After every extremist attack in the West, there are invariably questions asked of Muslim communities. The questions are, by and large, rather baseless, ranging from "why haven’t Muslims condemned terrorism?" (they have, countless times) to "why don’t Muslim report on terrorists?" (they have, and did, many times and were ignored). But sometimes, there are also questions within the Muslim communities of the West and when a group of imams in the UK recently declared that they would not offer the ritual funeral prayer for the deceased London attackers, they gave an answer to one of those questions.
There are two major questions that have been asked within the Muslim British community post-London Bridge. The first is quite simply this: if the UK government’s current counter-extremism policy is flawed, which many Britons feel it is, what are the more useful alternatives on offer? There will be those who will try to dodge the question, and focus almost solely on social and political factors in how Muslims are drawn into extremism, which effectively does away with the need to tackle it. But thoughtful members of the Muslim British community are also clear that while such factors are no doubt at work in the wider configuration of the radicalisation universe, there is an ideological component and it needs to be tackled. Where that component is, how it is expressed, how widespread it is – all of those remain legitimate questions, but the fact that it exists is not a subject of debate. It is about how to tackle it.
But there is a secondary question that hasn’t really been discussed openly before. In the aftermath of the London attacks, there are three corpses of the attackers and they are supposed to be prayed over and buried. On Monday, more than 100 Muslim religious leaders and preachers in the UK, with a range of perspectives and qualifications, declared they wouldn’t pray over the bodies. And here the question is raised: how are British Muslims to relate to extremists who not only think radical things, but die in the course of carrying out atrocities? Does the decision to not pray over the terrorists of the London Bridge attack bring us closer to that course of excommunication, which so many outside the Muslim community have been calling for? To put it quite simply: no. And moreover, it shouldn’t.
There is something akin to excommunication in Islam. It is called takfir. It is exceedingly rare in Islamic history, because the standard is set very high. Moreover, it has little to do with actions and everything to do with belief. To put it simplistically: a Muslim who does bad things is still a Muslim, even if he does bad things.
The question of whether he or she leaves the faith has everything to do with faith, not with actions.
Perhaps one of the most crucial deviances of radical extremists in the Muslim fold is their willingness to indulge in takfir so liberally, they consider massive swaths of Muslims as having rejected Islam.
For years, there have been calls for Muslim religious institutions to excommunicate groups such as ISIL and others. The religious leadership has largely rejected the option. To do otherwise is a slippery slope indeed, and it is wholly unnecessary in any event. Takfir is not necessary in order to arrest, pursue or wage war against criminals, Muslim or not – and indeed, stigmatise them as well.
The funeral prayer denial is a perfect example. By refusing to pray over the London Bridge attackers, the imams weren’t declaring they weren’t Muslim. They were, however, declaring that the crimes were so odious, public religious leaders and authorities should shun any public prayer over their bodies and they encouraged all mosques and imams to do the same.
It’s not a difficult position to justify. The funeral prayer is, according to Muslim religious authorities, a religious obligation upon the Muslim community to fulfil – but anyone can fulfil that obligation. The deceased family; those who actually place the body into the ground; it doesn’t necessarily need to be religious authorities or scholars, in order to fulfil the communal obligation. In that regard, the imams and preachers are not denying any religious duty.
Moreover, classical Islamic jurisprudence also makes it clear that religious authorities are justified in denying a public burial. There can be a variety of reasons to deny burials to criminals who are still considered to be Muslims, and they are mentioned in orthodox manuals of Islamic law. In that regard, these religious authorities are not coming up with some sort of new-fangled opinion.
But in this case, there is also an added, even if not critical, community factor involved. The British Muslim community is a demographically minor one that faces a significant amount of anti-Muslim sentiment and Islamophobia. If any mosque did actually carry out the funeral prayer, one can only imagine how the community of that mosque would be scandalised.
The media may have taken this move to have been unique and exceptional, heralding some kind of new era. It isn’t. The imams and preachers who took this step relied on established, orthodox religious tools to address a key issue – how to publicly relate to Muslims who are openly guilty of heinous crimes. The application of those tools will no doubt require sagacity and wisdom, and certainly they can be and have been abused – but at least in this circumstance, it seems these Muslim religious authorities have acted prudently indeed.
Dr HA Hellyer is a senior non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington and the Royal United Services Institute in London
On Twitter: @hahellyer
