An editorial in Pakistan’s Daily Times is unusually honest about Islamic clerics’ near-universal support for the mass murder of non-Muslims: Our clerics favour suicide-bombing! (Hat tip: zellmad.)

But if you dare to make this same point in the United States, the Council on American Islamic Relations will label you “Islamophobic.”

In a case of “wrong or misleading heading”, a survey on suicide-bombing by a Karachi Urdu newspaper has confused the press. It has wrongly concluded that our leading ulema have renounced suicide-bombing. This is what an online academic magazine has concluded: “Clerics from all schools of thought have declared suicide attacks un-Islamic and forbidden them under the Sharia; they said killing a non-Muslim without a legitimate cause was against the Islamic way of life”.

But the truth is that the meaning of what these clerics said is quite different from that which has been attributed to them. For instance, Maulana Amir Hamza of Jamaatud Dawa is quoted as saying that a suicide attack is an act of terrorism and that someone who kills himself to kill others also accounts for the sins of those killed. But he also added (found on website) that “no suicide attack is justified in a country which has Islam as the state religion, ruled by a Muslim ruler and is not under occupation by infidels”. This means that Iraq is excluded from this definition because it is occupied by infidels. In other words, Maulana Hamza would justify suicide bombing in Iraq against the occupying infidel.

This also means that suicide-bombing is not okay in Pakistan — because Islam is the state religion, the country is not occupied by infidels and General Musharraf is a Muslim ruler — but okay in a non-Muslim country like the United Kingdom, for instance. The scholar is clearly worried about Muslim suicide-bombers killing innocent Muslims. But what may become moot at any time is whether even Pakistan can qualify as an Islamic state and whether General Musharraf can be denounced as a bad Muslim for allying with an infidel like the USA.

The second cleric included in the survey is Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, formerly of the JUI, who actually allows suicide-bombing while alluding to Palestine!

Then there is a former minister and Sunni cleric, Dr Mehmood Ahmad Ghazi, who says that suicide-bombing is wrong but he too imposes the condition of the Islamic state, implying that it may be okay to kill innocent people in a non-Muslim state. Dr Anis of Jama’at-e Islami says he can’t be sure if suicide-bombing is wrong, but he too refers to Palestine without noting that Al Fatah condemns suicide-bombing while Hamas actually does it.

Our morose-looking Barelvi mufti, Munibur Rehman, says nothing new, as expected, but also maintains that suicide bombing in an Islamic state is not legitimate. This implies that one may suicide-bomb innocent non-Muslims and even target a non-Muslim state with impunity. Thank God, the shia scholar, Allama Qamber Abbas Naqvi, says that even a non-Muslim can’t be killed in this manner.

Therefore a re-reading of the views of these gentlemen leads to the conclusion that they have outlawed suicide-bombing only in very specific conditions and not generally at all.

In fact our clerics have confirmed that Al Qaeda, which began the trend on 9/11, can go on doing it. It is not clear if killing the Shias in Iraq is wrong because the ulema did not explain if they thought Iraq was being ruled by Muslims. It is quite possible that they may eventually disqualify Iraq as an Islamic state because the Americans are in occupation there. All of them cunningly ducked the question whether Al Qaeda’s killing of the Shias of Iraq — and the killing of innocent Sunnis by thugs like Muqtada al Sadr — was okay.

UPDATE at 2/25/07 10:00:37 am:

Buried by the Digg lefties, who don’t want people to know this: Digg - Religion of Suicide Bombing.