CAIRO, 6 April 2003 — Suicide attacks on the US-led coalition in Iraq are “permitted under (Islamic) religious law,” the sheikh of Al-Azhar, the highest Sunni Muslim spiritual authority, Muhammad Sayed Tantawi, said here yesterday. “Martyr operations against the invading forces are permitted under religious law,” he said, quoted by the official MENA news agency. Tantawi described the invasion of Iraq to oust the regime of Saddam Hussein as “an unjust aggression”.
“Whoever attacks others, spilling blood, harming the other’s honor and land is a terrorist,” he added, referring to the US-led coalition. Tantawi, however, said the US-led war was not a crusade against Islam since many Christian nations and religious leaders, including Pope John Paul II, have opposed it. He also indirectly criticized the Iraqi and the Kuwaiti leaders.
Saddam Hussein should have accepted a call from the United Arab Emirates last month to resign in order to prevent war, he said. “Had this initiative gone through, it would have preserved the blood of many Muslims and we would not be seeing the massacres under way against the Iraqi people.”
Tantawi described Iraq’s August 1990-February 1991 occupation of Kuwait as a “terrorist” act. He also criticized Kuwait, without actually naming the emirate, saying “when an Arab country enlists the help of foreign forces against another Arab country for no reason, this is treason to religion.”
On March 27, Syria’s Grand Mufti Sheikh Ahmad Kaftaro, the country’s top Muslim religious authority, called for suicide bombings against US and British troops in Iraq. Islam universally bans suicide as a crime against oneself but it allows it in defense of Muslims and their land, and celebrates as “martyrs” those who make the sacrifice. There have been two suicide attacks against the invading forces since the war began on March 20. One of them killed four US soldiers and the second three others, according to the US military.
Tantawi gave his blessing to volunteers wishing to help Iraqis in the war against US and British forces. Tantawi said the war on Iraq was an attack on all Arab countries. “Whoever wants to go to Iraq to support the Iraqi people, the door is open, and I say the door for jihad (holy struggle) is open until the day of judgment,” Tantawi told a news conference.
Activists say hundreds of Egyptians have signed up with the country’s lawyers’ union to fight alongside the Iraqis against the US-led war, now in its third week. Baghdad says thousands of Arab volunteers have arrived in Iraq and are ready to “martyr” themselves in the war to unseat the Iraqi government.
The top Palestinian religious authority yesterday banned Muslims from aiding the US-led war in Iraq. “All Muslim scholars in Palestine declare a fatwa (edict) forbidding any Muslim to participate in that aggressive war, or even to lend the voracious invaders a hand,” said the Al-Fatwa Supreme Council, an assembly of clerics from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Grand Mufti Ikrima Sabri, head of the Supreme Council, told Reuters in Ramallah: “We see that the continuous aggression against Iraq aims at stealing the oil of Iraq and not liberating the people of Iraq.” Palestinians are generally sympathetic to Iraq, seeing the 17-day-old war as parallel with their fight against Israel.
Lebanon’s top Shiite leader urged Arabs and Muslims yesterday to resist any American governor or US-backed government set up to run Iraq immediately after the war. “We as Arabs and Muslims ... will not give any legitimacy to any government set up in Iraq under an American administration or through efforts by the American administration to project legitimacy on some who will act according to its instructions,” Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah said in Beirut.
“We must confront any man that America tries to place in the position of administering Iraq under any title,” he said. “Especially when the American man ... whose name they are suggesting on the basis that he will come to set up an interim government or administration ... is the American who most lives (Ariel) Sharon’s mentality,” he said, referring to the Israeli prime minister.
