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Senior Qaeda Theologian Urges Followers to End Jihad

[New York Sun] Eli Lake - One of al-Qaeda's senior theologians is calling on his followers to end their military jihad and saying the attacks of 9/11 were a "catastrophe for all Muslims." In a serialized manifesto written from prison in Egypt, Sayyed Imam al-Sharif is blasting Osama bin Laden for deceiving Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and even calls for the formation of a special Islamic court to try bin Laden and his comrade, Ayman al-Zawahri. Sharif, currently serving a life sentence in Egypt, wrote in the 1980s two of the modern seminal texts for Sunni jihadism and in particular al-Qaeda, in Fundamental Concepts Regarding Jihad and The Five Ground Rules for the Achieving of Victory or Its Absence. Those books are scholarly justifications, citing the Koran and Hadiths, for joining a war against Muslim apostates such as the Egyptian ruling class and for a broader jihad against America. Sharif's latest texts are a renunciation of his earlier work, saying the military jihad against apostate states and America is futile. The director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, Frank Cilluffo, said, "Here you have someone with the stature and credibility, who more or less wrote the book on jihadism and is oft cited by other jihadists, making the case against it. This is someone with the heft on legal and religious grounds to make the counter argument that we can't." The author of Inside Al-Qaeda, Rohan Gunaratna, said he believed Sharif's conversion was genuine. "He has had a genuine change of heart because we are seeing a trend today in Egypt where the original members of both of the major jihadist organizations are turning....The traditional jihad movement is almost coming to an end. What has it accomplished in more than 25 years?"
2007-12-21 01:00:00
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