A Muslim who gets it…
Tawfiq Hamid is a courageous Muslim who has understood and renounced his own extremist history. In this reprint of an essay he wrote last year, he describes what makes a man turn into a jihadi. He describes his dilemma when, having come under the sway of al Qaeda’s number two Ayman al Zawahiri (pictured) he came eventually to reject jihadi precepts and yet could not accept that a peaceful interpretation of his religion could be theologically grounded. Eventually, he says he managed to square the circle:
By immersing myself in Salafi ideology, I was better able to judge the impact of its violent tenets on the minds of its followers. Among the more appalling notions it supports are the enslavement and rape of female war prisoners and the beating of women to discipline them. It permits polygamy and pedophilia. It refers to Jews as ‘pigs and monkeys’ and exhorts believers to kill them before the end of days: Say: ‘Shall I tell you who, in the sight of God, deserves a yet worse retribution than these? Those [the Jews] whom God has rejected and whom He has condemned, and whom He has turned into monkeys and pigs because they worshiped the powers of evil: these are yet worse in station, and farther astray from the right path [than the mockers]’. (Koran 5:60). Homosexuals are to be killed as well; to cite one of many examples, on July 19, 2000, two gay teenagers were hanged in Iran for no other crime than being gay.
These doctrines are not taken out of context, as many apologists for Islamism argue: They are central to the faith and ethics of millions of Muslims, and are currently being taught as part of the standard curriculum in many Islamic educational systems in the Middle East as well in the West. Moreover, there is no single approved Islamic textbook that contradicts or provides an alternative to the passages I have cited. It has thus become clear to me that Salafi ideology is what is largely responsible for the so-called ‘clash of civilizations.’ Consequently, I have chosen to combat Salafism by exposing it and by providing an alternative, peaceful and theologically rigorous interpretation of the Koran.
He therefore does not sanitise what is happening as ‘un-Islamic’; but at the same time he believes in a theologically grounded interpretation of his religion that would enable it to promote peace rather than war. He runs a terrible risk in promoting reform in this way. He deserves every encouragement. And his writing should be sent to every member of our political and security establishment, so many of whom deny the reality he has so painfully realised.