Al-Qaradawi Interview

by Marc Schulman, American Future

In an interview with Spiegel Online, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi (Red Ken Livingstone’s buddy), when asked why no Muslim judges or laws have officially expelled bin Laden and his followers from the faith, responded:

We condemn their acts, but I am categorically opposed to the idea of expulsion. That would be committing the same sort of sin as these people themselves commit: They want to make us and their other critics out to be heretics. The day will come when they will have to stand in front of the Kadi (Islamic judge), but at this point, we are not so far along. First we have to decide who should be their judges.

In Qaradawi’s mind, then, it would be a sin for Muslim clerics to proclaim bin Laden a heretic. This is no small matter, as Qaradawi is chairman of a world foundation of Muslim legal scholars founded last year and appears weekly on Al-Jazeera television.

Qaradawi isn’t even willing to condemn bin Laden for condemning him. What we have here is intra-Islamic d’himmitude. Can we realistically expect ordinary, “moderate” Muslims to condemn al Qaeda when legal scholars who proclaim their opposition to al Qaeda’s acts won’t?