Irish Times, Wednesday, October 1, 1997

The detention on Monday of European Humanitarian Affairs Commissioner Emma Bonino by Taliban morals police in Afghanistan, the sentencing of two British nurses accused of murder to corporal punishments in Saudi Arabia, and the slaughter of 11 schoolmistresses in Algeria send the wrong messages about Islam to the world.

These three examples show Muslims - and by implication their religion - to be intolerant, harsh and bloodthirsty. Unfortunately, these actions speak louder than the words of God set down in the Koran 14 centuries ago, louder than the just pronouncements of the Prophet Muhammad, louder than the voices of learned jurists who, over the centuries, developed a body of law and practice (the "Sharia") far more enlightened for their time than that in Europe. These examples are not of mainstream Muslim behaviour, expressive of the writ and spirit of Islam or indicative of the teachings of the Prophet. These are examples drawn from the behaviour patterns of tribesmen come to town.  Behaviour patterns, indeed, which are pre-Islamic and have little to do with the code of conduct laid down in the Koran and the "traditions" or "hadith" of the Prophet.

Let us look at each case in point. The Taliban is a movement of militant Sunni Muslim Afghan tribesmen from the south of the country. Rural people who live hard lives and employ harsh sanctions to ensure a modicum of order within their closely circumscribed world. In their society women have no rights at all - they are completely covered and totally secluded. Girls are sold off by their fathers for the right bride price when they are young, and often resold by husbands who tire of them. Unused to the amenities of urban civilisation, the Taliban ban them. There is, for instance, no music in Afghanistan except for unaccompanied religious songs and songs in praise of the Taliban.

Photography is forbidden as anti-Islamic because of the prohibition of "graven images" which could serve as objects of worship. It was photographing women in a shambles of a hospital in Kabul (the only hospital for women in the capital) which sparked the trouble between the Taliban and the European delegation. As far as the unkempt, unwashed and ignorant Taliban morals police who intervened, the Europeans were breaching two bans.

But the Taliban treatment of women and their attitude towards civilisation have nothing to do with the Koran or the practice of the Prophet. The Koran commands women to "be modest" and "to draw their veils over their bosoms" (Surah XXIV, verse 31) not to envelop themselves in the sort of chador worn by Afghan women which leaves only a square of net open for the eyes.

The Prophet was an innovator who gave women legal status, property and inheritance rights. He was a man whose closest confidantes were women, whose first convert was his wife, Khadija, an independent businesswoman. The "canonical punishments" of beheading and flogging as practised in Saudi Arabia are also tribal, relics of the pre-Islamic past when nomadic tribesmen maintained order by lopping off the hands of thieves and the heads of murderers. Blood money was an innovation intended to prevent blood feuds. Like the Taliban, the Saudi rulers are tribal, even after 70 years in power, hailing from the Najd region in the formerly inaccessible centre of the country and professing a puritan form of Islam based on the teachings of Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, an 18th century fundamentalist preacher who invested the House of Saud with hereditary kingship.

And since the power base and religious sanction of the monarchy remains the tribal Najd and the reactionary Wahhabi religious establishment, the monarch follows a harsh desert diktat which runs counter to the Muslim belief in a "merciful" and "compassionate" God, a belief reaffirmed in every prayer.

Saudi law and practice has not been refined to suit an urban setting or a cosmopolitan context. This is why pre-Islamic corporal punishments are imposed on all who dwell within the kingdom, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. But it is only when the punishments are applied to Western women like Deborah Parry and Lucille McLauchlan that the world takes notice. The brutal massacres conducted by the Armed Islamic Groups in Algeria are not only an aberration but an abomination in Islam. The Koran lays down humane rules of war while the Prophet ordered his own troops, when fighting for the faith, to "kill not the old men who cannot fight, nor young children nor women".

The roving bands of Algerian murderers who claim to kill in the name of Islam and God, are apostates, rejecting both the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet. They are men led astray by commanders and clerics who are veterans of the particularly bloody and brutal war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. This war was financed by Saudi Arabia at the instigation of the United States, and the "mujahedin", the "holy warriors", fighting in the anti-communist crusade were given religious instruction by preachers provided by the Saudis.

Foreign "mujahedin", known as "Afghans", were recruited from all over the Arab world, trained in Pakistan, sent into battle and then discarded once the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan. Many who returned home became involved in Islamist opposition activities and have been either killed or arrested by their own governments. Others turned up in Bosnia or the Palestinian occupied territories, eager recruits for warfare against "enemies of Islam" like the Serbs and Israelis.

Like the "Afghans", the Taliban are Pakistan-trained and Saudi indoctrinated and financed, so it is not surprising that there are many similarities between Taliban and Saudi rule, and not simply on the tribal level.

It is a tragedy for Islam that the tribalist Wahhabi agenda, backed up by Arabian petro-dollars, should be a major force in the Umma at this time of world transformation. For the Wahhabis have reacted to the challenge of modernisation by trying to force the Umma into an idealised seventh century "Islamic" mould instead of creating a determination to take on the present and provide a relevant, progressive Islamic framework for Muslims.