ABU DHABI // Moderate religious voices need more resources to correct the misinterpretations of Islamic law that have led to situations such as the crisis in Iraq, a local sheikh says.
Religious leaders who speak out against extremist groups face violence but lack the resources to make their voices heard, said Sheikh Habib Ali Al Jifri.
Sheikh Al Jifri, from Yemen, founded the Tabah Foundation, an Abu Dhabi institution that researches issues related to Muslim society.
He gave examples of choices in Islamic history and aspects of its law that he says promote tolerance of minority groups and peace.
Sheikh Al Jifri also stressed that groups such as the Islamic State harm not only minorities, but everyone – even other groups that share its ideology, such as the Jabhat Al Nusra extremist group.
“Their harm isn’t limited to Christians,” he said. “They’ve harmed Muslims, they’ve harmed non-Muslims, and within Muslims, they have harmed the different factions – Sunni and Shia.
“I’m not inclined to frame the situation in Iraq as a minority-versus-majority issue. I’m looking at it as an extreme terrorist group that has no boundaries in the harm that it causes.”
The Islamic State has been seizing territory in Syria and Iraq, eventually taking Iraq’s second city of Mosul in June. It has declared the territory a “caliphate”.
The militant group has carried out mass executions and persecuted members of Iraq’s many religious and ethnic communities.
Last month, the group demanded that Christians leave the city, stay and pay a religious tax, convert to Islam or face death.
After it took over the town of Sinjar in north-west Iraq, militant violence killed 40 children from the Yazidi religious community, while thousands of others have tried to escape to nearby mountains, reports say.
This kind of violence is based on misunderstandings of Islamic law or outdated concepts, and these groups are motivated by political interests while exploiting religion, Sheikh Al Jifri said.
“In our day and age, the focus has shifted more to the security concerns with regards to the situation,” he said.
“That is important but it has come at the expense of the other approach, which is clarifying their wrongness from an intellectual and knowledge-based perspective, using decisive proofs.
“Perhaps this is because of a lack of strategic vision on the part of certain states in the region.”
This has allowed extremist groups to exploit generations of young Muslims, Sheikh Al Jifri said.
More projects such as an inter-faith initiative on which he worked, A Common Word, are also needed to combat the ideas that fuel extremist groups’ violences, he said.
The project involved meetings of Christian and Muslim religious leaders, who produced a document outlining the shared values between the two faiths. Some of the leaders then incorporated the findings into university or religious courses.
Leaders of faith in the region should “revive” these types of projects and expand their scope, Sheikh Al Jifri said.
Islamic scholars have faced violence for condemning such violence or fatwas calling for their blood, he said, and 300 of them had died, including a friend of his who was a scholar in Iraq.
“He was killed in front of his own house because from the beginning he spoke against Al Qaeda,” he said.
“I’ve been declared a non-believer by those people. I’ve been threatened for my stance.
“But we will not stop.”
The UN has called for “immediate, safe and unhindered humanitarian access to all Iraqis in need”, and has called the seizure of Sinjar this week “a humanitarian tragedy” that may have displaced as many as 200,000 people.
lcarroll@thenational.ae
