SIRAJUL Haq’s election as the Jamaat-i-Islami’s new emir raises some questions about the party’s policies at a time when the government is holding talks with the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan. At issue is the JI’s attitude towards terrorism — terrorism not as a theory but as the mode of war for enforcement of Sharia worldwide.

This ‘jihad’ has made militants target the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai to London’s Tube and buses to Times Square, the weapons ranging from AK-47s to a terrifying war tool — suicide bombing.

Every ideological party calls its ideology immutable but is forced by circumstances to change. The Soviet CP’s 20th Congress Party (Feb 25, 1956) was historic not only because Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s personality cult but also because he repudiated two cardinal principles of Marxism-Leninism by declaring: one, war with the capitalist world was not inevitable; two there were ‘different roads to socialism’. The Chinese called it revisionism. But Khrushchev had the courage to do so.

In India, the JI has dropped opposition to ‘Western’ democracy and takes part in elections because the party leadership now considers secularism a divine gift (see Irfan Ahmad’s Islamism and Democracy in India: the Transformation of Jamaat-i-Islami).

This ‘revisionism’ reflects the Indian JI’s pragmatism in a country where Muslims are in a minority. What about the Pakistani JI? Do the JI’s new chief and shura have the courage to admit that they have modified, amended or perhaps ditched the ideology as bequeathed by founder Maulana Maudoodi?

The pity is that the JI’s ‘revisionism’ is in support of ‘radical reactionaries’ whose actions and aims run counter to some of Islamic civilisation’s fundamental values such as regard for human life and abhorrence of fitna (civic disorder).

Throughout in his writings — from booklets and pamphlets to the six-volume magnum opus Tafheemul Quran — Maudoodi makes clear that enforcing Islamic hudood (punishments) and declaring jihad are the prerogative of an Islamic state and no individual or group has the right to arrogate this privilege to himself/itself.

Interpreting ayat 33 (‘Sura Bani Israel’) in three notes, the JI founder says no individual or group has the right to punish the guilty and that an Islamic state alone has the power to do so.

Significantly, his interpretation cautions against wreaking vengeance on the suspect in any form — such as killing the innocent, torturing the guilty and humiliating and abusing his body. This should be seen against the Taliban’s practice of mutilating the bodies of captured Pakistani soldiers or beheading them.

Maudoodi’s views on jihad are well known. He was arrested in 1948 when he said the tribal invasion of Kashmir was not a jihad because jihad is not a personal or group matter and that an Islamic state alone can declare it. Today his party is backing the ‘jihad’ of a conglomerate of ragtag groups who have murdered 50,000 Pakistanis.

Their targets have included Eid congregations, mosques during Friday and taraveeh prayers, schools, hospitals, funeral processions, peace assemblies and hospitals, besides military targets of a state founded on law and grounded in what Rousseau calls general will.

Incidentally, a militants’ website declares as ‘infidels’ those it is at war with. A recent headline on its website referred to the two Peshawar cops it had killed as murtad (apostate). The TTP also never fails to murder ‘other infidels’, especially the Chinese, because of the purported persecution of Muslims in China.

Interpreting ayat 72 of ‘Sura Anfal’, Maudoodi says the support for Muslims in a non-Muslim country cannot be given recklessly (he uses the word adha-dhund) but should be given in conformity with international law while upholding any treaty obligations the Islamic state may have with that particular non-Muslim country.

There should be no support, he says, that is violative of the Islamic state’s treaty obligations (Tarjumaé Quran-i-Majeed, mae’ mukhtasir havashi).

Finally, the question of waging war on Pakistan. Addressing a seminar in Islamabad, Syed Munawwar Hasan said people like Osama bin Laden lived in the people’s hearts.

This is difficult to swallow, because Pakistanis would shut their hearts tight if Osama bin Laden tried to gatecrash into their cardiac privacy after the Al Qaeda chief’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, officially declared war on Pakistan — a country governed by a constitution the signatories to which included JI leaders such as the late Prof Abdul Ghafoor and Mahmood Azam Farooqi.

Where does the JI under the new chief stand? Does it support al-Zawahiri’s war on Pakistan? If not, will the JI chief remove the misunderstanding? All ideologies are malleable: if the JI has chosen to ‘revise’ the founder’s ideology the new emir should have the courage to acknowledge this ‘revisionism.

The writer is a member of staff.

mas@dawn.com