Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

656 • TAKFIRnor has it been banned in Great Britain, where it has been activelyengaged in demonstrations against the United States and the governmentof Tony Blair as well as seeking to increase its presence andinfluence among Britain’s large Muslim population. Authorities inboth Great Britain and Germany have investigated the HT on allegationsof illegal hate-mongering or hate crimes while Russia bannedthe HT as a terrorist organization in 2003. Despite a Pakistani banon the group in 2004, the ban has since been lifted and the HT wasactive within Pakistan in agitating against the government of formerpresident Pervez Musharraf and also U.S. and British interventionsin Afghanistan and Iraq.Following both the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacksof September 11, 2001 and the London Underground bombings of7 July 2005, the British branch of the HT published declarations condemningthose attacks as contrary to Islamic law for their targetingof civilians, to which the al Qa’eda–affiliated Moroccan IslamicCombatant Group issued a statement denouncing the HT as beinginsufficiently Islamic in its commitment.TAKFIR. This is the Islamic judicial act of declaring someone, orsomething, to be a kaffir, one who deliberately rejects the true faith.Under traditional Islamic law the penalty for deliberate apostasy isdeath. The Sunni and Shi’ite doctors of religious law reserved forthemselves the right to issue religious decrees of takfir against thoseMuslims they deemed to be apostates or enemies of Islam. Such adeclaration announced the religious permissibility, and even the duty,of the faithful Muslim with means and opportunity to execute thedeath penalty against the excommunicated person. When the head ofa Muslim state is thus anathematized, the decree in effect authorizesa coup d’état or revolution to remove the impious ruler.The use of takfir has come into prominence twice in the recenthistory of terrorism. Using an interpretation of takfir developed bythe medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Tamiyyah, Sheikh Omar AbdulRahman, the religious leader of the Egyptian Munaz zamat al Jihadgroup, issued a decree of takfir against Egyptian President Anwar Sadatin 1980. Jihad activists accordingly assassinated Sadat on 6 October1981. On 14 February 1989 Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini issueda decree of takfir against the Indian-born British author SalmanRushdie for the writing and publication of The Satanic Verses, a