| Submit your comments on this article | ||
| Africa North | ||
| Moroccan takfirist leader condemns attacks on foreigners | ||
| 2009-12-16 | ||
| [Maghrebia] A prominent sheikh of Morocco's takfirist movement is drawing wary scrutiny in Maghreb religious and academic circles for his description of attacks on foreigners as "treason against Islam". Sheikh Mohammed Fezeizi, who is serving a three-decade prison term for a terrorism-related case in Morocco, sent a letter to his daughter in July in which he broke with his own past proclamations about the virtue of killing foreigners.
In the letter, Fezeizi rebutted al-Qaeda's justifications for terrorist attacks targeting civilians in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, based on Germany's membership in NATO, fighting Muslims in Afghanistan, and supporting the state of Israel.
"Those who want only killing, blood and theft, they have nothing to do with God's religion, either in Germany or elsewhere," Fezeizi said in the letter, which was reprinted in Der Speigel. Fezeizi, who is considered the leader of jihadist Salafism in Morocco, started his career in 1976 as a preacher at a small mosque in Tangier. He soon embraced the fundamentalist school of Salafism and started forming links with jihadist movements in Algeria and Europe. This career was capped by a meeting with Sheikh Omar Abu Ammar, one of Osama Ben Laden's top aides, in London in 1999. In 2000, Fezeizi gave lessons on takfir [the practice of declaring others kuffar or apostates] and jihad at a mosque in Hamburg. But Fezeizi's apparent split with his past comrades and positions has yet to fully convince everyone. "Did Fezeizi find out that Germany is a land of peace and tolerance only when he landed in prison?" asked Moroccan researcher Mohammed Kallaoui. "We have to wait and see whether the positions he expressed actually stem from political awareness, a true ideological, intellectual and doctrinal review, or whether they're just the result of the conditions under which Fezeizi lives in prison and out of a desire" to go free. However, Kallaoui noted that Fezeizi's letter comes in the context of a larger trend toward contraction of the Salafist movement. "Many of those who were arrested on terrorism-related cases, whether in Morocco or other countries, now regret their acts and believe they got carried away in the movement and made some mistakes in the fever of the jihadist discourse," said the researcher. "Those people have already pulled back from those ideas." Abdullah Rami, a researcher at the Moroccan Centre for Sociological Studies in Casablanca, said Fezeizi's letter to his daughter, along with other letters in which Fezeizi apologised to Arab intellectuals he had previously targeted in fatwas, were still only personal notes leaked to the press. "We can talk about a review [of ideological documents underpinning takfirism] when Fezeizi issues a public document, not based on personal messages," said Rami. "The effect and influence of these messages are still limited." "I've personally seen a program on Al Jazeera ... in which Fezeizi called without hesitation for killing a number of independent thinkers who he accused of atheism," said Moukhtar Abdellaoui, head of the Hassan II University's philosophy department. "Fezeizi may be true in his new claims, but his words may also be an attempt to win sympathy." "In either case, I think we're faced with a 'return to awareness' about the importance of dialogue and avoidance of final and absolute judgments," added Abdellaoui. "We need to know that dividing the world into two halves is a premature thing in which the Islamic world is likely to lose more than win." | ||
| Posted by:Fred |
| #3 likely clemency plea to Huckabee |
| Posted by: Frank G 2009-12-16 14:43 |
| #2 Gee, it's almost as if he knew his mail was being read... |
| Posted by: mojo 2009-12-16 11:02 |
| #1 Takiya: it's not just for kufr anymore. |
| Posted by: ed 2009-12-16 00:26 |