Afghans aim to defuse failed suicide bombers with Koran

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

Afghans aim to defuse failed suicide bombers with Koran

By Hamid Shalizi
KABUL | Mon Jun 11, 2012 7:50am EDT

(Reuters) - In a room full of would-be suicide bombers at a high security detention centre in the Afghan capital, an elderly cleric quietly reads out verses from the Koran, telling the young men the act of killing oneself is itself a crime in Islam.

"You won't go to paradise. Killing yourself and killing others is forbidden in Islam," he tells the men sitting on chairs arranged in rows in the brightly lit room, and points to pages in the holy book.

Some of them nod, others stare vacantly.

Afghanistan's National Directorate Security, long reviled for abuse and torture of detainees, says it is trying to draw the poison out of the young minds by teaching them the Koran, taking the men to mosques in Kabul to show people praying peacefully and proving their instigators were wrong.

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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/11/us-afghanistan-bombers-idUSBRE85A0AS20120611

[LibAsHell]

1. Quite a few scholars have this take, but extremists have an easy rebuttal

They say that if you kill yourself to escape hardships and depression, etc., then it's bad, but if you're doing it because the enemy is invading your land and you're trying to kill them, then it's jihad and perfectly justified.

I can see how that distinction would be logical to someone who is compelled by Muslim extremist propaganda.

[dmallind]

2. The problem here is abrogation

The Qur'an is not a (vaguely) linear story like the Bible. It doesn't even tell stories at all to any great degree. It's a collection of oral revelations NOT in chronological order. The concept of abrogation is in the Qur'an itself. The difficulty comes in as to whether to employ strictly chronological abrogation or source-determined. In this case though only the former applies as verses both for and against the rightness of killing for the faith are both in the Qur'an itself rather than the sunnah or hadith.

Sadly, due to the way in which "revelations" corresponded to issues in Muhammad's life, the sura that says killing is just peachy if for the faith comes from the Medina period, where he was cutting a nascent empire out of the trading caravans. The peaceful sura is from the Mecca period, when he was hawking a new faith to the largely uninterested population and a less strident view was warranted. Needless to say the violent Medina sura is the latter and thus the abrogating one.

I'm sure there are all manner of rationalizations for why go-along-to-get-along interpreters prefer the earlier sura, but only by overturning the precepts of naskh that apply in every other case of progressive revelation can they make that claim.