Re: Islam, War, Militant groups .. some quetions
IMO this is the be all end all on islamic warfare. I am quoting an excerpt but do go through the entire fatwa by Shaykh Muhammad Afifi al-Akiti. Bookmark it, spread it around.
"To put it plainly, there is simply no legal precedent in the history of Sunni Islam for the tactic of attacking civilians and overtly non-military targets. Yet the awful reality today is that a minority of Sunni Muslims, whether in Iraq or Beslan or elsewhere, have perpetrated such acts in the name of jihâd and on behalf of the Umma. Perhaps the first such mission to break this long and admirable precedent was the Hamas bombing on a public bus in Jerusalem in 1994 - not that long ago. (Reflect on this!)
Immediately after the incident, the almost unanimous response of the orthodox Shâfi’î jurists from the Far East and the Hadramawt was not only to make clear that the minimum legal position from our Sacred Law is untenable for persons who carry out such acts, but also to warn the Umma that by going down that path we would be compromising the optimum way of Ihsân and that we would thereby be running a real risk of losing the moral and religious high ground. Those who still defend this tactic, invoking blindly a nebulous usûlî principle that it is justifiable out of darûra while ignoring the far’î strictures, must look long and hard at what they are doing and ask the question: was it absolutely necessary, and if so, why was this not done before 1994, and especially during the earlier wars, most of all during the disasters of 1948 and 1967?
How could such a tactic be condoned by one of our Rightly Guided Caliphs and a heroic fighter such as 'Alî (may Allâh ennoble his face!), who when in the Battle of the Trench his notorious non-Muslim opponent, who was seconds away from being killed by him, spat on his noble face, immediately left him alone. When asked later his reasons for withdrawing when Allâh clearly gave him power over him, he answered: “I was fighting for the sake of God, and when he spat in my face I feared that if I killed him it would have been out of revenge and spite!” Far from being an act of cowardice, this characterizes Muslim chivalry: fighting, yet not out of anger.
In actual fact, the only precedent for this tactic from Muslim history is the cowardly terrorism carried out by the “Assassins” of the Nizari Isma’îlîs. Their most famous victim from a suicide mission was the wise minister and the Defender of the Faith, who could have been alive to deal with the fitna of the Crusades: Nizâm al-Mulk, the Jamâl al-Shuhadâ’ (may Allâh encompass him with His mercy!), assasinated on Thursday, the 10th of the holy month of Ramadan 485/14 October 1092.
Ironically, in the case of Palestine, the precedent was set not by Muslims but by early Zionist terrorist gangs such as the Irgun, who, for example, infamously bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22nd July 1946. So ask yourself as an upright and God-fearing believer, whose every organ will be interrogated: do you really want to follow the footsteps and the models of those Zionists and the heterodox Isma’îlîs, instead of the path taken by our Beloved (may Allâh’s blessings and peace be upon him!), who for almost half of the (twenty-three) years of his mission endured Meccan persecution, humiliation and insults? Is anger your only strength? If so, remember the Prophetic advice that it is from the Devil. And is darûra your only excuse for following them instead into their condemned lizard-holes? Do you think that any of our famous mujâhids from history, such as 'Ali, Salâh al-Dîn, and Muhammad al-Fâtih (may Allâh be well pleased with them all!) will ever condone the article you quoted and these acts today in Baghdad, Jerusalem, Cairo, Bali, Casablanca, Beslan, Madrid, London and New York, some of them committed on days when it is traditionally forbidden by our Law to fight: Dhû l-Qa’da and al-Hijja, Muharram and Rajab? Every person of fitra will see that this is nothing other than a sunna of perversion."