Swat cleric sets sharia deadline

Sufi Muhammad, the Muslim cleric acting as a peacemaker in northwestern Pakistan's restive Swat valley, has threatened to launch fresh protests unless Islamic courts are established in the region within two weeks.

Muhammad, who was instrumental in bringing about a ceasefire between the government and the Taliban, also demanded on Sunday that both sides release prisoners they were holding.

The provincial government of the North West Frontier Province had agreed to introduce sharia, or Islamic law, as part of the peace deal.

But Muhammad, who heads the Tehrik-e-Nifaz Shariat Muhammadi group, said the government was procrastinating over the implementation of sharia, and that he had yet to see the government take "practical steps" to establish the Islamic courts.

'Harmful to peace'

"We also asked the government to implement Nifaz-e-Adl [a system of Islamic justice] by March 15 after which we will launch a protest," Muhammad told a news conference in Mingora, the main town in the valley.
Muhammad also set a March 10 deadline for the release of prisoners.

Maulana Fazlullah, Muhammad's son-in-law and leader of the Taliban in Swat, said on Saturday on illegal FM radio that the government's reluctance to release captured fighters was harmful to peace efforts.

Taliban fighters had released seven men after the agreement.

Taliban fighters, who control much of the valley, declared an indefinite ceasefire on Tuesday and the Pakistan army said it was suspending operations.

Fighting in Swat began in late 2007 after hundreds of fighters infiltrated from Afghan border enclaves to support the Taliban and their drive to introduce Islamic rule.

At least 1,200 civilians have been killed in the violence.

Source: Agencies

Pakistan to allow sharia in Swat

Pakistan's government has agreed to restore sharia, or Islamic law, in the Swat Valley and neighbouring areas of the country's northwest as part of a peace deal with local pro-Taliban fighters.

The agreement was reached after talks in Peshawar between members of Tahrik-e-Nafiz Shariat Muhammadi and officials of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) government on Monday.

Announcing the decision to restore sharia, a spokesman for the NWFP government said Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani president, had already agreed in principle to this concession to the region's religious conservatives.

"All un-Islamic laws related to the judicial system, those against the Quran and Sunnah, would be subject to cancellation and considered null and void," a NWFP spokesman said in a statement following the talks.
Officials gave few details of the kind of sharia they were planning to implement in the Malakand region, which includes Swat Valley, but said that laws that fail to comply with Islamic texts would be suspended.

The Pakistani government has also agreed its troops will refrain from launching military operations in Swat as part of the deal.

Religious conservatives

The Tahrik-e-Nafiz Shariat Muhammadi, or the Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, has long demanded the implementation of sharia in the region.

"This is not the first time Sharia law has been imposed in this area," Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder said, reporting from Pakistan.

"In the mid 90s it was imposed following violent protests by the movement for the implementation of sharia law there.

"The majority of people in that area are very conservative. They have been demanding the implementation of sharia law because they say the other law takes far too long to dispense justice, and the demand is for swift justice.

"However, this will not mean that the groups opposed to the government will be dispensing that justice. The government of Pakistan will appoint the judges."

Shuja Nawaz, a strategic analyst with the South Asia Centre , told Al Jazeera that the agreement could prove problematic for Pakistan in future.

"It will mean that the government is ceding territory to the Taliban, which will be a repeat of what happened when prime minister Benazir Bhutto was in power in 1994 and a number of districts in Swat and Malakand were handed over to essentially the same group so they could impose their rather convoluted view of sharia on those districts.

"The moment you cede space to them, the Taliban will want to extend that control and then the government will have to go through this business of sending in the military yet again to clear and hold the territory."

Necessary negotiations

The agreement is likely to draw criticism from the US, which is battling Taliban and al-Qaeda groups in the area. The US has said that such deals only serve to allow fighters to regroup.

But Pakistan says that force alone cannot defeat all opposition groups and that talks must take place, although several past deals have failed.
Unlike regions under tribal rule in the northwest, where al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters have found safe havens to launch attacks both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Pakistani government has typically controlled the Swat Valley.

Conservative groups aiming to introduce sharia have been fighting government troops in the region since 2007.

The groups took control there after a 2008 peace deal collapsed within months of being signed.

Much of the violence, which has left hundreds of thousands of people homeless, has been blamed on the Taliban in Swat, headed by Mullah Fazlullah, the son-in-law of Maulana Sufi Muhammad, the leader of Tahrik-e-Nafiz Shariat Muhammadi.

Government struggle

Regaining control of the Swat Valley - which was formerly a popular tourist destination - is a significant test for Pakistan's civilian leadership.

Separately on Monday, 16 people were killed when a suspected US drone fired two missiles at a target on Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan.

A security official in Pakistan's Kurram tribal region said that a building used by the Taliban was destroyed in the attack.

"Afghan Taliban were holding an important meeting there when the missiles were fired," an intelligence official in the area said.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

European takes closer look at Islamic financing

PARIS: With commercial bank financing tight, Europeans have been taking a closer look at Islamic banking.
"The potential is there," Ahmad Jachi, the first deputy governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon, said at a conference this past week in Paris. "It's a matter of really enabling and creating the market."
Islamic banking has already been integrated into the British and German banking systems, and banking executives at the conference said efforts were under way to allow Muslims in France to bank and invest under regulations that conform to Shariah, the legal code of Islam.
Estimates of the Islamic banking market's current size vary from $500 billion to $1 trillion. It has only about 5 percent of the overall banking market, but attendees at the conference, which was sponsored by The Economist, said Islamic banking has a huge potential for growth, since one-sixth of the world's population is Muslim.
The International Monetary Fund estimates that the Islamic banking sector has grown 10 percent to 15 percent a year over the past decade.

New Sharia products in Asia sought

The booming Islamic finance industry has yet to rub off on wealthy Asians who say there are far too few Sharia products to invest in, the private banking arm of Malaysia's second largest lender said yesterday.
Sharia investing is a key pillar in the Middle East and has caught the interest of non-traditional centres such as London and Singapore, but rich Asians are still cool on it.
Asia is a big potential market for the $1 trillion Islamic finance sector, with the Asia-Pacific home to 28 per cent of the world's high-net-worth-individuals, who are defined as those with investible assets of more than $1 million.
Even in Malaysia, which has the world's largest Sharia bond market, wealthy individuals have limited interest in Islamic assets.
"The appetite is still quite small because they continue to nibble," said CIMB Private Banking co-head Carolyn Leng.
The bank says it is Malaysia's top private banking firm with assets of 4.4 billion ringgit ($1.23bn). The bank expects to increase this to about 7bn ringgit by 2010, Leng said.
"Offering of Islamic products are not that great here, what you have is probably what the market (outside) has as well. Product innovation is key, we need to be a lot more creative."
Structured products and Islamic bonds are the main sharia products that wealthy Malaysians put their money into, Leng said.
In contrast to Asia, Middle East investors have a wider choice of Islamic offerings as banks tap their global resources to structure innovative products, Leng said.
"There are a lot of derivatives-based kind of products. The way they structure some options into their products is interesting because it's done in such a way that it's a profit-sharing method," she said.
Islamic banking products can be bought and sold by all investors, regardless of individual religious belief, and is premised on the notion of ethical investing.
Islamic banks have been barely bruised by the global financial crisis, although falling property and commodity prices and slowing economies are starting to affect the sector.
Source : Gulf Daily News

Interview : Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf (4)

Can you explain Sharia?

The word "Sharia" is the term given to define the collectivity of laws that Muslims govern themselves by. And there is a presumption that these laws recognize all of the specific laws mentioned in the Quran and in the practice of the prophet, and do not conflict with that. So any law, anything studied in the Quran or the hadith, is definitely [Sharia]. The idea is that it is divinely legislated, that the creator also has legislated certain things for us.
But in the community of Muslims, it was recognized very early on that the Quran and the hadith do not speak to all issues. And there are many issues which are not necessarily addressed in the Quran and the hadith, that the Quran is silent on. ... There is a recognition in the [science] of Islamic jurisprudence that there are issues which have to be obtained by analogy, by consensus, and other [subsidiary] sources of jurisprudence. But as long as they don't conflict with the Quran and hadith of the prophet, it's considered to be, quote, unquote, "Sharia."

The flexibility built in there, you know, the using of your own common sense, is that what allows different places to apply Sharia differently?

Well, I wouldn't phrase it quite that way. The correct phrasing would be that when people think about Islamic law, there's a presumption that all of Islamic law is Quranic, or emanates from the Quran and the hadith. The point is, and the truth of the matter is, what really defines Islamic law [is] the sum total of Islamic law as has been practiced by Muslims throughout the last 14, 15 centuries ... . Generally, it emanates from the Quran and the hadith. The Quran and the hadith are a limiting factor and a shaping factor. But any body of laws that includes and embodies the specific commandments and prohibitions mentioned in the Quran and the hadith, that does not violate any of these things, has been considered as Sharia, as Islamic. And this allows a lot of variation of opinion, in things which the Quran and the hadith are relatively silent on as long as the principles are maintained, of justice, et cetera.

My understanding of [the Sharia] rules about punishment for matrimonial infidelity [is that] you have to have four eyewitnesses, or several eyewitnesses to the [act] in order to demand the death penalty. It's almost inconceivable to me that you could ever produce that kind of eyewitness or evidence. But we hear that these kinds of punishments are meted out fairly regularly. Is the law being followed the way it's set [out]?

You cannot judge a whole body of law by one instance of criminal law. When people think about Sharia law, they often think about the penalties for certain crimes. They don't think about the sum total of Islamic law and its jurisprudence, which means the underlying structure and philosophy and understanding of how you arrive at what we call the Islamically correct decision. You do not define Sharia law by just a couple of penalties. ...
Islamic law has a few penalties for certain crimes. But the rules of evidence, as you mentioned in the case of adultery, require either the free confession by the individual and/or the existence of four witnesses who are of sound mind and who fit the description of qualified witnesses, which is very rare to obtain.
Much of what we see when we hear of events that apply Sharia law, what we see in Nigeria, for instance, or even in Pakistan, is a desire by much of the people to see the general principles of justice followed. ... It is a desire by the people to see their system of laws be more equitable. It is a call for correction of the overall system of social justice, of economic justice, which the Quran calls for, and the example of the prophet calls for.
You see, Muslims have an ideal. Part of their ideal is to follow what they call the example of the prophet, the Sunna of the prophet. So at an individual level, a human being who wants to perfect himself or herself looks to the tradition of the prophet, his individual practice, and tries to emulate the prophet as much as possible.
There is also a collective subliminal ambition that Muslims have, that at a collective level, they also embody the ideals of the community that the prophet developed in Medina. So when Muslims today speak of the attempt to establish an Islamic state, what they are really saying is that they would like to have a community that lives in accordance with the ideals, the relationships, the social contract, which the prophet had developed in Medina with his companions and how they had this amongst each other. ...

In what ways do Western values, morals, and cultural practices, intrude upon, and [in what ways] are they at variance with Islamic ideals?

I think there are two aspects to this question, in the broader sense of the word. There is Western values regarding governance; Western values regarding separation of powers; Western notions regarding what the role of government is in society; Western notion in terms of democratic institutions and principles and ideas. And to a large extent, Muslims are very enamored of these systems, and would like to implement them in their own societies ... because these principles and norms are completely in sync with the principles of the Quran and the teachings of the prophet. Muslims would like very much to implement these norms within their societies.
When you come to speak about things like behavioral norms, gender relationships, or the kind of things that people will do, this is a separate issue. And there is another aspect of the West, and that is the attitude of the West towards the non-Western countries, in terms of trying to be presumptuous in telling them how they should even live their lives in ways that they are not accustomed to -- like modes of dress, for instance. In the 1930s, when the first shah of Iran forced his soldiers at bayonet point to force Iranian women to take off the chador, for instance.
People don't like to be told how to dress. This is a matter of personal individual conscience. Even we here in the West do not insist that our students in public schools wear uniforms. We give them that level of freedom. People do not like to be told how to do certain things in their personal lives.

What are the key differences between being a Muslim in America and being a Muslim in the Muslim world?
There are many aspects to that. There is the political aspect, the sociological aspect, the social and family aspect, the economic aspect. So there are many aspects to the to the difference between living in a Muslim country as a native especially, and living in this country. ...
If I were to look at maybe the broadest difference: there is a sense of freedom in the United States. So one practices one's faith in the United States as an act of deliberate choice. If you are not [doing so, it's] not so much because of social pressure. There may be a certain amount of social pressure. But at a certain point in one's life, one is relatively free to live one's life as one chooses in this country.
And that sense of freedom makes one's religiosity or the defining lines of one's religiosity much sharper. Religion is a much more personal thing here. It is also a deeper experience within the personal envelope. One is forced to attach oneself to one's religion in a personally deeper way in terms of the existential issues -- it has to be anchored on a much deeper existential foundation.
Another aspect about living in the United States is that one experiences a lot of negative media attention to one's Islamicity. And that has resulted, and can result in a reaction one way or the other by many people. Many Muslims feel in this country like the Christians did in Rome when they were fed to the lions. And here the lions are the media. We hope that perhaps things will change in the United States, as they did in Rome, as well.
Source : Frontline : Muslims

Interview : Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf (3)

Who decides the rules of Islamic jurisprudence?

The thing about the Islamic situation is we don't have a church. We don't have an ordained priesthood, which makes it a little complicated. But we do have a tradition of scholarship, and rules of scholarship. It's very much like any field of knowledge.
Take any field of knowledge, like physics or biology or chemistry. Anybody can become a chemist or a biologist or a physicist. But there are rules [developed], and a kind of a growing consensus of opinion on how one should think correctly to arrive at what would be deemed a right, a correct decision.
Analogously, there is, in Islam, a tradition of theological interpretation, of [juridical] understanding and knowledge. And as long as you abide by these, the consensus of understanding on how you arrive at a decision, certain differences of opinion are considered equally valid.

What about interpretations regarding women, in particular? We find, in many parts of the world that tend to be populated by Muslims, it seems that women are getting the short end of the stick.

Well ... the prophet, for his times, was a feminist. And there are certainly voices within the Muslim world who believe and argue very strongly for the rights of women. But gender relationships really deal with the cultural norms of a particular group and the times in which they live. If one were to say, for instance, that American women are behind Muslim women -- and I pick the fact that there have been five Muslim women heads of state, and that the United States is behind the Muslim world in this regard -- that would not be considered to be an accurate assessment of how women are regarded in a particular society. One has to look at the sum total ... of the norms and the relationships and the understandings that exist in a given society in a given time. ...
Some of what we see may be considered to be inequities. But we have to remember that when Islam spread from Arabia to what we consider the Muslim world today, it spread through countries and societies which had very ancient traditions. Egypt had an ancient tradition, Iran, another ancient country, Persia before that. The subcontinent of India: another ancient culture. Same thing with current-day Turkey, the Byzantine Empire. ...
Through that, many cultural norms became to be considered by societies as being Islamic, but they're really cultural. So in matriarchal societies, which you will see some matriarchal societies like in West Africa or in Egypt, you'll find women very, very influential. Women hold the purse strings; women determine a lot of what happens, because ancient Egypt had a tradition of having women kings, women queens, queens of Egypt.
Whereas in some societies, which tended to be nomadic, it was very much more male-oriented, and the patriarchal and very strong male orientation became predominant. So as you go across much of the Muslim world, you will see this diversity, which really entered into Muslim life through custom, and not through the Quran and the hadith itself.

Can you define "hadith" for an American audience?
The word "hadith" means any report of something the prophet either said or did. That's hadith with small "h.". Hadith with capital "H" is the collection of all these reports.

Which have been carefully substantiated or authenticated?
There are all kinds of grades of hadith, from the most authentic to those that have been forged, and various degrees in between. Islamic hadith scholarship actually is a very fascinating study, because through the different hadith you get a slice of Islamic history. The politics of what happened at different periods of time are all manifest in the hadith.

And the Sunna, similarly.
The word "Sunna" is used to mean the normative practice of the prophet. In fact, the jurists have defined the general Sunna of the prophet to mean everything the prophet did or said. The hadith is the report of the Sunna. And of the practice of the prophet, there's a certain class of actions that are normative for Muslims to follow, Sunna which has legal value, has a precedent value. And there is Sunna which has no Sharia value. For instance, the prophet prayed a certain way. This has Sharia value, we're supposed to pray that way. The prophet went to hajj on a camel -- doesn't mean that we have to ride a camel from Medina to Mecca for our hajj to be valid. We can take a car. We can take a plane, because that Sunna has no Sharia value.
Source : Frontline : Muslims