Fitna

This tiny booklet is meant to highlight the nature of theological dialogue between two middle managers, one representing the Pakistani Taliban faction and the other representing the ISI (Pakistani Inter-services Intelligence). Pakistani Taliban are an offshoot of the Afghani Taliban which the ISI had armed and nurtured to take control of Afghanistan in the vacuum left by the withdrawal of the Russian Army. The dialogue is my translation of a dialogue captured in two videos given below, in Urdu taken probably during the first operation against the Pakistani Taliban in the Tribal Areas. What makes the confrontation extremely engaging is because both protagonists are well versed in Islamic and national history of Pakistan. Constantly during the dialogue the ISI Handler seems to be reaching out to the rebellious Talibani leader by giving him an olive branch over and over again. The Talibani leader on his part comes across as mocking and deriding his former master, repeatedly rejecting all conciliatory efforts of the former partners. This dialogue should be listened by all Urdu listeners as the translation below cannot do complete justice to the very interesting and logical dialogue. I believe that the Talibani theology represents a very rigid form of Islamic thought which simply believes that all the world belongs to Allah as he is the absolute master, and that all creatures are His slaves, and that the Qur'an represents His law which is incumbent on all of His slaves. Actually, this definition is pretty common across most Islamic strands, the real difference with the Talibani theology is that they believe that anyone not following the letter of Qur'an, automatically becomes an apostate (Murtid) thus an enemy of Islam. They therefore thus justify their war against the 'Islamic Republic of Pakistan'. Another observation I made is that the particular Islamic historical events mentioned in the dialogue below are not well known among the majority popular brand of Sunni Islam. Talibans also consider themselves to be Sunni but they seem to use certain contentious aspects of Islamic history like the Masjid al-Dirar event as an analogy (dalil), which is rarely discussed almost unknown among most practising Sunni Muslims. The Taliban therefore, have been able to forge together a variant of Islamic theology without any known Ulema, or extensive literature of their own. Instead they tend to quote these neglected or greyed events from the Islamic history as proofs of their actions, justifying suicide bombings, arbitrary killing of their enemies whether Muslim or non-Muslim, to great effect. The Taliban seem to have embraced end-justifies-the-means strand employed within Islam right from the time of the Prophet and still used today by all current Islamic movements of today. Within Islam there is no real centralised canonical order akin to Catholics in Rome or Protestants with their Church of England, which leaves the field wide open for any Muslim scholar to start churning out fatwas (religious injunctions) in huge numbers. Just a cursory glance in some of the scholars mentioned in the dialogue below roughly reveal around 2000 fatwas per scholar, which is a pretty high number to control. Such a high amount of fatwa churn provides ample resource for anyone to justify their actions, which I hope will be pretty obvious for anyone reading the dialogue below. As the dialogue is accessible on the internet, I shall try and provide all references from the WWW by asking Sheikh Google in blue, details of link are given at the end of the dialogue.