SHEIKH YOUSUF AL-QARADAWI’S VISIT TO GAZA A GREAT HONOR FOR PALESTINE
By Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine*
He is also one of the most respectable and honorable Alim (religious scholar) under the sun. The 86-year-old philosopher and theologian has spent the bulk of his life defending liberty from the clutches of colonialism, imperialism and Zionism. He never flinched from saying or doing the right thing even when what he did or said was unpopular with certain quarters as is the case with his current visit to Gaza.
In the 1960s, he had to flee Gamal Abdul Nasser’s repression as the iconic Egyptian leader sought to eradicate all opposition to his dictatorship. That era witnessed the execution of many members of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, including the group’s main ideologue Sayyed Qutb.
In my recent visit to Doha, I wished I could shake hands with the independent-minded scholar who would really tell the truth, even though doing so infuriated and alienated leaders and governments. Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond my well, I didn’t have the honor to meet with his eminence.
A great honor for Gaza
There is no doubt that the venerable Sheikh’s visit to the Gaza Strip is a great honor for Gaza and for Palestine. At the very least, we have the President of the International Union of Muslim Religious Scholars visiting a partially-liberated part of Palestine, without having to bear the humiliation of handing his passport to Israeli occupation soldiers as is the case at the Allenby Bridge border crossing in the West Bank.
This is no small difference for any person with an iota of honesty and also for those who value the meaning of dignity..
The last time al-Qaradawi visited the Gaza Strip was in 1958, one year after this writer’s birth. Then, he urged the people of Palestine to cling to their homeland and to struggle by all means in order to restore their legitimate rights and return to their homes and villages from which they had been uprooted at the hands of Zionist gangs coming mostly from Eastern Europe.
As Israeli aggression and hegemony grew at the expense of the Palestinian and other Arab peoples, the venerable Sheikh never gave up and never surrendered to the Zionist fait accompli. Instead, he continued to urge Palestinians and other Muslims to walk in the path of freedom and liberty, irrespective of the sacrifices. In so doing, the Sheikh invited the wrath of Israel, her guardian ally, the United States as well as several western countries whose governments languish under Zionist influence.
At one point, influential American Congressmen and senators pressured the Qatari government to stop funding a successful website called Islam-on-line which the Sheikh oversaw and supervised. The barking dogs of the Zionist hasbara accused the site, for which this writer was working, of inciting against Jews and promoting anti-Zionism. The Sheikh retorted by arguing that “We Muslims are not against Zionists because Zionists are Jews, we are rather against them because they are murderers, oppressors and usurpers of our land and rights.”
Sheikh al-Qaradawi did issue a Fetwa or religious edict permitting Palestinian fighters to carry out “martyrdom operations” inside Israel as a weapon of last resort to deter Israel from annihilating the Palestinians. The Sheikh was not really excited about seeing young Palestinians dismember themselves into bits and pieces in order to dismember Israelis into bits and pieces. None the less, he argued that Israel’s fanatical genocidalism against the Palestinian people demanded some unorthodox tactics and solutions that would deter the Nazi-like Zionist regime from doing to the Palestinians what Nazi Germany had done to Jews and others.
The sheikh argued: “The Zionist Jews have forced the Palestinians to choose either of two choices, to die like meek sheep at the Jewish slaughterhouse, or die as martyrs in the streets of Israel. Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people, not Islam, pushes young Palestinians to carry out so-called suicide-bombings.”
The Arab Spring
Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi is par excellance the Sheikh of the Arab Spring. He supported rather enthusiastically the Arab uprisings that toppled the tyrants of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. He argued repeatedly and convincingly that dictatorship and tyrannical authoritarianism had nothing to do with Islam and that the Arab-Muslim masses had an absolute Islamic duty to unseat and overthrow despotic rulers such as Tunis’s Ben Ali. Libya’s Qaddafi , Egypt’s Mubarak and Syria’s Bashar Assad.
The Sheikh’s support for the Syrian revolution drew sharp and hostile reactions from certain sectors in the Arab and Muslim worlds, including Leftists, secular Arab nationalists and some Shiite circles that are at Iran’s beck and call. The Sheikh was often abused and called names due to his calls for the removal of the nefarious Syrian dictator.
Some pro-Iranian media outlets called the prominent scholar a “Mufti for NATO.” The Muslim brotherhood, the Left’s historical foe in the Arab world, was called “the Ikhwan of America.”
The sheikh didn’t even care to respond, opting to keep going, no matter how loud was the dog barking.
The truth of the matter is that there is no iota of truth to the frustrated hallucination against the Muslim brothers, which come from bankrupt Marxist circles, utterly unable to wake up from their long dormancy following the downfall of their god, the Soviet Union in 1991.
As to the Shiites, their concerns have really nothing with Israel and American imperialism. These slogans are just diversionary red herrings to dupe the naïve masses. The real concern of the Shiite Central Nervous System in Tehran is that they dread the appearance of a triumphant authentic Sunni Muslim movement that would constitute a real ideological Islamic alternative to Shiite esotericism and millenarianism. This is probably the main reason behind Iran’s and Hizbullah’s dogged support and backing of the nominally-Shiite but evil regime in Damascus.
Sheikh Yousuf al-Qaradawi is and will always be hard and uncompromising with regard to Israel. But he is only stating the legalistic Islamic stance on the matter. In other words, he is not inventing anything.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) ranks third after Israel and Iran in its vilification of the towering Muslim scholar. The PA minister of Waqf and Islamic Affairs reportedly accused al-Qaradawi of seeking to deepen the rift between Hamas and Fatah.
Habbash is quite notorious for badmouthing the elderly scholar, even to the point of accusing him of ignorance!! and lack of knowledge.
Well, I’m not going to further comment on this issue, lest the comparison lead us to inadvertently give certain people a dignity they don’t deserve.
The Arab poet said: Don’t you see that a sword is treated unfairly when it is said this sword is sharper than a stick?” (T/P02/E1)
* Khalid Amayreh is a journalist living in Palestine. He obtained his MA in journalism from the University of Southern Illinois in 1983. Since the 1990s, Mr. Amayreh has been working and writing for several news outlets among which is Aljazeera.net, Al-Ahram Weekly, Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), and Middle East International. He can be reached through [email protected].
Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)
Source : http://www.alresalah.ps/en/index.php?act=post&id=2093
