Pioneering role of Islam

ISLAM’s various aspects and provisions not only focus on modes of worship, but also cover all worldly transactions that are essential to ensure stability and prosperity in the society. It provides guidance with regard to social, legal, political, economic, and personal affairs. The holy Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet (PBUH) are the primary sources whereby we derive the norms of the Islamic faith. The Holy Quran is a piece of Divine literature and its authenticity cannot be questioned.

Muslim scholars use the term ‘siyar’ for international law which is the plural of ‘sirah’, meaning ‘conduct’. Islamic international law performs the function of regulating the conduct of Muslims and non-Muslims, thus it is termed as ‘siyar’. It is a vital component of the Islamic legal system by Muslim jurists and lawyers. However, western accounts of the origins of international law tend to omit this contribution in their consideration of the history of the subject.

Let us take a brief look at some of the diverse aspects and provisions of Islamic international law:

1. Peaceful relations among states: Islam promotes prevalence of peace and harmony in the international community. It encourages tolerance and friendly relations towards other states: “...So if they withdraw from you and fight you not and offer you peace, then Allah allows you no way against them.” (4:90) “And if they incline to peace, incline thou also to it, and trust in Allah. Lo! He is the Hearer, the Knower.” (8: 61) “Allah forbids you not respecting those who fight you not for religion, nor drive you forth from your homes, that you show them kindness and deal with them justly. Lo! Allah loves the doers of justice.” (60:08)

2. Diplomatic relations: It has always been a part of Islamic international law to show honour and regard to foreign envoys. The Holy Quran and the Sunnah of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) clearly state that diplomats are entitled to immunity from prosecution, freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention, and proper care and treatment. Diplomats enjoy immunity not only for themselves, but also for their families, staff, and servants.

3. Pacific settlement of disputes: Islamic international law promotes peaceful settlement of disputes by means of negotiation, mediation, and arbitration. The Holy Prophet (PBUH) concluded a peace treaty, i.e., the Treaty of Hudaibiya, with the non-Muslims of Mecca, in 628 A.D. This is regarded as a classic example of settling of disputes without resorting to violence.

4. Law of treaties: On the basis of the fundamental Islamic concept of honouring of contracts and of good faith in their observance, Islamic international law underscores scrupulous compliance with the provisions of treaties: “Fulfil the covenant of Allah, when you have made a covenant, and break not your oaths after the assertion of them, and after you have made Allah your surety...”

Yet, a treaty is not binding if there is reason to believe the other party shall not honour the same: “And if you fear treachery on the part of a people, then throw back to them (their treaty) on terms of equality. Surely Allah loves not the treacherous.” (8: 58)

5. Law of war: Islam allows war when all peaceful means of checking tyranny, violence, and injustice have failed: “And fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loves not the aggressors.” (2:190) “And what reason have you not to fight in the way of Allah, and of the weak among the men and the women and the children, who say: Our Lord, take us out of this town, whose people are oppressors, and grant us from Thee a friend, and grant us from Thee a helper!” (4: 75) “Permission (to fight) is given to those on whom war is made...” (22: 39)

Here it must be mentioned that nowhere in the Quran and the Sunnah of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) is it mentioned that Muslims should resort to war for the spread of the Islamic faith. The Quran clearly says: “There is no compulsion in religion...” (2: 256) This verse rejects whatever is talked about Muslims offering Islam or the sword as alternatives to the non-Muslims.

6. Humanitarian law: Islam established the sanctity of life, honour, and property in times of war, and made rules for the conduct of war and ensured their enforcement, centuries before the West declared them to exist in the various present-day treaties, conventions, and protocols.

Islamic law clearly defines how the troops must behave during an armed conflict. In brief, some of the various acts forbidden in war are: (1) starting war without formal ultimatum; (2) cruel ways of killing; (3) killing of non-combatants; (4) killing of prisoners of war; (5) killing of envoys; (6) massacre in the conquered territory; (7) dishonouring of women (8) inhumane treatment of prisoners of war; (9) punishing prisoners of war for acts of belligerency; (10) mutilation of dead bodies; (11) destruction of crops, trees, and other natural resources; (12) plundering and looting; (13) charging the prisoners of war for their maintenance; (14) depriving the conquered population of their possessions, interfering in their religious practices, forcing them to convert to Islam, and denying or restricting their legal and equitable rights. It must be noted that the observance of these rules is incumbent upon every Muslim soldier, commander, and ruler. Anyone who commits a violation of these norms is guilty of an offence under Islamic law.

7. Asylum: Islam instructs Muslims to grant shelter to non-Muslim individuals and groups that seek protection in the Muslim territory. The underlying purpose is that the non-Muslims would have due opportunity to learn about the Muslim faith: “And if anyone of the idolaters seeks your protection (O Muhammad), then protect him so that he may hear the word of Allah, and afterward convey him to his place of safety. That is because they are a folk who know not.” (9: 06)

Conclusion: Any study of the western international law is based upon the assumption that it was the West that created and developed international law. However, the above-mentioned facts amply prove that Islamic international law, a comprehensive set of rules, strikingly similar to the secular concept of international law, came into being some eight hundred years before the Dutch jurist Grotius put pen to paper and became the founder of the western concept of the law of nations.

It’s the regime, stupid

IF an air and missile strike could destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, it might seem the best of many bad options. But the likely costs outweigh the benefits.

Is the intelligence on Iran so much better than it was on Iraq? The Clinton administration launched Operation Desert Fox against Iraq in 1998 to degrade its weapons programmes, and even today we don’t know what it achieved. As President Clinton later put it, “We might have gotten it all; we might have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. But we didn’t know.”

Would Desert Fox II in Iran, even on a larger scale, produce a very different result? The Pentagon can hit facilities it can see with relative confidence. But much of Iran’s programme is underground, and some of it we don’t know about. Even if a strike set back Iran’s plans, we would not know by how much. For all the price we would pay, we wouldn’t even know what we’d achieved.

And we would pay a price. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs would declare victory, as Saddam Hussein did in 1998, and probably would gain some sympathy and admiration from the Muslim world and beyond. Instead of pushing for sanctions against Iran at the U.N. Security Council, the administration might be fending off resolutions censuring it for “aggression.”

Then there is the prospect of Iranian retaliation: terrorist attacks, military activity in Iraq, attempts to close off the Gulf shipping lanes and disrupt oil supplies. Unless we were prepared to escalate, ultimately to the point of taking down the regime, we could end up in worse shape than when we began.

But the inadequacy of the military strike option does not mean we can simply turn to diplomacy. Diplomacy by itself has no better chance of success. The present Iranian regime appears committed to acquiring a nuclear weapon. It has been undeterred by the prospect of international isolation or economic sanctions and apparently deems these hardships an acceptable cost. If so, even bigger carrots will not persuade it to forgo a programme it considers vital to its interests. Fear of U.S. military action is probably the only reason Iran even pretended to negotiate with the Europeans (and a big reason why the Europeans have negotiated with Iran), but it has not been enough to stop their programme.

We need to reorient our strategy. Our justifiable fixation on preventing Iran from getting the bomb has somehow kept us from pursuing a more fundamental and more essential goal: political change in Iran.

No one wants to see Iran get a bomb, but it does matter who is in power. We don’t worry that France or Great Britain has nuclear weapons. We tolerate India’s and Israel’s arsenals largely because we have some faith that their democratic governments will not use them. Were Iran ruled by even an imperfect democratic government, we would be much less concerned about its weaponry. It might dismantle its programme voluntarily, as did Ukraine and South Africa. But even if it didn’t, a liberal and democratic Iran would be less paranoid about its security and therefore less reliant on nuclear weapons to defend itself.—Dawn/Washington Post Service

The writer is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

N-regime: double standards

SO who are the cheese-eating surrender monkeys now? President Jacques Chirac of France says rogue states fit the French doctrine for a response using its nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, the Bush administration goes softly-softly on an Iranian revolutionary regime that is setting out to go nuclear.

So now it seems that it’s the French who are from Mars and the Americans who are from Venus. What a difference four years make. Four years and a bloody nose in Iraq.

Yes, President Bush had some stern words for Iran in his state of the union address this week. But the tone was very different from his state of the union in 2002, soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when he arbitrarily hitched together Iraq, Iran and North Korea in an “axis of evil”. Now he says “the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons”. The world, note, not the United States. But how will the world prevent it? At the moment the only serious answer coming from Washington is multilateral diplomacy, preferably through the UN. Welcome to the Euroweenies club, Mr President!

To be sure, the White House insists that the president can never take the military option off the table. But senior administration officials make it entirely clear that Iran is not another Iraq, and military analysts agree that there are no good options for strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, only bad or worse ones. I had the chance last weekend, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, to talk through those options with one of the leading American experts on the military side of the relationship with Iran, Kenneth Pollack.

Many people suggest that the US might leave it to Israel to do the dirty work of setting back Iran’s nuclear programme with bombing raids. Pollack argues convincingly that this would be extraordinarily difficult for Israel to do, even if it was ready to.

Israel has few planes capable of operating effectively at that distance. There are so many possible sites where the Iranian leadership might be hiding their nuclear kit. After the first few strikes you would have lost any element of surprise. Thereafter you would have to take out Iranian air defences before continuing the bombing — a major undertaking. And Iran could retaliate, not least by encouraging Hezbollah to carry out terrorist reprisals against Israel.

Since Israeli commanders say what they really fear most from Iran is not the Tehran government possessing a nuclear bomb (they have their own to deter it with) but the unleashing of Hezbollah, these strikes could produce precisely the effect they were intended to avoid.

None of this is to say that Israel wouldn’t, in the end, do the deed if it felt its own vital security was threatened. But militarily, only the US could do it with any probability of a technical success (by which I mean setting back the programme to produce nuclear weapons for a number of years). However, that technical success would come at a huge price.

Given the wide distribution of potential nuclear sites, far beyond the well-known ones at Isfahan and Natanz, it’s almost certain there would be collateral damage: in plain English, the killing of innocent civilians. This would produce a wave of patriotic solidarity with the theocratic regime in Iran, even among those young Iranians who are fiercely critical of the mullahs, and another tidal wave of reaction around the world, especially among Muslims. Small wonder that Washington is not keen on it.

Four years ago the run-up to Iraq was like a game of American football — swift and explosive. Over Iran we shall see a long, drawn-out game of chess. The board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that begins today will be followed by another in early March, which will almost certainly agree to report Iran to the UN Security Council. That is what was agreed in a useful meeting between Britain, France, Germany, the US, Russia and China in London earlier this week. Russian and Chinese officials went to Tehran to bring home the message to the Iranian government. Jack Straw did the same in a meeting with the Iranian foreign minister.

Even if it goes to the UN, there will probably be more elaborate moves before sanctions are imposed. It’s very unclear what sanctions China and Russia would agree to. This Persian chess game is multidimensional and exemplifies the reality of a multipolar world. The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, denounces the assaults of “false superpowers”, but the real point is that they are multiple great powers, with diverse interests. Even if they agree sanctions, those may not stop the Iranian regime going ahead, overtly or covertly, with its nuclear programme. Fortunately, nuclear experts reckon that it will take from three to eight years for Iran to reach the point at which it can decide whether to go hell for leather towards the weaponization of its nuclear capacity.

That timetable has a particular significance for US politics. If you wonder why the Bush administration is being so mild and moderate, so more-European-than-the-French, on this issue, a cynic would observe that they know the crunch won’t come on their watch. If you ask why both John McCain and Hillary Clinton, two frontrunners to become the next president of the United States, are being so hawkish on this issue, a cynic would observe that they know the crunch probably will come on their watch, after 2009.

Meanwhile, we should avoid seeing Iran only through the prism of our attitudes to the United States, as so many Europeans did with Iraq. The truth is that, whatever Washington does or does not do, the world faces a serious problem of nuclear proliferation, and Iran has become a leading test case. The head of the IAEA, the Nobel peace-prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, said in Davos: “The present system for preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons is at an end, is bankrupt.”

The nuclear non-proliferation treaty is not adequate to the task and is often honoured only in the breach. The most telling charge against established nuclear powers such as the US and Britain is that of double standards: why is there one rule for you and another for the rest? More acutely still: why is there one rule for Iran but quite another for Israel and India? To say “Oh, that’s because they are responsible democracies” raises the question, “Who decides which states are responsible democracies?” And anyway, Pakistan isn’t.

So whatever we do about Iran, what we need is a new international system for the supervision and inspection of nuclear capacities in every country in the world. It should be explicit, consistent and administered by the nearest thing we have to a world arbiter, the United Nations. In order for it to be credible, established nuclear powers such as Britain and the US will have to submit themselves to the same regime of supervision and inspection as everyone else. “The US will never agree to that!” you exclaim. Well, not under the present leadership and in its current mood. But the American approach to Iran and this week’s state of the union address show how much even the Bush administration has changed.

In 2009 Washington could change some more. If you want a message of hope in this dark scene, remember Churchill’s remark that you can usually rely on the United States to do the right thing — once it has exhausted all the alternatives.

—Dawn/ Guardian Service