A blind Islamic cleric died last month after spending over 20 years in an American prison, most of them in solitary confinement. What did Omar Abdel Rahman do? What motivated him?
‘America an enemy of Islam’
Abdel Rahman was found guilty of trying to wage “a war of urban terrorism” against the US and of plotting to kill Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. He was convicted under a rarely used “Civil War-era seditious conspiracy charge”, the New York Times reported then.
The blind sheikh described the trial as “an attack on the words of God” and called the US “an enemy of Islam”. But don’t all religions preach peace? Was Abdel Rahman unaware of the nature of Islamic doctrine?
PhD in Quran interpretation
Sent to a school for the blind, he “excelled”, memorising the Quran by the age of 11. He became an Islamic scholar completing his doctorate in Quranic interpretation at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the world’s premier center of Islamic learning
ISIS cleric?
Yale academic Graeme Wood called him an “ISIS cleric before there was an ISIS”. So it is perilous to ignore the role played by ideology. In studying the works of IS and its supporters, we see a coherent view of the world rooted in a minority interpretation of Islamic scripture, that has existed for as long as the religion itself, Wood writes
The IS supporters’ confidence in their own righteousness gets stronger when they are told—often by enemies who have never bothered to examine their claims—that they know nothing about their religion, when they often know a great deal (often more than their critics) about scripture, law and theology, if not about the basic humane virtues that most Muslims consider central to their faith