Glad to see I have a role model in becoming a sardonic old man. It’s not justice or shari’ah, it’s extortion.
What surprises me, however, is that none of the maulanas and muftis made an issue of the exact amount of money when so many avenues of argumentation were open to them. Was the amount extorted from the Sikhs right according to all the major schools of Islamic jurisprudence? Wasn’t it less? Wasn’t it more? Shouldn’t the amount be equivalent to the value of a certain weight in gold? And what about the requirement, according to many jurists, that the dhimmis must additionally be publicly humiliated and made to display some distinct marker to separate them from the pure and virtuous? Shouldn’t the dhimmis be disbarred from riding a motorbike now, and limited only to riding a bicycle? So many valid questions of fiqh were available to the reverends for the purpose of displaying their brilliance. Further, the newspaper report does not indicate if a similar payment would be demanded again next year. Perhaps not, but then is it valid under shari’ah to extort jizia in a lump sum? Are not the Talibans guilty of a bid’ah in this instance? Surely a few fatwas are needed to settle that issue.
Another question that the newspaper report left in the dark is: have the champions of shari’ah simultaneously levied an ‘ushr on local Muslims? Not to do so, while collecting jizia from non-Muslims would be an affront to Islamic ‘adl that so many opinion columns and editorials have recently praised. It would amount to one more bid’ah, to say the least.
Since the maulanas and muftis of Pakistan have seeming failed to do a proper job of establishing shari’ah with all its ramifications in Orakzai, I urge the Pakistani Supreme Court to take notice, suo motu, and make sure the Taliban also levied an ‘ushr on all local Muslims, including themselves. The learned court only recently decided that the penalty for ‘blasphemy’ in Pakistan should indeed be death; it should, therefore, have no trouble deciding what punishment should be meted out in such grave cases of bid’ah. Islamic ‘adl demands nothing less.
C. M. Naim (22 April 2009)
[From Islamic ‘Adl in Orakzai]
The Orakzai Sikhs are being charged a ridiculous amount of money. About US $500,000 for 12 families? That’s just so far out of the real… they are described as “impoverished” on top of living in Orakzai as shopkeepers!
And the jizya is an income tax for non-Muslim members of an Islamic state. While I question the appropriateness of the state itself, I second your highlight of the rampant ridiculousness of the situation since Muslims pay taxes that are always at a significantly higher rate than that of the jizya tax (the exact percentages, of course, vary by branch).
Clearly this is just an attempt to force-convert or kick out non-Talebanis.
Jackasses, the lot of them.