Can jihad be launched against fellow Muslims? Yes, say those rebelling against a Muslim state, because the ruler is unjust or cavorting with a non-Muslim enemy. This, again, is the view of bin Laden and others, which is why he and his supporters have launched terrorist attacks against his homeland, Saudi Arabia. To them, the Saudi regime is too pro-American.

Overall, there is broad consensus that terrorism is not jihad but a perversion of the holy texts. These are “deviant ideas that are used as justification for terrorism,” declared the 2005 summit of the Islamic Conference.7

As John Esposito says, “Islam, like all world religions, neither supports nor requires illegitimate violence. Like all scriptures, Islamic sacred texts must be read within the social and political contexts in which they were revealed. It is not surprising that the Qur’an, like the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament, has verses that address fighting and the conduct of war.”8

SUICIDE BOMBING

In the Second World War, Japanese kamikaze pilots rammed their planes into Allied ships, and Soviet pilots crashed into bridges in Germany. Imperial Japan held up those suicide missions as the ultimate military valor, and the Allies saw the Soviet pilots as anti-Nazi heroes. Buddhist monks committed self-immolations during the Vietnam War to protest the American military presence and, in Sri Lanka, to highlight Sinhalese demands. Their suicides were not used as a weapon to kill others, but they shared the trait of self-sacrifice with those willing to die for their cause.

In contemporary times, the extensive use of suicide bombings was initiated by the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, who are Hindus. Their best-known use of the human weapon was in 1991, when a female suicide bomber assassinated Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, who had sent Indian troops to help out the Sri Lankan government contain the Tamil insurgency.

Islam forbids suicide — in the same way other religions do — since only God has the right to take life. Both the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad prohibited suicide. There is no tradition in Islam like the one, say in Japan, which has had a long history of suicides by disgraced officials to escape public humiliation.9

Top religious authorities in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and elsewhere have condemned suicide bombings in the strongest terms. Within hours of 9/11, leading Muslim scholars expressed their outrage and called the act un-Islamic. “But very little or none of that was reported by the Western media; what was reported instead was that some Muslims believed in the conspiracy theory that 9/11 was either a Jewish plot or that the American government itself was in on it,” Malaysian human rights activist Chandra Muzaffar told me in 2005 in Kuala Lumpur, echoing a widely held Muslim view.

Similarly, in the wake of the subway bombings in London, Muslim scholars were emphatic in their denunciations. Declared Sheikh Sayed Mohammed Tantawi, head of Al-Azhar in Cairo, “Those responsible for the London attacks are criminals who do not represent Islam.”