Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes. Here is part III. of a three part series by Charles, entitled “CONFLICT OF COMMANDS”.
Conflict of Commands III: Two pre-Hasan documents
by Charles Cameron
In my research on the topic of “conflict of commands” I ran across two documents from October and November of 2001 which make for interesting reading in the wake of Major Hasan’s slide presentation and the Fort Hood shooting.
The first is a MEMRI post, and hence both copyrighted and readily available on the web. It s titled Terror in America (23) Muslim Soldiers in the U.S. Armed Forces in Afghanistan: To Fight or Not to Fight? and dated November 7, 2001, and the intro paragraph reads as follows:
As soon as the U.S. geared up for the war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Muslim military personnel in the American armed forces began to deal with the question of the religious permissibility of their participation in battle. Army Chaplain Capt. Abd Al-Rasheed Muhammad, the Imam of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. sent an inquiry on the matter to the North American Fiqh (Islamic Jurisprudence) Council, which in turn referred the matter to clerics in the Arab world. The clerics issued a Fatwa permitting Muslim soldiers to take part in the fighting if there was no alternative, and the council delivered the ruling to Capt. Muhammad. But on October 30, the editor of the Arabic London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reported that the clerics who signed this Fatwa had changed their minds and abrogated their previous Fatwa with a new one prohibiting participation of Muslim soldiers in the war in Afghanistan.
The rest you can read on the MEMRI site.
The second document was actually posted a little earlier on the State Department site, although it is no longer available there. Dated 16 October 2001 and titled U.S. Islamic Leaders Issue Fatwa on U.S. Muslim Soldiers Fighting Terrorists, as far as I can determine, it is currently only present (outside of archive.org) on the Department’s Jakarta site.
Interestingly enough, this document also includes a quote from another person whose name has been much in the news in connection with Islamism: Chaplain Yee — the Chinese-American US Army Chaplain who ministered to the Muslim inmates at Guantanamo Bay, was charged in 2003 with sedition, espionage and other crimes, and held in a Navy brig until all charges against him were dropped. Yee is quoted as saying back in 2001 that “Muslims on his base have come to him with worries about being ordered to fight Muslims overseas”.
I think this document is worth reposting in full, and would simply note my surprise that neither this official State Department statement nor the MEMRI document appears to have formed part of any discussion of the Fort Hood incident in open source materials that I have seen. I hope the IC is doing better in this regard — but if these materials have been overlooked by the relevant classified inquiries too, I wonder whether this might not be yet another result of the sort of thing Gregory Treverton comments on in his 2009 paper “Bridging the Divide between Scientific and Intelligence Analysis” from the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies, Swedish National Defense College:
Analysts do not have the freedom to explore issues by pursuing them down the rabbit hole, so to speak. There is a hard andfast process in place that determines what they look at, when, and in some cases, to what end.
*U.S. Islamic Leaders Issue Fatwa on U.S. Muslim Soldiers Fighting Terrorists:
*
U.S. Muslim soldiers need to defend their country and combat terrorism
By Phillip Kurata
Washington File Staff Writer
16 October 2001
Washington — Two prominent Islamic scholars in the United States have issued a fatwa, or legal opinion, on the importance of American Muslims serving in the U.S. military to defend their country and combat terrorism.
“All Muslims ought to be united against all those who terrorize the innocents, and those who permit the killing of non-combatants without a justifiable reason. The Muslim soldier must perform his duty in this fight despite the feeling of uneasiness of ‘fighting without discriminating.’ His intention must be to fight for enjoining of the truth and defeating falsehood. It’s to prevent aggression on the innocents, or to apprehend the perpetrators and bring them to justice,” the fatwa reads.
It was written by Taha Jabir Al-Alawani, President of the Fiqh Council of North America and President of the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, and Sheikh Muhammad Al-Hanooti, a member of the fiqh council. The two Islamic scholars issued their legal opinion in response to a query submitted by Chaplain Abdul-Rashid Muhammad, the most senior Muslim chaplain in the U.S. military, who sought guidance on the permissibility of U.S. Muslim servicemen to participate in the war effort in Afghanistan and other Muslim countries.
“Muslims are part of the American society. Anyone who feels he’s fighting in a just war must fight,” Al-Alawani said.
“We abide by every law of this country except those laws that are contradictory to Islamic law,” said Sheikh Al-Hanooti. The sheikh added that U.S. Muslim military personnel may refuse to fight on the grounds of conscientious objection.
“If any Muslim serving in the U.S. Armed Forces has a conscientious objection to combat and believes that it is against Islamic principles to fight in any war, then that individual has the right to stand by his or her concience,” Al-Hanooti said. “They realize, of course, that they may be administratively separated from the military as a result of their choice.”
Muhammad, who is stationed at the Walter Reed military hospital in Washington, says there is no conflict between being a loyal soldier and a loyal Muslim. He is helping some Muslim American servicemen deal with their qualms about fighting terrorists who claim to represent Islam.
“It is time now for us to not only wake up, but speak up,” Muhammad said in a recent interview. “The prophet said when we see evil action we are compelled to change it with our hand, challenge it with our tongue or at least hate it in our heart.”
Muhammad, an African American who was raised as a Baptist, became the first Muslim chaplain in the U.S. military in 1993. Until then, all the 3,150 U.S. military chaplains were either Jews or Christians. In 1996, a second Muslim chaplain was commissioned by the Navy. Since then the number of Muslim chaplains in the U.S. military has grown to 14.
Qaseem Uqdah, a Marine Corps veteran who is executive director of the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veteran Affairs Council, said the Muslim military chaplains include Muslims who were born into the faith in Asia, Africa and the Middle East and Muslim converts, who include several African Americans, an Anglo-American and a Chinese American. Uqdah’s group has been selected by the U.S. military to recommend people as Muslim chaplain candidates.
U.S. military officials say a shortage of candidates with the required education limits the number of Muslim military chaplains. Three Muslim chaplains are currently being trained at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.
The newest Muslim chaplain is James Yee, a Chinese American and a graduate of the West Point military academy, who was born into a Lutheran family. He became interested in Islam while a student and later spent four years studying Arabic and Islam in Damascus, Syria. Currently he serves with the 29th Signal Battalion at Fort Lewis, Washington.
Chaplain Yee said that Muslims on his base have come to him with worries about being ordered to fight Muslims overseas.
“An act of terrorism, the taking of innocent civilian lives is prohibited by Islam, and whoever has done this needs to be brought to justice, whether he is Muslim or not,” Chaplain Yee said.
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