Is This the Islam of Prophet Mohammad, a Blessing to

Mankind?

Sultan Shahin, Founder-Editor of this progressive Islamic website NewAgeIslam.com and President of
non-profit NGO New Age Islam Foundation and its subsidiary Education for Peace, a center for
preventing radicalization, established in April 2008. Is this Islam? Could this be the Islam of Prophet
Mohammad (pbuh) who was sent as a blessing for mankind? Could Islam convert a British-born into a
mass killer of his own people, plowing a car into innocent pedestrians, as happened this week in a
London attack on British Parliament?

Questions like this are asked everytime there is an Islamist terrorist outrage. This question was asked
recently in India when a young radicalised Muslim Saifullah was killed in Lucknow, preferring what he
called martyrdom to life, despite hours long pleadings of his brother as well as a cleric and other
elders.

The same question was put in an even more poignant scene by a lady in Peshawar, crying over the
blood-spattered dead bodies of her school-going children in December 2014. The proud killers of 132
innocent children and scores of female teachers were the Pakistan Taliban, students of Islamic
madrasas, supposedly well-versed in the teachings of Islam. The Taliban claim to kill in the name of
Islam. They claim to glorify Islam by doing so. They believe they are trying to establish the sovereignty of
Allah over the world. So, the question is inevitable. Is this Islam, indeed?

Only a fortnight ago, I was forced to ask this question in a slightly different mode. Is this pure Islam or
true Islam, as Salafis, Wahhabis claim? Not for the first, nor for the last time, to be sure, over hundred
devotees of Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sindh, Pakistan, had been killed in the name of what
Salafi-Wahhabis consider true, pure Islam. Salafi-Wahhabis abhor Sufism because they believe that Sufi
practices resemble pre-Islamic polytheistic Hindu traditions. Any Muslim who strays from the path of
what Salafis consider true Islam is an apostate and deserves to be killed. The murderer has been
brainwashed by Wahhabi ulema into believing that he can be assured of a place in heaven if he kills
apostates and kuffars.

Questions galore. But no real answers. Sufism-oriented Ulema and Mashaikh in India and the Sahel
region of Africa are becoming more and more vociferous in denouncing Wahhabism-Salafism. No doubt
Islamist terrorism is a result of the indoctrination of sections of Muslims by Wahhabi-Salafi ulema
around the world. This has been possible owing to the induction of tens of billions of Saudi petrodollars
over the last 40 years. Even after 9/11, in which 16 of the 19 terrorists were products of Saudi education
system, the West has allowed Saudi Arabia to continue spending billions in the propagation of an
extremist, desiccated version of Isam, shorn of all its beauty and benevolence.

So it is good that Sufi ulema, under attack from Wahhabi militants, are coming out to denounce the
Salafi understanding of Islam. But is this enough? Do they not need to ask why its Salafis who are
winning this ideological war? Have Sufi ulema been able to bring back to the Sufi fold even a single
Islamist terrorist? After all, all the terrorists of today, at least from the South Asian and African Sahel
region were part of a Sufism-oriented Islam until recently. Wahhabism existed mainly in the Arab
regions. There were very few Salafis anywhere else. Easy availability of petrodollars for the propagation
of Salafism has certainly played an important role. But can money alone bring about this kind of
transformation? Why is the Sufi counter-narrative not effective enough to make a difference?

Writing in this space, almost exactly a year ago, I had made an earnest appeal to the Sufi Ulema and
Mashaikh gathering in Delhi for an international conference. I had asked them to go beyond the usual
shibboleths and utilse this great opportunity to consider this most urgent question: why is the Sufi focus
on positives of Islam not working? The more Sufis and other moderate Muslims denounce terrorism, the
more followers this Satanic ideology finds. I had pointed out the basic reason behind this conundrum:
the radical theology of violence and exclusion and the current theology of consensus of all ulema,
including Sufi ulema, are by and large one and the same. Any differences are cosmetic. ISIS and other
terroist organisations may be militarily defeated tomorrow but the problem of radicalisation and violent
extremism in Islam will still remain. Islam supremacism, xenophobia, intolerance and exclusivism as well
as gender inequality are inherent in the current Islamic, including Sufi, theology. It is this that should
concern us most.

I had an opportunity on the eve of that last Marchs conclave in Delhi to meet Maulana Tahirul Qadri, a
Sufi-Barelvi scholar from Pakistan, renowned for his 600-page fatwa against Islamist terrorism. I asked
him two questions. One: are holy Qurans war-time instructions, intolerant and xenophobic in nature,
still applicable to us Muslims in the 2st cenury, though we could not be possibly fighting 7th century
wars of the Prophets time? His answer: There are no intolerant verses in Quran and yes, all of them are
applicable to us for ever. My second question was: by quoting a profusion of ahadith (plural of hadith,
so-called sayings of the prophet) in your presentation, and considering them akin to revelation, are you
weakening Khalifa Baghdadis terrorist ideology, which is largely based on ahadith, or strengtening it?
He remained silent.
There is a hadith, according to which Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) himself ordered his followers to attack
a town called Taif by showering stones with Minjaneeq (i.e. a catapult) despite the possibility of
innocent civilians being killed. When a companion ponted out that this could result in civilian killing, the
Prophet is supposed to have said: They are also from them. A Taliban scholar, under interrorgtion
from a Pakistan Army officer, quoted this hadith to justify terrorism. Having watched the video on
internet, I asked an Indian Sufi scholar, if the Prophet, in his view, could have said something that
contradicts several verses of Quran and his own previous statements. He simply said: I have checked,
this hadith is in the sihah-e-sitta (six so-called authentic books of ahadith including Bukhari and
Muslim). To all my questioning, if this meant, he believed that the Prophet himself justified killing of
civilians, the Sufi scholar just remained silent. So, regardless of what your rationality may tell you,
hadith, as collected even centuries after the Prophets demise, in the age of Arab imperialism, is
believed to be akin to revelation and cannot be questioned.

It is this thinking on the part of all our ulema, of whatever school of thought, that must change, if we are
going to fight violent extemism in Islam. Sufi fulminations against Wahhabism-Salafism are hypocritical
until the core of their theologies remains the same. It is sheer hypocrisy to quote peaceful, pluralistic
verses of Quran and teach in a madrasa books like Tafsir-e-Jalalain which say that these verses have
been abrogated by later war-time verses asking Muslims to kill the kafir wherever they are found.

The fact is these verses were meant for a particular situation and do not apply to us any more. Similarly
many ahadith were concocted to justify imperialist, expansionist wars fought by monarchical, dynastic
khalifas, in the name of Islam. It is irrational to call them akin to revelation. The same holds true of
Sharia that was first codified 120 years after the demise of the prophet and has been changing since
from time to time and place to place. It simply cannot be considered divine. These aspects of the
consensus core theology of Islam constitutes the root of the problem.

Clearly, moderate ulema, from whichever sect, must realise the need to introspect deeply and honestly
and go far beyond their present positions, if they are serious about rescuing Islam from extremism. This
should not be a sectarian endeavour. There are Muslims in all sects who want to live in peace and favour
pluralism. They all need to get together and brainstorm.

Sultan Shahin is the Founding Editor of a Delhi-based progressive Islamic website, NewAgeIslam.com. He
can be reached at sultan.shahin@gmail.com

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