By Edward A. Gargan
Newsday

LAHORE, Pakistan — Last month, as the Bush administration declared "war on terrorism," Mufti Nimazzudin Shamazai, a militant Islamic cleric in Karachi, Pakistan, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, authorizing Muslims to kill Americans.

It was one in a wave of fatwas issued by hardline mullahs denouncing the United States and calling for a jihad, or holy war, against the infidels from across the seas.

In the Islamic world, fatwas have proliferated in recent years. Once pronounced by a limited number of religious authorities, they are now issued with the regularity and speed of press releases. In response, scholars, religious authorities and governments in Pakistan and other countries have taken steps to reign in the practice.

The fatwa as an institution made global headlines in 1989, when Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued one against British author Salman Rushdie. Khomeini declared that Rushdie had blasphemed God and insulted Islam in his book, "The Satanic Verses," and said any Muslim who encountered the novelist must kill him. Rushdie went into hiding under 24-hour police guard and has emerged to a more normal life only in the past year.

In South Asia, fatwas are routinely issued on matters as diverse as debt settlements, marriages, property disputes and, most recently, as a call to war. But for many of Pakistan's most prominent religious scholars, the profusion of fatwas is illegal, and a violation of Islam's basic tenets.

"Fatwas cannot be issued this way," said Massoud Ahmed, a professor of Arabic and Quranic studies at Punjab University, and the religious leader of Lahore's Badshahi Mosque, one of the world's largest. "Fatwas can only be issued by muftis," senior clerics with more training than most mullahs, "after consulting the mullahs from the four" schools of religious thought in Sunni Islam. "These fundamentalist mullahs, they just issue fatwas by themselves. This is not Islam."

Across the Islamic world, mullahs great and small deliver fatwas on issues magisterial and trivial. In Jordan, a mullah issued one against Pokemon, a Japanese cartoon, declaring that it promoted polytheism and gambling. In Egypt, a cleric pronounced a fatwa against a television game show called "Who Will Win A Million," maintaining that it celebrated gambling. In Qatar, a mullah wrote out another banning the celebration of Valentine's Day because it was not an Islamic holy day.

Sometimes, fatwas clash with secular authority. On Jan. 1, two Bangladeshi High Court judges, including the country's first woman jurist, Nazmun Ara Sultan, ruled fatwas illegal. The court declared that a "fatwa means legal opinion, which means legal opinion of a lawful person or authority. The legal system in Bangladesh empowers only the courts to decide all questions relating to legal opinion on the Muslim and other laws in force."

The ruling provoked riots, and a leading cleric declared that, "Allah gave the right of giving fatwa through the holy Quran and thus it will remain as long as Islam is there."

Despite the court's decision, fatwas continued to trickle out of mosques in Bangladesh.

In Malaysia, a National Fatwa Council rules on the propriety of fatwas. When the clerics of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement called on Muslims to fight a jihad against the United States if it attacks Afghanistan, the Malaysian council intervened.

"The call for jihad is to the (Afghan) populace to defend the country. Therefore it is compulsory for Afghans to defend their country, but not for Muslims from other countries to get involved," council chairman Ismail Ibrahim declared.

"We can offer moral support and medical supplies as this is compulsory for us, regardless of whether they are Muslims or not," Ibrahim told the Malaysian daily New Straits Times. "However, as far as actual fighting is concerned, we should stay out of it."

At the same time, said one journalist here who writes extensively about militant Islam in Pakistan for a respected weekly magazine, many of the hardline clerics are issuing fatwas to extort money.

"I have a fatwa issued against me," he said, asking that his name not be used because he felt endangered by the hardliners. "I have to pay 5,000 rupees, or about $80, each month to a mullah who issued the fatwa or his thugs have been ordered to kill me."

The enforcers, he said, were the members of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a militant group that conducts attacks in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

October 7, 2001