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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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 Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2009 2:52 pm Post subject: The fatwa that wasn't |
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Interesting article on Fatwas.
The fatwa that wasn't
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Ayatollah Khomeini's so-called fatwa was bound up with the unique politics of revolutionary Iran and bore little relation to Islamic legal tradition.
The word "fatwa" first came into popular usage in English in 1989 with Ayatollah Khomeini's ruling that sentenced the author Salman Rushdie and his publishers to death for the writing and publication of The Satanic Verses. The 15 Khordad Foundation offered $1m to any foreigner and $3m to any Iranian who could "punish this mercenary of colonialism for his shameful act". This means that you can look up "fatwa" in mainstream online dictionaries today and find that the definition carries the sense of an "order" or "decree" handed down by a "religious leader". It wasn't uncommon either to find "fatwa" being used as a synonym for "death sentence" in the press.
But in fact a fatwa is simply a non-binding legal opinion, a particular reading of an issue within Islamic law, rather like the interpretation of a Harvard law professor on a fine point of US constitutional law. The fatwa has no legal jurisdiction, and is only held, strictly speaking, to be binding upon the jurist who issues it. Unsurprisingly, therefore, most issues are disagreed upon in the world of fatwa-giving or non-promulgated law. The current mufti of Egypt, Ali Goma'a, has said that only about a hundred basic matters are generally agreed upon, otherwise the 1.4m matters that have been subject of legal opinion are disputed among Muslim jurists.
To point out that the Islamic legal tradition is resolutely argumentative, pluralist and open-ended is not to merely indulge in semantic pedantry about what a fatwa is. Rather, the fact that Khomeini issued a legal opinion, a verdict and a sentence, all in one, points to what was unique and virtually unprecedented about the religious authority he exercised in revolutionary Islamic Iran under the doctrine of vilayat-i faqih or "government of the jurist".
Historically, both in pre-colonial Sunni and Shia Islam, the predominant view has been that while the jurists interpreted the law, judicial authority came from the executive (whether the Sunni caliph or the Shia imam). The upshot of this distinction was that the jurists, as guardians of the law, would only confer informal legitimacy upon any executive authority if it upheld the principle of the rule of law. This arrangement came unstuck in the Muslim world with the rise of nation-states and their need for codified law applied to discrete territories in the 19th and 20th centuries � the interpretation of law would henceforth be done within the constitutional nation-state and not by the jurists.
However, Iran today is an exception to this fundamental shift (as is Saudi Arabia and as was the Taliban's Afghanistan). Within traditional Twelver Shia Islam, the Twelfth Imam, last in a line of religious figures believed to have a prior right to rule as descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, is held to have disappeared over a thousand years ago. It was believed thereafter that any government without the Imam was basically illegitimate and that any ruler could only govern legitimately by fulfilling certain preconditions.
Khomeini's innovation at the start of the 1970s was to argue that the "representative of the imam" (na'ib al-imam) had to be a jurist rather than anyone else. After the revolution, and uniquely within Islamic history, Khomeini became that representative who embodied both juristic and executive authority through the "government of the jurist".
Therefore, despite the temptation to explain Khomeini's so-called "fatwa" by reference to the venerable theory and practice of Islamic law, it is probably more appropriate to see how religious eschatology has been overcome by modern politics. Just as, for instance, Zionist partisans repudiated the Jewish idea that Israel could not be remade before the return of the messiah, so too did Khomeini's revolutionaries accept that legitimate Islamic governance need not wait for the return of the Twelfth Imam.Similarly, it would be predictable to look for analogies with the Spanish Inquisition but more interesting to compare Khomeini's "fatwa" with any other modern state seeking the global enforcement of its moral-legal vision while offering up bounties for fugitives wanted dead or alive in a third country jurisdiction.
Khomeini's "fatwa" was always highly rhetorical too � and no due legal process was envisioned. To bolster his theocratic authority, Khomeini sought to define the true Muslim in terms of compliance with his edict.
Another argument for a political reading was that Khomeini also ruled out any possibility of repentance, a central Qur'anic concept, saying it was still "incumbent on every Muslim" to carry out his edict regardless.
The afterlife of the "fatwa" was always political rather than legal too. Britain, which had broken off diplomatic relations with Iran over the edict, resumed them at a charge d'affaires level in 1990; the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the Islamic equivalent of the United Nations, declined to back the "fatwa" explicitly in the same year. The restoration of full diplomatic ties with Britain in 1998 led the reform-minded President Khatami to declare that the Iranian government would not back the "fatwa"; however, conservatives such as Khomeini's successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, have argued that it remains in force, most recently when Rushdie was knighted in 2007.
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2009 3:22 pm Post subject: |
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A couple of years ago (?) I posted an article I'd come across saying much the same thing, with the additional claim that fatwas were for 'sale' in the sense that anyone could go to a legal scholar and pay for an opinion. If I remember rightly, the going rate was as low as $25.
The post was deleted as being 'too inflammatory'. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2009 3:54 pm Post subject: |
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| Why being against Khomeni or Bin Laden isn't being against muslims. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2009 8:02 pm Post subject: |
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| Ya-ta Boy wrote: |
A couple of years ago (?) I posted an article I'd come across saying much the same thing, with the additional claim that fatwas were for 'sale' in the sense that anyone could go to a legal scholar and pay for an opinion. If I remember rightly, the going rate was as low as $25.
The post was deleted as being 'too inflammatory'. |
Yes, I remember that. I was rather surprised at the mods decision. |
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CyberGuy
Joined: 27 Dec 2007
Location: Daejeon, Korea
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| Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2009 9:21 pm Post subject: |
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| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
| Why being against Khomeni or Bin Laden isn't being against muslims. |
Because Khomeni represents Shia Muslims which are only 5~10% of the Muslims.
About Bin Laden: Bin Laden was American Mujahid and a Hero in Afghan-Russian war and all his weapons had "Made in USA" on'em. So talking about Bin Laden is like talking about USA's policy few years ago rather than about Muslims.
Furthermore: only 15~18% of Muslims are Arabs. So, people should please come out of their fantasy of believing all Muslims are Arabs. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2009 9:29 pm Post subject: |
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The US didn't give stuff to Bin Laden. Pakistan did.
The US did provide Pakistan with a lot of stuff but they US had little control over what groups got it. |
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Jeff's Cigarettes
Joined: 27 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2009 9:35 pm Post subject: |
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| Fartwa, I believe. |
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CyberGuy
Joined: 27 Dec 2007
Location: Daejeon, Korea
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| Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2009 2:44 am Post subject: |
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| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
The US didn't give stuff to Bin Laden. Pakistan did.
The US did provide Pakistan with a lot of stuff but they US had little control over what groups got it. |
I have gone through your comments in other threads, and found out you are full of BS.
I have inferred that you might be one of self-delusional ignorant, paranoid, supremacist, patriot bigots who still support ex-President G.W. Bush. If that is true then your comments are not worthy of the dirt in my garage.
Here some unlearning for the ignorants like you:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/ArundhatiRoy.html
(The writer is Nobel Prize winner; maybe worthy for the people who give Nobel Prize a bit of weight). |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:26 pm Post subject: |
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| CyberGuy wrote: |
| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
The US didn't give stuff to Bin Laden. Pakistan did.
The US did provide Pakistan with a lot of stuff but they US had little control over what groups got it. |
I have gone through your comments in other threads, and found out you are full of BS.
I have inferred that you might be one of self-delusional ignorant, paranoid, supremacist, patriot bigots who still support ex-President G.W. Bush. If that is true then your comments are not worthy of the dirt in my garage.
Here some unlearning for the ignorants like you:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/ArundhatiRoy.html
(The writer is Nobel Prize winner; maybe worthy for the people who give Nobel Prize a bit of weight). |
You are one of those radical America haters who throws around Anti American accusations like baseball cards cause it give you a feeling of being part of something.
If you are looking for bigots you only need to look to the Bathists , the Khomeni followers or the Al Qadists you moonbat filth lover
| Quote: |
Before we prescribe how a pristine Iraqi resistance must conduct their secular, feminist, democratic, nonviolent battle, we should shore up our end of the resistance by forcing the U.S. and its allied governments to withdraw from Iraq." |
http://www.brown.edu/Students/INDY/archives/2005-04-07/articles/opin-sperber_resist.htm
How Roy�s friends in Iraq now kill
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/how_roys_friends_in_iraq_now_kill
-ARUNDHATI ROY (apologist for the Iraqi insurgents)
And she is a radical (ratical) like you.
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Dive into a conversation about America in the Arab world today, or even in Europe and Africa, and it won�t take 30 seconds before the words �Abu Ghraib� and �Guant�namo Bay� are thrown at you. Yes, both are shameful, but Abu Ghraib was a day at the beach compared to what Al Qaeda and its Sunni jihadist supporters have been doing in Iraq, yet none of their acts have become one-punch global insults like Abu Ghraib and Guant�namo.
Consider what happened on Aug. 14. Four jihadist suicide-bombers blew themselves up in two Iraqi villages, killing more than 500 Kurdish civilians � men, women and babies � who belonged to a tiny pre-Islamic sect known as the Yazidis. |
http://minor-ripper.blogspot.com/2007/08/tom-friedman-new-york-times-august.html
Friends of yours cyberguy?
PS ARUNDHATI ROY never won the nobel peace prize. You dummy.
Last edited by Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee on Tue Feb 17, 2009 10:35 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Kimbop
Joined: 31 Mar 2008
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| Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2009 5:36 pm Post subject: |
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| CyberGuy wrote: |
I have gone through your comments in other threads, and found out you are full of BS.
I have inferred that you might be one of self-delusional ignorant, paranoid, supremacist, patriot bigots who still support ex-President G.W. Bush. If that is true then your comments are not worthy of the dirt in my garage.
Here some unlearning for the ignorants like you:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/ArundhatiRoy.html
(The writer is Nobel Prize winner; maybe worthy for the people who give Nobel Prize a bit of weight). |
I've been shying away from Dave's lately, but after I read this nonsense i had to reply. Presenting this apologist as an alternative to enduring freedom? If Arunadhati Roy has her way, ALL Indian women would be wearing burkhas, and bollywood would cease to exist. She is a champagne socialist who is pretty much anti everything. Like Rosie odonnel, she;s your typical leftist-feminist: she has no children and mocks development in India while enjoying her Delhi mansion. And she never won no steenkin' nobel prize. Let her stick to writing cute little stories. But I digress: c'mon man, if you're going to bash Bush, surely you can find some better ammo than her. And stop reading her op-ed rubbish! |
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megandadam
Joined: 28 Dec 2008
Location: toronto, canada
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| Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2009 6:06 pm Post subject: |
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i don't know why exactly you're so up in arms about all this.
roy is certainly no nobel peace prize winner, she's a critic and a feminist and certainly doesn't want women in burkhas. i don't know where you could possibly have scraped that from. if you do know where, please post that link.
not sure why you'd need kids to be a feminist and why would bollywood not existing be a bad thing? |
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