Scholars Call Attacks a Distortion of Islam

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Scholars Call Attacks a Distortion of Islam 
By Laurie Goodstein, , 30 September 2001

With evidence that Muslim militants were responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, prominent Islamic scholars and theologians in the West say unequivocally that nothing in Islam countenances the Sept. 11 actions. But in interviews, they explained that certain scriptural passages are distorted by Islamic extremists like Osama bin Laden. 

In his office in Leesburg, Va., Taha Jabir Alalwani, the chairman of a council that issues Islamic legal opinions for Muslims in North America, opened a copy of the Koran to Page 1,732 and read aloud in Arabic a verse that lays out the rules of when a Muslim may fight. 

"The verse says you have a right to fight those people who try to force you to adopt another religion or to leave your home," said Dr. Taha, a Muslim judge who founded a graduate school in Leesburg to teach Islam to Westerners and Western values to Muslims. "But America didn't ask you to abandon your religion. America didn't deport you, or tell you to leave your homes." 

Questions about the role of religion in justifying the attacks have taken on fresh urgency with the discovery of letters that the Justice Department believes belonged to the hijackers. The letters cited from the Koran and reminded the hijackers that they were on a holy mission that would lead them to "eternal paradise with all righteous and martyrs." 

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The scholars said they had not had time to judge the letters' authenticity, but, as far as the attacks themselves, they said that such atrocities violated the ethics of battle spelled out by the prophet Muhammad. 

In part because of this conviction, the scholars — educated intellectuals who teach in Western institutions — remain unconvinced that Muslims, even radical militants, were behind the attacks. 

Some of them even said that with the release of the letters by the Justice Department on Friday, it appeared that Muslims were being framed. The attack, they said, could have been the work of an ...

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