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| Suicide-bombing an integral part of jehad | | Muslim bombers' growing threat to Muslim Pakistan | |
BL KAK
NEW DELHI, FEB 8
Al Qaeda alone is not angry with Pakistan government. Shia sect of Muslims alone is not angry with the Musharraf dispensation. A dispasionate analysis of four or five incidents in Pakistan in a fortnight will make it clear that what happened was not strictly just against the Shia comunity. The pre-Ashura attacks too were against the government, which was supposed to then face the public accusation that it was incapable of controlling violence. The recent Islamabad incident is of a piece with the others in that it was unsuccessful and was prevented by the security personnel from wreaking the planned havoc.
But it was also significantly different. Instead of one man, it was a group of people in a vehicle who opened fire before the actual act could be performed. Was the innovation meant to prevent the police from blocking the route of the terrorist or was it simply the style of a new party or group trying to do what only Al Qaeda and its henchmen normally carry out?
According to media reports from Pakistan, the attacker arrived at the airport (in Islamabad) around 8:50pm in a taxi with two other men and was stopped for checking by Airport Security Force officials who asked for his identification. The man opened fire at the guards and then ran towards the airport's VIP lounge. The security officials returned fire, inflicting multiple bullet injuries on him. The attacker was hit in the face and the upper part of his body. At this point, there was an explosion that killed the bomber and injured 10 people, mostly security men. The Interior Minister of Pakistan says the attacker was also wearing an explosives belt which did not go off; the Information Minister thinks the man was blown up when his grenade fell out of his hand and exploded near him.
Either way you look at it, it points to a 'new party' taking part in the suicide-bombing method of protest accepted only recently by the Islamic clergy, explains Daily Times of Pakistan in its editorial. To be precise, it was first accepted in a fatwa by the greatest living Arab jurist Yusuf Qardawi residing presently in Qatar. He shocked the traditional clergy by allowing suicide - expressly banned by the Quran - under circumstances of extreme injustice. His opinion was directed at condoning the Al Qaeda acts in the West where good Muslims took their own lives to signal Islam's challenge to its persecutors regardless of the fact that it killed innocent non-Muslims in the process.
And the Daily Times pronounced: "It was a thoughtless fatwa to issue. It has created a new loophole against the edict forbidding suicide among the usually imitative clergy of South Asia". Two inferences have been drawn: first that suicide-bombing is an integral part of jihad - which is now private - and that it is permissible not only against the non-Muslim West but also against the governments in the Islamic world that do the bidding of the infidel West. The Islamabad suicide-bomber was most probably not linked to Al Qaeda but an innovator backed by the Pakistani clergy extrapolating from the suicide fatwa of Qardawi.
The clergy is outraged by recent developments in Pakistan, the most upsetting being the amendment made in the hudood or what the clergy thinks is an immutable Quranic edict. It is not just the high-visibility political clergy that has been fulminating against the amendment carried out by the elected representatives of the people in Parliament. It is also the high priesthood of the seminary who think politics beneath their dignity. The high-water mark of this vituperation came from a former judge of the Supreme Court Justice. Such is his authority in Pakistan that his 'Dajjal speech' on a TV channel - Dajjal being President Pervez Musharraf - influenced an Islamabad cleric to threaten the government with suicide-bombing when his illegally constructed mosque was pulled down.
The airport bomber wanted to get at the VIP lounge, clearly a place where only high officials and the ministers of the offending government gather for travel. He was also a very angry suicide-bomber and did not pause to think his act over and go according to a cold-blooded plan. It was not a plan of action prepared by a professional and drilled into a robotic votary of Al Qaeda. The first rule broken here is that the bomber was accompanied by men who have now been arrested. The second rule broken is that the bomber tried to get in through a gate he knew would be guarded by security men.
The unsuccessful attacks give comfort because they might not have been directed by Al Qaeda from Waziristan. Yet if they are "copy-cat stuff" being deployed by other clergy to vent their fury, it is a disturbing phenomenon, a kind of ham-handed proliferation that may happen more frequently, and which cannot be thwarted by military means only. |
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