The duty of the scholars

In Saudi Arabia there is a Council of Senior Scholars. Founded by the state in 1971, with its presidency exercised by someone in the office of the Grand Mufti, the Hay'at Kibar al-Ulama is an institution that controls the country's religious views and institutions, and gives opinions and issues fatwas on religious matters, including social and political ones. Its members are appointed by the crown.

Of course, since the king bears the title "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" and the country's official religion is Islam, this council's first priority is to act with sensitivity in every matter that will look after the benefit of Islam and the Muslims in the country and the world. Maslaha mursala, that is, the benefit of society, the good of the Muslim community, is one of the important sources of legislation in Islamic jurisprudence. Maslaha, defined as that which is for the benefit of all Muslims or which removes some harm from Muslims, has been counted, alongside the Qur'an, the Sunnah, Consensus and Analogy, as a source of jurisprudential legislation.

For an administration whose real duty is to serve Muslims, there is no duty more prior than looking after the benefit of society. Determining this benefit, or determining its religious meaning, is the first duty of the ulema. If the Islamic world today is truly in a position of loss and damage, the ulema's not knowing and not operating the science of maslaha sufficiently has a great share in it before anything else.

As the most fundamental duties of an Islamic administration, and as the basic principles of legislation too, the Islamic world is running a serious deficit in protecting people's life, property, honor, mind and religion. In Islamic countries the life, property, honor, mind and religion of Muslims are not secure. Muslim blood has been made the cheapest blood in the world not in non-Muslim countries but in the Islamic countries themselves. The most weapons in the world are sold by non-Muslim countries and bought by Muslim countries, and with these weapons it is Muslims who are killed the most.

Their property can easily be confiscated by their own rulers. There is no security of property.

When there is no freedom of thought, there is no security of mind and religion either. The prisons of Muslim countries, in a condition worse than medieval dungeons, house the most distinguished, most enlightened, most learned people of their own peoples. These people live in prisons under the severest torture.

In contrast, in the Islamic world a great hostility toward Muslims, hatred of Islam, and attacks on the sacred values of Muslims are running rampant.

This is a great harm to which the Muslim world is subjected, a great corruption, and it requires the ulema to raise their voice before anyone else. Yet under these circumstances we do not see any idea, assessment or voice coming from the Saudi Arabian council of ulema on identifying, remedying and struggling against this harm to which Muslims are subjected.

But in recent days this council has published a statement declaring the Muslim Brotherhood community a terrorist organization.

In the statement it described this structure as "a terrorist organization that is far from the Islamic line and does not represent Islam, that is opposed to Islam in line with partisan goals, under the guise of religion; an organization that encourages division, fragmentation, chaos, violence and terror," and called on everyone to be careful against this organization, not to believe in and join this organization, and not to feel sympathy for it.

Setting aside the moral and religious meaning of this move, it is interesting, and just as instructive, of course, that such a council of ulema has taken on the task of declaring the Ikhwan a terrorist organization. For in some meeting minutes leaked a few years ago between Saudi Arabian and American intelligence officials, it had been seen that it was the Saudi officials who were trying to persuade the American delegation to declare the Ikhwan a terrorist organization. In response, the American intelligence officials said that despite all their efforts they had not been able to identify any terrorist activity that could be attributed to the Ikhwan, and that if they did such a thing they would be left with no credibility whatsoever, stating that no step should be expected of them in this direction.

In the serial talks held on this subject, the American side said that some initiatives made in this direction in the USA had also not succeeded, that is, that they had not been able to prove the Ikhwan's link to terrorism, and that on the contrary its aspect as a peaceful organization had been revealed more; they resisted the insistence of the Saudi officials, saying that classifying it as a terrorist organization would create a situation very contrary to the USA's own claims and role in the Middle East.

Still, they had added that the most appropriate thing to do would be to steer the Ikhwan movement toward democratization and joining a human-rights-based process, the removal of violence and giving up extreme ideological discourse; but was this advice not precisely the source of their interlocutors' concerns? The Ikhwan is not feared because it is terrorist, it is feared because it is not terrorist, and indeed because it is more pro-democracy than necessary for the Arab world. This is very plain and clear.

The answer needed to this Council, which has no word to say to those who have been holding in prison for three years, without right, an exceptional scholar like Salman al-Awdah, is being given by the civil ulema who truly look after the maslaha of the Muslim people. Let us end with the answer given from his Facebook account by Ali Muhyiddin al-Qaradaghi, Secretary-General of the International Union of Muslim Scholars:

"Not to defend the Ikhwan, but only so that the truth may find its place, I ask the Council of Senior Scholars this question: In terms of the jurisprudence of balance and the jurisprudence of priorities, is it better to attack the Ikhwan, or to attack those who support the caricatures insulting the Blessed Prophet? Or is it more necessary to attack those who occupy Al-Aqsa Mosque and Jerusalem, and those who sign normalization agreements with the occupying state and play its trumpet?"