Bunting for the Sheikh

Madeleine Bunting presents a sympathetic portrait of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi in today's Guardian. Well, that's her choice - and the choice of her editor. Others are free for their part to take a bit more critical distance. I'll just concentrate on one matter from Bunting's piece. She says of Qaradawi:

Consistency is a point of honour to most religious leaders and he is no exception; if you have spent years studying religious texts to deliver fatwas, you don't often change your mind.

Now, look at the passage on suicide bombings that follows:

Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel, [Qaradawi] insists, are a form of jihad. "The actor who commits this is a martyr because he gave his life for the noble cause of fighting oppression and defending his community," he says. "These operations are best seen as the weapon of the weak against the powerful. It is a kind of divine justice when the poor, who don't have weapons, are given a weapon which the fully equipped and armed-to-the-teeth powerful don't have - the powerful are not willing to give their lives for any cause."

He maintains that Palestinian suicide bombing is targeted at combatants (something his critics would strongly dispute). "Sometimes they kill a child or a woman. Provided they don't mean to, that's OK, but they shouldn't aim to kill them. In every war, mistakes are made and non-combatants get killed and usually military commanders come forward (as in the case of the US) and apologise - why can't they accept others do the same?"

But he draws a distinction between suicide bombing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its use in London or New York. "The difference is huge. What happens in Palestine is self-defence. But in 9/11 they were not fighting an invasion; they didn't just use their own bodies but those of all the others in the planes. These young men attacked non combatants - even other Muslims and Arabs - going about their daily lives. Because of this I have condemned what happened in London, Sharm El Sheikh [the Egyptian resort] and Madrid both in my personal capacity and as chair of the International Union of Muslim Scholars."

Five points: (1) How are infants and children - on a bus, in a cafe, in some other public place - 'the powerful'? (2) How can you not 'mean to' kill a child or a woman, if you detonate a bomb in the sort of venues just mentioned, in which children and women are visibly present? How could this be a 'mistake'? (3) Palestinian suicide bombers are attacking non-combatants. (4) The putative distinction between suicide bombing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the bombings in Madrid and London doesn't withstand scrutiny. If the justification for the former is supposed to be 'fighting an invasion', then the same justification can be, and has been, invoked by apologists in the Madrid and London cases. (5) Even when 'fighting an invasion', the deliberate killing of innocents is a crime under international law and every civilized code of warfare.

The Sheikh's 'consistency' resides just in stubbornly repeating views that are vulnerable to the most obvious of objections.

The Guardian gives this stuff an entire page of its smartly revamped paper. That, as I believe I've noted once or twice before, is where we now are. This is where we now are:

Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi seems frail and betrays his 79 years as he walks into the ornate sitting room in his Qatari home. But after breaking his Ramadan fast, he talks late into the night with undimmed energy and passion.