http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/02/american_takfiris.phpta-nehisi coates
American Takfiris21 Feb 2010 12:27 pm
A. Serwer
The theological justification for al Qaeda's wholesale slaughter of civilians was provided by Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, one of the founding fathers of al Qaeda. Because the murder of innocents is forbidden in Islam and the murder of Muslims in particular, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden required some sort of theological framework for justifying terrorism. This was provided by al-Sharif, who essentially argued in his book, "The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge," that apostates could be murdered, and that approach, takfir (which has come to be known as takfirism) allowed al Qaeda to, for all intents and purposes, kill anyone they wanted without violating the laws of Islam by declaring them to be apostates. In other words, Dr. Fadl helped provided a theological justification for something that everyone involved knew was wrong.
The legal memos justifying torture aren't very different in terms of reasoning--it's clear that John Yoo and his cohorts in the Office of Legal Counsel saw their job not as binding the president to the rule of law, but to declare legal any tactic that the executive branch believed necessary to fight terrorism. They worked backwards from this conclusion, and ethics officials at the Department of Justice, we now know, decided that they they had violated professional standards in doing so. Whereas al-Zawahiri and bin Laden turned to al-Sharif for a method to circumvent the plain language of the Koran, Bush and Cheney went to Yoo and Jay Bybee to circumvent the plain language of the law. Most Islamic scholars, just like most legal experts, reject their respective reasoning as unsound.
- snip -
I confess to being bothered that we haven't seen a similarly backlash against the architects of torture here--part of the reason we haven't, is because even though innocents were tortured, we still see them as fundamentally alien. Few Americans directly suffered as a result of what Yoo and Bybee did--although I think we have yet to understand that damage that's been done to our society as a whole. Bolstered by ideological partisans and powerful figures looking to avoid accountability for their actions, men like John Yoo and Jay Bybee have yet to be held responsible for the crimes they enabled--and I'm not sure they ever will be--although I'm less concerned with their punishment than with the permanent American rejection of torture. The Justice Department's David Margolis overruled the original conclusions of the Department's ethics lawyers that Yoo and Bybee had, in ignoring legal precedents and sanctioning behavior that was likely illegal, had committed "professional misconduct". That would have triggered professional sanctions for Yoo, a tenured professor at Berkeley, and Bybee, a sitting federal judge, but Margolis' memo instead concludes that they had excercised "flawed legal reasoning" that could be forgiven in part because of the context in which the memos were written, months after the 9/11 attacks. Margolis though, does not endorse their reasoning, and as for Yoo, he writes that whether or not he deliberately gave bad legal advice is a "close question." Al-Sharif will never be able to wash the blood from his hands, but while this founding father of al Qaeda has recoiled from the fruits of his labor, the American architects of torture continue to argue that their reasoning is legally sound.
- snip -
Eventually, with the big stuff, we usually find our way--we see this with our slow, staggering, but inevitable march towards full personhood for gays and lesbians. And while those who stained America's honor with war crimes have escaped accountability for now, these American takfiris will eventually be judged by history with a clarity we cannot muster today.
MORE
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
