation of strategic
deception (taqiyya).

Jaques was just as deceptive in his advice to the Memorial
Project

That giant Mecca-oriented
crescent that forms the centerpiece of the Flight 93 Memorial?
Jaques admits that it is similar to the Mecca-direction indicator around
which every mosque is built, but so
what:

…just because something is ’similar to’ something else does
not make it the ’same’.

The half-mile wide crescent is much too
big, says Jaques, to be recognized as the central feature of a
mosque. After all, that would make it the world’s biggest mosque by a factor
of a hundred! What could be sillier? But Taqiyya very much for
asking.

Jaques does not name his own religious beliefs, but it seems pretty
clear that he must be a Muslim, and probably of the revivalist stripe
(which he finds so “new and exciting”). Will he deny it, as Islam allows
(Koran, verse
16:106)? Feel free to ask.
Please note any response in the comments.

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