Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [120]
I am pained by the twisting of my religion by a small band of misguided fanatics. Such people embrace a deviant form of Islam. While claiming to act in its name, they are in reality just murderers and thugs. They constitute an unrepresentative minority of the 1.57 billion Muslims in the world, but they have had a disproportionate impact on how the faith is perceived. These people are called takfiris, which in Arabic means “those who accuse others of being heretics.” They rely on ignorance, resentment, and a distorted promise of achieving martyrdom to spread their ideology, turning their backs on over a thousand years of Quranic scholarship and commentary in the name of what they presume to be the authentic ways of seventh-century Arabia.
Takfiris are a small part of a larger fundamentalist movement, the Salafi movement. Salafi ideology (Salafi in Arabic means “going back to the past”) proposes to go back to the “fundamentals” of the early faith, but the majority of Salafis do not condone terrorism or the killing of innocent civilians. They declare total war on their enemies and believe that people who kill themselves in suicide attacks go straight to heaven. For them there are no limits on how war can be waged against their enemies, and they disregard traditional Islam’s moral codes, enshrined in the Quran and in the Hadiths. Almost all Muslims are aware of the tradition set in the early days of Islam in the seventh century by the first Muslim Caliph, Abu Baker Al Sediq, whose instructions to his armies were to not kill women or children or elderly people and to not cut any tree that bears fruit. In what can be considered the Muslim “Geneva Conventions,” Abu Baker’s first act as Caliph said:
Do not betray; do not carry grudges; do not deceive; do not mutilate; do not kill children; do not kill the elderly; do not kill women. Do not destroy beehives or burn them; do not cut down fruit-bearing trees; do not slaughter sheep, cattle, or camels, except for food. You will come upon people who spend their lives in monasteries, leave them to what they have dedicated their lives.
The actions of the takfiris have nothing to do with Islam and its message. Islam celebrates life; they seek to destroy it.
Takfiris have turned their back on this tradition of clemency and compassion. They aim to overthrow governments across the Arab world by violent means in order to declare a worldwide “Islamic” republic. For the sake of what they imagine to be Islam, they are killing Muslims and corrupting Islamic ethics, and they also seek to destroy the world embraced by 99.99 percent of all Muslims.
The takfiri movement, which can be traced back to the revival of a doctrinaire jihadi tendency in Egypt in the 1970s and had connections to the 1979 uprising in Mecca, would spawn many violent terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda. Takfiris are drawn to wars where Muslims are under attack, and they swarmed into Afghanistan. Many, including Osama bin Laden, learned about war, strategy, death, and terror while fighting the Soviet occupation forces in the 1980s. After that conflict ended in the early 1990s, large groups of these fighters returned to their native lands, bringing their new “skills” with them.
In Jordan we have been following the activities of these takfiris for many years. A large number of them flocked to Afghanistan in the 1980s and to Bosnia and Chechnya in the 1990s. After France and the UK, Jordan was the largest contributor of troops to the UN forces in the former Yugoslavia, sending