Can you hear me now?

Demonstrator, Islamabad, Pakistan.

We'll stop believing this is plain vanilla "Muslim" thinking when we see condemnation of this sign, and its sentiments wherever expressed, from:

• Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani (a Shia), Iraq;
• The Committee of Muslim Scholars (the main Sunni Arab religious authority), Iraq;
• Sheikh Akrama Tzabari, Mufti of Jerusalem;
• Abdul Aziz al-Asheikh, Grand Mufti of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and President of the Committee of Major Scholars and the Centre for Knowledge Based Research and Verdicts;
• Dr. Muhammad Sayid Tantawy, Grand Imam and head of The Supreme Council of Al Azhar Al-Sharef Islamic Research Academy, Egypt; and
• Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran.

We think it fair to expect some effort on the part of Muslim leaders to act thus, given the extent of the violence that has occurred during The Great Cartoon Controversy and the obviously generally deteriorated relations between Islam and the rest of the world.

We select these men in the belief that they are major religious authorities either within important Muslim communities or nations, within the ummah itself, within Dar al-Islam, within Dar Al-Harb, or all of these. What they say would logically be deemed of great importance to significant Muslim communities or all Muslims, as the case may be.

We do not expect a condemnation of just this picture but a condemnation of all the wild and crazy signs recently carried by Muslim demonstrators around the world during the great "We can bait and kill you and consider you on a par with pigs and excrement but don't dare publish any cartoons about Mohammed" controversy.

We also expect a condemnation of the garbage spilling from the mouth of Sheikh Ibrahim Medeiris, on Palestinian Authority TV, on May 13, 2005 (kill the Jews, we will rule the world, etc.).

We say we expect condemnation. Which is to say, we think that if there were a will to ameliorate the hostility between Dar-Al-Harb and Dar Al-Islam -- now increasingly mutual rather than just one-sided -- we expect there would be evidence of a coordinated housecleaning in the doctrinal house of the ummah and that it would be logical, in fact inevitable, that these men would be at the forefront of such an effort. (Ok. Ok. It's stupid to think that the senior Iranian clerk would declare support for Hitler to be contrary to Islam.)

There is no impediment to any of these Islamic religious leaders pronouncing on a Pakistani matter (or any other) as

• Abdul Aziz al-Asheikh has declared himself on terrorist attacks in New York and jihad in Iraq;
• Ayatollah Khomeini condemned Salman Rushdie to death when he was not living in Iran;
• the Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Akrama Tzabari authorized the execution by the Palestinian Authority of 15 Arabs accused of working with Israel; and
• the Sheikh 'Ali Mo'allim Hussento, President, Board of Ulema', Italian Muslim Association, Italy concerning Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam).

These were and are pronouncements on matters of interest to these eminent persons that were not talking place in their own country.^[1]

Nor is the incident too trivial for his attention as he has denounced women appearing unveiled at the 2004 Jeddah Economic Forum and mixing with men.

To his credit, in February 2005 Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Asheikh condemned terrorism and said it must be combated it at all level. Among the crimes of terrorists he mentioned were:

• accusing Muslims and leaders of being infidels;
• calling for a fight against Muslims; and
• killing non-Muslim expatriates living in Saudi Arabia.

We'll temper our enthusiasm for such healthy pronouncements, given that there are disturbing contradictory pronouncements by, for example, the same mufti, who declared in 2001 after 9/11:

That these matters that have taken place in the United States and whatever else is of their [the?] nature of plane hijackings and taking people hostage or killing innocent people, without a just cause, this is nothing but a manifestation of injustice, oppression and tyranny, which the Islamic Sharee'ah does not sanction or accept, rather it is expressly forbidden and it is amongst the greatest of sins.^[2]

We are hardly reassured when it may clearly be inferred from the above that flying airliners into buildings like the World Trade Center, non-suicide airliner hijackings, and hostage taking are acceptable under the sharia with a just cause.

It may be a useless effort to try to keep track of various jurisprudential pronouncements. We don't know who keeps score in these matters and we are willing to try to do so ourselves, since accountability is not a concept that leaps to mind when considering the sharia and the pronouncements of its adherents. Far be it for us to be the ones to go looking for it.

Nor are consistency and respect for jurisdiction the hallmarks of day-to-day sharia administration. Certainly there is no grand body of Islam that bothers to enforce consistency. Multiple schools of interpretation exist and all of the sharia is founded on a book and associated commentaries that, to our eye, resemble gibbberish and are random, internally inconsistent pronouncements on even matters of major importance. E.g., no compulsion in religion v. death to apostates. No compulsion to sign up for Islam just world class harassment and abuse if you don't. E.g., Death unless you accept dhimmitude, jizyah tax, etc.

It is not for us to dive into the Thicket of Fiqh. That is for the muftis and imams to do.

Unfortunately, it will be a long wait before anything is done to analyze, harmonize, and systematize the sharia such as is done routinely in American law by the West Publishing Company; the Lawyers Co-Op Publishing Company; a host of high-quality law reviews, bar journals, and other commentaries; and the federal and state codifiers of statutes; among others.

The reason for this remarkable lack of interest in analysis and harmonizing can be found in pronouncements such as this by King Abdul Aziz (Ibn Saud) on May 11, 1929:

They call us the "Wahhabis" . . . . We are not proclaiming a new creed or a new dogma. Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab did not come with anything new. Our creed is the creed of those good people who preceded us and which came in the Book of God (the Qur'an) as well as that of his Messenger (the prophet Muhammad, prayer and peace be upon him).

This is the teaching of Sheikh al-Islam Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, and it is our creed. It is a creed built on the oneness of the Almighty God, totally for His sake, and it is divorced from any ills or false innovation.^[3]

There it is. NO INNOVATION. And, lemme guess, the guy who gets to say "Innovation!" gets to say "Blasphemy!" too.

Notes
^[1] From what we can understand so far, there is no concept of a religious jurisdiction within which any imam or mufti cannot rule. We seem to recall that only a conflict between extraterritorial fatwas or between an extraterritorial one and a local one requires some kind of after-the-fact reconciliation procedure.
^[2] The Mufti of Saudi Arabia on the Recent Terrorist Attacks In The USA, The Islam Page, undated.
^[3] "Teachings of Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab." The Saudi Arabia Information Resource, undated.