What to do?: 'jihad against Israel' fatwa pits IUMS against Egypt's top religious authority Dar al-Ifta

A call for jihad (holy war) against Israel by the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) is pitting it against one of the oldest religious institutions in the Arab world.

The union, a Qatar-based independent guild of thousands of senior international Muslim scholars established in 2004, called for Muslims to rescue the Palestinians by launching war against Israel and those backing its campaign against Gaza, especially the US.

Moreover, in an edict it issued on 5 April, the IUMS' Committee on Edicts and Jurisprudence described the Israeli war on Gaza as a process of "systematic cleansing".

Previously, IUMS proclaimed a fatwa (religious ruling) on 28 March, that stated "jihad against the [Israeli] occupation is an individual obligation upon every capable Muslim", while also calling on "Muslim governments to intervene immediately," through military, economic and political means.

The committee also called for Palestine's neighbouring countries, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, to come to the rescue of the Palestinians by participating in this holy war against Israel.

It also asked Arab states that signed peace treaties with Israel to reconsider those treaties, founding an alliance of Islamic nations against the self-proclaimed Jewish state and slapping an all-out siege on it.

The latest 5 April edict by the committee was strongly opposed by Egypt's Dar al-Ifta, the main religious authority in Egypt, which was established over 100 years ago and contains some of the nation's most luminous religious minds.

Dar al-Ifta countered by describing the call for jihad as an "invitation for chaos" by an entity that does not represent all Muslims, one that does not have the religious right to make such a call.

"Backing the Palestinians to obtain their legitimate rights is a religious, ethical and human duty, provided that this is made to serve the interests of the Palestinian people, not to serve specific agendas or within adventures whose outcome is not calculated," Egypt's Dar al-Ifta said in a statement on 7 April.

"A declaration of war can only be made by the state and the political leadership, not through statements issued by unions that do not enjoy any religious authority or represent Muslims," it added.

Standing ground

An official of Dar al-Ifta accused the IUMS of aiming to incite peoples in Arab and Islamic states against their own governments by making such a call for jihad against Israel.

"Wars can only be declared by states and governments," Khaled Imran, a senior official of Egypt's Dar al-Ifta told The New Arab.

"Such wars cannot be launched haphazardly, but they need special preparations," he added.

He warned against what he described as organisations that are not mandated to issue religious edicts, giving themselves the right to issue those edicts.

Who is authorised to issue religious edicts or call for jihad is a religious argument encroaching on a political territory.

Egypt's Dar al-Ifta is affiliated to the Egyptian government. It is headed by a senior religious scholar called the 'Grand Mufti', the most senior official responsible for the issuance of fatwas or religious edicts. The grand mufti is usually appointed by the Egyptian president.

This means that Dar al-Ifta has to toe Egypt's official line, especially when it comes to foreign policy issues.
 

Egypt was the first Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, having fought four wars against it earlier.

It shares borders with Gaza and Israel, making it bear the brunt of the Gaza war. Together with the US and Qatar, Egypt also leads negotiations for bringing the Gaza ceasefire, which was terminated by Israel on March 18, back on track.

Apart from providing almost 60 percent of all the aid that entered Gaza before Israel blocked all aid entry into the Palestinian territory, Egypt leads an Arab-Islamic effort to reconstruct the war-devastated enclave without displacing its people in the face of US President Donald Trump's plan to take it over, kick its people out and turn it into a "Middle East Riviera".

Polarisation over Israel's war on Gaza

The Israeli war on Gaza is uniting Arabs and Muslims with the Palestinians and against Israel, given the barbaric nature of Israeli attacks against the people of the coastal Palestinian enclave and the huge human toll the war is leaving behind.

So far, over 50,000 Gaza residents, mostly children and women, have been killed and tens of thousands of others injured, including some with life-altering injuries.

The people of Gaza have nothing to look for in their territory which is almost totally decimated, especially with the Israeli army preventing the entry into Gaza of all types of humanitarian aid, including food and drinking water, as a way to pressure the once Gaza-ruling Hamas.

US unconditional support for Israel and silence by the international community also spread a feeling of universal injustice, a feeling that is causing hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims to lose faith in an international system that is no longer capable of defending the oppressed or bringing oppressors to account.

Nevertheless, the same Gaza war is also creating rifts, especially as to what should be done and who is responsible for the Palestinians' current calamity.

The unfolding altercation between the IUMS and Egypt's Dar al-Ifta is seen as embodying these rifts, amid expectations that these rifts will further polarize Arabs and Muslims on what should be done to help the Palestinians in the coming period.

Main parties to this row are winning supporters to their side of the argument every day, grimly highlighting the difficulties facing Muslims' unity on an issue that falls at the heart of their struggle: Palestine.

In Egypt, the same rifts are manifesting themselves clearly with some ordinary people and political forces laying the blame on Hamas for dragging the Palestinians, and potentially some Arab countries, into an aimless war, one that is causing the destruction of Gaza and the possible loss of the Palestinians struggle for statehood as a whole, and others defending the Palestinian group.

A retired Egyptian army general is coming under fire these days for openly defending the Gaza-ruling movement and praising its 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel for reviving the Palestinian issue.

TNA failed to get comments from several IUMS members it approached on their social media accounts on the statement of Egypt's Dar al-Ifta.

The union, which contains thousands of senior Islamic scholars from almost all countries, criticised Israel repeatedly in the past months for staging what it described as "genocide" against the Palestinians in Gaza.

On 8 April, it issued a statement, in which it called for an official Arab and Islamic position against the Israeli war on Gaza.

It called on Egypt to open the Rafah crossing on the border between Sinai, Egypt's north-easternmost territory, and Gaza.

The crossing point is open on the Egyptian side, but has been closed on the Palestinian side since Israel occupied its Gaza side in May last year.

Independent Palestinian analyst Mazen al-Najjar preferred the decisions and the positions of the IUMS to what he described as the "silence" of official religious institutions in the Arab region.

"If the scholars of the IUMS are not qualified to issue religious edicts, who else is?" al-Najjar asked.

He said he expects nothing revolutionary or significant to come from the official religious establishment in the region.

"However, I expect this to come from independent men of religion whose job is to tell people what they should do to help the Palestinians in the face of the atrocities committed in Gaza," he told TNA.