Despite the gravity of the hate speech directed at non-Muslims in what is called the Islamic world, and despite the fact that the clerics of Islam scorn all religions, especially Judaism and Christianity, as naturally as they breathe, the real danger lies in the pairing of takfir (declaring others infidels) and jihad against the infidels (the kuffar).
Some try to simplify the matter and downplay the gravity of the term takfir by saying that all the Abrahamic religions declare one another infidels.1 This is a grave mistake, because the term kafir exists only in Islam, and not in the hundreds of other religions in the world. In Christianity there are believers and non-believers, and no earthly punishment, discrimination or persecution follows for the non-believer. In Judaism there is the Jew and the Gentile, and the rules are about Jews not mixing with the Gentiles. This was to isolate them from the evil of the nations until the Messiah comes, and God promised to defend them and protect them from the nations’ attacks.
In Islam the matter is different. Anyone who does not believe in the message of Islam’s prophet Muhammad is a kafir, and anyone who is not a Muslim monotheist is a kafir. Even denying any part of Islam, as the Sheikh of al-Azhar, Dr. Ahmed al-Tayeb, says, is kufr. Kufr in Islam is disbelief in Allah and His Messenger, as set out in the Islamic tradition. According to the Syrian writer Fayez Ali Sahlab in his book Takfir and Counter-Takfir, 524 verses of the Qur’an contain the word kufr: disbelief in Allah, in Allah’s signs, in Allah’s blessings, in the Messenger, in the Day of Resurrection, in the Qur’an, in part of the Book, in Allah and His angels and messengers and the Last Day, and the kufr of lying and fabricating against Allah.
According to the website al-Durar al-Saniyya, 2,180 hadiths of Muhammad refer to kufr, kafir, kafirin and kuffar. On top of that there are tens of thousands of fatwas and sayings of jurists affirming the kufr of everyone who is not a Muslim.
Kufr extends to anyone who differs from the thought of Ahl al-Sunna wal-Jama’a (the Sunnis), even a Muslim. In 1991 the Mufti of Egypt, Dr. Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, issued a fatwa on the Druze and Ismaili sects. It said they have the status of neither People of the Book nor polytheists. Eating their food is not permitted. Muslims may kill them wherever they are found. They are apostate heretics (zanadiqa) whose repentance is not accepted. Their boys must be killed so they do not mislead others, and it is forbidden to sleep in their houses or walk with them2.
There are of course many fatwas on the apostasy, heresy, kufr and atheism of the Baha’is. A fatwa of the Islamic Research Academy issued in December 2003 described Baha’ism as “a kind of deadly intellectual epidemic, which the state must mobilize all its resources to combat and eradicate.” Many fatwas and court rulings against the Baha’is in Egypt were collected by Dr. Farag Foda in one of his studies3. Among Ahl al-Sunna wal-Jama’a it even reaches the point of declaring someone who abandons prayer a kafir.
We are speaking here of takfir, which is vastly graver than the charge of contempt. According to explicit verses in the Qur’an, the kuffar are: those who have gone astray, wrongdoers, enemies of Allah, the worst of beasts (that is, the vilest of animals), more astray than cattle, the worst of creation, people who do not understand, a clear enemy to the Muslims, and Allah is an enemy to the kafirin4.
Imagine describing a person as the enemy of Allah, the enemy of Islam and the enemy of the Muslims. Fighting him then becomes justified, and for many jurists obligatory. That is why Islamic jurisprudence holds that fighting the kuffar is a duty on every Muslim who is an adult, sane and mature.
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali says in his book al-Iqtisad fi al-I’tiqad (Moderation in Belief): “The settled principle is that whoever denies the message of Muhammad is a kafir, that is, abiding in the Fire after death, and his blood and property are permitted in this life.” In Faysal al-Tafriqa bayna al-Islam wa al-Zandaqa (The Decisive Criterion Between Islam and Heresy), al-Ghazali also says: “Kufr is to deny the Messenger in anything he brought, and faith is to affirm him in everything he brought. Kufr is a legal ruling like the ruling on slavery. Its penalty is the licitness of blood and abiding in the Fire, and its basis is legal, by text or by analogy to a text.”
Kufr in Islam is therefore a legal status and a legal ruling, an attribute and an accusation carrying severe penalties, the gravest of which is making a person’s blood licit. Takfir carries a death warrant for whoever Muslims classify as kuffar. As the writer Hamed Abdel-Samad says, 25 Qur’anic verses call for fighting the kuffar5.
Jihad is the legal definition and method of fighting the kuffar. It may be defense of Muslim land. It may be fighting the kuffar and polytheists until they allow Islam to be spread by force, or removing polytheism (shirk) by force from every country in the world. Put plainly, fighting non-Muslims across the whole world is a legal duty. Islam never knows peace, and the Qur’an calls for peace only in the case of defeat: “So do not weaken and call for peace while you are superior” (Muhammad 35). That is why the Nobel-winning writer Naipaul, described as Indian, said that if Muslims have power and are able to use it, they will not hesitate to use it, and for that reason described Islam as a “force for conquest.”
As for the People of the Book (Jews and Christians), the Egyptian sheikh Muhammad Hassan says there is no disagreement among Muslims anywhere in the world about their kufr. There is a vast number of fatwas declaring them kuffar, and still more accusing them of shirk, such as the fatwa of the late Sheikh of al-Azhar, Gad al-Haq Ali Gad al-Haq6.
Search the internet under “the kufr of the Jews and Christians” and you find a consensus among senior sheikhs on their kufr, and even on the kufr of whoever does not believe in their kufr. Categorical headlines meet you: “The Decisive Statement on the Kufr of the People of the Book,” “The Evidence and Proofs That Jews and Christians Are Polytheists,” “The Kufr of Jews and Christians Is Confirmed by the Consensus of Ahl al-Sunna wal-Jama’a,” “The Consensus of the Muslims on the Kufr of the Christians,” “Whoever Doubts the Kufr of Jews and Christians Is a Kafir.” From Abu Hamid al-Ghazali to Ibn Taymiyya to Sayyid Qutb to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab to Ibn Baz to Ibn Uthaymin, all agree on the kufr and shirk of the People of the Book, Jews and Christians, and on fighting them.
Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, goes further and speaks of “the obligation to fight the People of the Book, and that Allah multiplies the reward of whoever fights them.”7 Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, of course, does not let the matter pass without a fatwa. He says on the IslamOnline site: “The kufr of the Jews and Christians is among the clearest of the clear for any Muslim who has an atom of knowledge of Islam.”8 Sheikh Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Khaliq says in his book The Ruling on Peace and Reconciliation Treaties with the Jews: “The basic principle in the relationship between Muslims and the kuffar is enmity and war, because of the saying of Allah the Most High: ‘And fight them until there is no fitnah and the religion, all of it, is for Allah’ [8:39].” He adds: “Whoever thinks that war and enmity between Muslims and Jews will cease is a denier of Allah’s promise and His religion, and whoever works to remove this enmity and hatred between Muslims and Jews is a kafir in Allah, glory be to Him.”
Brother Rachid’s program Bold Question devoted an entire episode to explaining the danger of declaring non-Muslims kuffar. It relayed statements by the Sheikh of al-Azhar, Dr. Ahmed al-Tayeb, in which he explicitly acknowledges the kufr of the Jews and Christians. The well-known Egyptian sheikh Yasser Borhami explained that “fighting the kafir is a divine command, except for the mu’ahid among them,9 and the covenant is either a covenant of dhimma, a covenant of truce, or a covenant of safe-conduct.” In other words, fighting most of humanity is an Islamic duty.10
Yes, terrorism begins with classifying people as Muslim or kafir. It then escalates from the verses of fighting to the fatal bullet, the poisoned dagger or the severing of necks. It is the racism that permits killing others, killing those who, in the eyes of the jurists of Islamic fiqh, do not deserve to be sound human beings because they do not resemble them in belief.11
There is an entire body of jurisprudence called the fiqh of the dhimmis, in addition to the fiqh of a Muslim’s dealings with the kuffar and the polytheists. Both establish a special status for Christians and Jews. They pay the jizya “while they are subdued.” A non-Muslim may not hold authority over a Muslim. Non-Muslims may be employed only in cases of extreme necessity. The penalty for slander is not applied to a Muslim who slanders a dhimmi or a kafir. The blood money of a dhimmi is half that of a Muslim. A believer is not killed for a kafir, even if the killer is a Muslim slave and the victim a free dhimmi. By the consensus of the jurists the testimony of a dhimmi is not accepted, except in rare, specified cases. A kafir does not inherit from a Muslim. The matter extends even to congratulations and heartfelt affection, which a Muslim is forbidden to show a non-Muslim.
This means that classifying a person as a kafir in Islam has consequences that run from insult to discrimination to racism to terrorism, killing and permanent war. At the same time Muslims complain about mere critical opinions of Islam, which they treat as contempt, and they want international sanctions on anyone who comes near their religion with criticism. A difference of opinion is, to them, a crime, while racism, terrorism, killing and bloodshed are lawful and sacred violence in the fiqh of Islam. According to the fiqh of loyalty and disavowal (al-wala’ wal-bara’), the house of Islam and the house of war, and the Muslim and the kafir, they are in a state of permanent war with the world. Meanwhile they complain, scream, destroy and kill because someone in some part of the globe voiced a mere opinion about their religion and their prophet.
When Muslim jurists speak of the “controls of takfir,” they mean the controls and restrictions on declaring a Muslim a kafir. Non-Muslims are kuffar and polytheists according to clear Qur’anic verses, according to the hadiths of Muhammad, and according to the opinions and consensus of Muslim jurists across the ages.12
The crime of contempt of religions in Islamic countries is nothing but one of the effects of this takfir, which the Organization of the Islamic Conference is seeking to export to the international level. According to the U.S. religious freedom report for 2008, “the introduction of the concept of defamation into the Human Rights Council in Geneva and the UN General Assembly in New York is in reality nothing but an attempt to export the laws of takfir existing in many Islamic countries to the international level.”
Hatred, takfir of non-Muslims, and from them fighting and jihad against non-Muslims, are principal components of Islamic sharia. Takfir and jihad are the most dangerous of the Muslims’ doctrines, so much so that Islamic jurists consider jihad the sixth pillar of Islam.
The backbone of Islam is jihad and fighting, and the most important cause of jihad is takfir. Takfir is the cornerstone of jihad, jihad is the cornerstone of Islam, and jihad in turn is the cornerstone of international terrorism. There are 70 verses in the Qur’an that call for jihad.
The British researcher Bill Warner says that takfir in Islam has not ceased for a single moment in the whole of Islamic history, and that takfir and jihad caused the killing of 270 million people throughout history, not counting the wounded and the male and female slaves. He says Islam has no achievements in history except through takfir, jihad and raids, since Islam does not flourish without raids, as the well-known historian Bernard Lewis wrote.
Jihad is at once defensive and offensive. According to Islam’s jurists offensive jihad is the more important, because it removes kufr and shirk from the earth, as the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, Abul A’la Maududi, said. The Egyptian Sayyid Qutb says that jihad against the kuffar cannot be anything but offensive.
Takfir is a racist classification, followed by a duty to hate the kuffar, to be hostile to them, and then to fight them. By extension, takfir is a threat to the most important human right, the right to life. Takfir is a crime against humanity. Jihad is not a right but aggression, assault and terrorism in international law. Killing the apostate is not an Islamic right but a crime against human life. The call to hatred is not religion but a racist crime.
Takfir and jihad are without doubt a war on the contemporary world, especially the West. America, the West and the international community must therefore:
Completely prevent the application of Islamic sharia outside Islamic countries
Criminalize Islamic takfir
Criminalize Islamic jihad
References
Muhammad Hassan al-Munir, Dialogue by Killing: The Massacres of Fiqh and the Jurists, p. 47.
Farag Foda, “Minorities and Human Rights in Egypt,” a study issued by the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, in the book Freedom of Opinion and Expression: Restrictions and Problems, pp. 200–201.
Qur’anic verses describing the kuffar:
“Indeed, those who disbelieved and averted [others] from the way of Allah have certainly gone far astray.” [An-Nisa 167]
“And the disbelievers are the wrongdoers.” [al-Baqarah 245 in the original, apparently 2:254]
“O you who have believed, do not take My enemy and your enemy as allies, extending to them affection while they have disbelieved in what came to you of the truth.” [al-Mumtahanah 1]
“Whoever is an enemy to Allah and His angels and His messengers and Gabriel and Michael, then indeed, Allah is an enemy to the disbelievers.” [al-Baqarah 98]
“Indeed, the worst of living creatures in the sight of Allah are those who have disbelieved, and they will not [ever] believe.” [al-Anfal 55]
“Or do you think that most of them hear or reason? They are not except like livestock. Rather, they are more astray in [their] way.” [al-Furqan 44]
“Indeed, they who disbelieved among the People of the Scripture and the polytheists will be in the fire of Hell, abiding eternally therein. Those are the worst of creatures.” [al-Bayyinah 6]
“That is because they believed, then disbelieved, so their hearts were sealed, and they do not understand.” [al-Munafiqun 3]
“And when you travel throughout the land, there is no blame upon you for shortening the prayer if you fear that those who disbelieve may attack you. Indeed, the disbelievers are ever to you a clear enemy.” [an-Nisa 101]
Hamed Abdel-Samad, debate on German television. https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=769094739803151
Said al-Ashmawy, fatwa and article, al-Ahali newspaper, April 10, 1996.
Hasan al-Banna, Collected Letters, al-Matba’a al-Shar’iyya, p. 280.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, IslamOnline website, “A Statement of the Truth of the Kufr of the People of the Book and Their Resentment of the Muslims.”
A mu’ahid (plural mu’ahidun) is a non-Muslim who is protected by a covenant (‘ahd) with Muslims, so he can’t legitimately be fought.
For more, see Bold Question episode no. 238,
and episode no. 415, “The Danger of Takfir,” a dialogue between Brother Rachid and Magdy Khalil,
Muhammad Hassan al-Munir, previous reference, p. 63.
Qur’anic verses describing Jews and Christians as kuffar and polytheists:
“Say, ‘O People of the Scripture, come to a word that is equitable between us and you: that we will not worship except Allah and not associate anything with Him and not take one another as lords instead of Allah.’ But if they turn away, then say, ‘Bear witness that we are Muslims.’” [Al Imran 64]
“They have certainly disbelieved who say that Allah is the Messiah, the son of Mary, while the Messiah has said, ‘O Children of Israel, worship Allah, my Lord and your Lord.’ Indeed, he who associates others with Allah, Allah has forbidden him Paradise, and his refuge is the Fire. And there are not for the wrongdoers any helpers.” [al-Ma’idah 72]
“They have certainly disbelieved who say that Allah is the third of three. And there is no god except one God. And if they do not desist from what they are saying, there will surely afflict the disbelievers among them a painful punishment.” [al-Ma’idah 73]
“The Jews say, ‘Ezra is the son of Allah’; and the Christians say, ‘The Messiah is the son of Allah.’ That is their statement from their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved before. May Allah destroy them; how are they deluded?” [at-Tawbah 30]
“They have taken their scholars and monks as lords besides Allah, and [also] the Messiah, the son of Mary. And they were not commanded except to worship one God; there is no deity except Him. Exalted is He above whatever they associate with Him.” [at-Tawbah 31]
“O you who have believed, indeed the polytheists are unclean, so let them not approach al-Masjid al-Haram after this, their [final] year. And if you fear privation, Allah will enrich you from His bounty if He wills. Indeed, Allah is Knowing and Wise.” [at-Tawbah 28]
Great article. Appreciate the work this took! It’s interesting how Islam turns the 10 Commandments on their head and legalizes what God considers sin. If you want your nonMuslim neighbor’s property, just kill him in the name of Allah and take all his possessions. That’s actually murder and theft in God’s eyes.