His Majesty's King Abdullah 11’s speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg last week had a resounding impact among world leaders and peoples since he affirmed that Jordan will not allow the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to hijack our religion, distort its image and defame our noble values . Arabs and Moslems should be the ones defeating and uprooting that Satanic plant committing hideous murders using the name of our God and religion.
Two days following the king’s speech, a spokesman for the Islamic State, Abu Mohammed al Adnani, issued a statement, carried out by al Furqan network, saying that the next target for Daesh will not be confined to Syria and Iraq, but their reach will be extended to include Riyadh, Kuwait and Amman.
Strategic patience will certainly lead to defeat Daesh militarily in Mosul and Reqqa, in months or years. But a military victory for the United States led coalitions will not permanently uproot that Satanic plant. The Islamic State recruits its fighters through an ideology. History has substantiated strong evidences that it requires another ideology to defeat a deviant one.
Islamic scholars in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have issued press statements condemning the atrocities of Daesh, but without one single religious Fatwa that says in non ambiguous terms that members are non Muslims and apostates, Kafir. Such a clear cut fatwa will constitute a strong deterrent for the three thousand Tunisians and nearly one thousand Jordanians, all of whom are fighting there, assuming they are following the way of Jihad for God.
What is needed is new curricula for preparatory and secondary schools that specifically repudiates the misconception of Tawheed as interpreted by those who deviated from Islam as we know it in Jordan and the Sunni world.
It is unfortunate that professors of Islamic Sharia in many Arab universities are graduates of the same educational institutions that advocate a narrow minded doctrine of Jihad, while ignoring the holy pillars of tolerance with other religions, and universality of mercy to all human kind.
They are the same professors who were tasked by the ministry of education to put down school curricula in the subject of religion to elementary, preparatory and secondary classes.
Since 1973, when the Gulf oil prices quadrupled, many educational institutions managed successfully to give scholarships and incentives to our younger generations to recruit them to that deviant concept of Jihadi Salafism. Many ministers of Awqaf and religious affairs had their PhD’s as graduates of those institutions.
The publishing industry there, with its new multi-mllion dollar budget, drowned the bookshop markets in the Arab world with cheap compendiums of their literature .
True remedy should start at that early level.
