The Role Of Fatwas In Islam

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The Encyclopedia of Modern Middle East and North Africa defines fatwas as “the legal judgement or learned interpretation that a qualified jurist (mufti) can give on issues pertaining to the shari’a (Islamic law).” Fatwas are able to be issued by anyone trained in Islamic law, and is said to have been issued in their millions since early Islam, usually concerning the various aspects of “individual life, social norms, religion, war, peace, jihad, and politics.” (Weimann 2011, 766) Fatwas can be binding for Shias and fundamentalist or radical Sunnis, depending on their relation to the issuer (Schmuel Bar 2006).
Terror fatwas, synonymous with jihadi fatwas, are fatwas that promote jihad, violence and martyrdom, sanction targets, and even permit
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Terrorism is either domestic or international. Domestic terrorism is when the attack takes place in the venue country where the perpetrators and victims are from; international terrorism is when an attack takes place in “the venue country [which] concerns perpetrators or victims from another country.” (Sandler 2014, 3; 5). International terrorism is said to have started in 1968 when Palestinian terrorist groups carried out a string of airplane hijackings (Hoffman 2006), and had been largely comprised of nationalist and radical revolutionaries from the late 1960s until the late 1980s (Rapoport 2004). Moreover, a significant shift occurred in terrorism in the …show more content…
Religious terrorism has several core characteristics: first, it has a transcendental dimension instead of a political one, where violence is “executed in direct response to some theological demand or imperative”; second, religious terrorists typically “seek the elimination of broadly defined categories of enemies,” and, unlike secular terrorists, are not concerned with the counterproductive effects produced by indiscriminate killing; and lastly, they view themselves as “outsiders” seeking “fundamental changes to the existing order.” As a result, religious terror allows the “sanctioning of almost limitless violence against a virtually open-ended category of targets.” (Hoffman 2006,

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