This may be the fatwa the world has been waiting for. It was delivered, not in a mosque or a madrasah, nor in some dark corner of cyberspace, but in a wood-paneled hall opposite St. James' Park in London last week. Though issued just across the street from Britain's Foreign Office, its author, Shaikh Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, stressed that neither he nor Minhaj ul-Quran, his Pakistan-based organization, was supported in any way by any government. His voice and finger often rising sternly, the sheik delivered a far-reaching diatribe against terrorists and what he described as their wrongheaded concept of jihad. His fatwa: Terrorism is at all times, in all conditions, against Islam. The murders terrorists commit will send them, not to paradise, as often claimed, but to hell. "[Terrorists] are the heroes of hellfire," he thundered. Their actions are not just unlawful but render terrorists kufr, or disbelievers, casting them outside the Islamic faith.
At 600 pages, Qadri's fatwa may well be the most detailed antiterror fatwa ever written, but it's far from the first. Since 9/11, clerics from Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to al-Jazeera's televangelist Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi have condemned terrorism. In 2008, 6,000 Indian Muslim clerics endorsed an antiterror fatwa. Qadri himself was among the 170 Islamic scholars from various sects who signed an antiterrorist fatwa in Amman in 2005.
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1969662,00.html#ixzz0hxzzQTHy
