Nadia Murad Bansee Taha at the state parliament in Hanover, Germany, 31 May 2016. Photo: Julian Stratenschulte/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

Yazidi activist and ISIS survivor Nadia Murad has been named this year’s Nobel peace prize winner, along with Congolese gynecologist Denis Mukwege, for their efforts to end sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.

Nadia endured more than three months in ISIS captivity after her village, Kocho, was overrun by militants on 3 August 2014. Troops from the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) Peshmerga had left their positions all over the mainly Yazidi area of Mount Sinjar, in northern Iraq, to defend the city of Duhok after the fall of Mosul that June.

Her mother is believed to be buried in one of the mass graves found close to her village after it was retaken by the Peshmerga; she also lost brothers, sisters and nephews. Nadia’s niece, “sister and soulmate” was killed by a landmine whilst making her own daring escape from ISIS in 2016. Nadia took her passing particularly badly; by then she was safely ensconced in Germany and already advocating for rescues and aid.

Of the 331 individuals and organisations nominated for the Nobel peace prize this year, Nadia is absolutely the most deserved winner. I will freely admit my bias here: I met her first in the summer of 2015, during a trip to the UK with the AMAR Foundation. On this visit, she met the late Sue Lloyd-Roberts, whose last Newsnight dispatch before she passed away featured Nadia and two other ISIS survivors (all anonymously).

Yazidism, prior to the 2014 genocide, expelled those who had any sexual contact with non-Yazidis. Baba Sheikh, the religions patriarch, changed this when he said that those who had been in ISIS captivity should be honoured as “holy women”. This was hugely significant, removing some of the shame of speaking out about sexual violence and ensuring that ‘returnees’ were supported by their community.

In London, members of the Yazidi diaspora made long journeys from all over the UK to greet and honour Nadia and the two other girls, bringing small gifts, food and flowers. There was (almost) as much kissing and laugher as there were tears.

When Nadia talked, activists Ahmed Khuddiha and Mahar Nawaf and I struggled to retain the composure she kept throughout. Dressed entirely in black, she showed me scars still visible on her skin. Over the past four years, colour has slowly crept into her wardrobe and many of these wounds will have healed. But the toll of telling and retelling her story has left its own kind of mark.

Colour has slowly crept into her wardrobe and many of these wounds will have healed. But the toll of telling and retelling her story has left its own kind of mark.

Speaking out, Nadia explained that first day, is her way of fighting back. For her community, she has told her story again and again, expecting that assistance will follow. With notable exceptions including Germany’s Baden-Wuttenberg programme, that support remains largely elusive, inadequate, or in some cases, misdirected.

Inspired by meeting the survivors, I worked with Change.org and the brilliant Yazidi activist Rozin Khahil, a 17-year-old living in the UK, and in the middle of her A-levels at the time, to ask Theresa May, then Home Secretary, to help rescue 3,000 others still in captivity.

From Yazda activists, I received lists of missing people, including phone numbers (some of which still rang), and information about where they were being held. Yazda had shared this information with officials in Kurdistan, Iraq, the US and the UK, but no rescue missions were launched. They gave it to me in desperation, and I joined long email and whatsapp chains where people exchanged pictures of the missing and dead.

The advocacy and activism of Yazidi people in Iraq, and the diaspora, managed to free hundreds of those captured. In Duhok in late 2015, I visited camps where those freed from captivity lived, along with those displaced by the war. Conditions were appalling. I heard harrowing stories of sexual violence, torture and mass murder.

A woman stands in the Sharya refugee camp near the Northern Iraqi city of Dohuk, Iraq, October 2015. Photo: Stefanie Järkel/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

The only groups I saw providing aid in the camps – a year after the genocide – were the United Nations and the Germans. The UK Foreign Office told me at the time that our government was giving “support to all victims and vulnerable persons, including Yazidis, rather than specifically to Yazidis or any other group”.

Though the Yazidis had been singled out by ISIS as a minority ethnic group, efforts to help them from the UK did not. The same sectarianism and discrimination that the Yazidis experienced in war, and had experienced in Kurdistan for generations, was also evident in approaches to assist them in the aftermath of genocide.

The UK gave to a pooled UN humanitarian fund, and said it supported sexual violence awareness projects in the region – but couldn’t give me many details, due to safety issues of local partners.

The same sectarianism and discrimination that the Yazidis experienced in war, and had experienced in Kurdistan for generations, was also evident in approaches to assist them in the aftermath of genocide.

Many Yazidis believe that money intended for them was siphoned off by the KRG to pay for the costly war their Peshmerga troops were, at the time, still losing. The PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) then consolidated their position in Sinjar, and took many Yazidis recruits within the ranks of their Syrian affiliate, the YPG. Some of these included ISIS escapees, to more tabloid fanfare.

Nadia’s resolve and furious eloquence in sharing her story soon turned her into a spokesperson of her Yazidi people. In 2016, at just 23, she was named the UN’s first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking. She has been lauded by politicians and supported by celebrities – notably Amal Clooney, who wrote a moving forward to Nadia’s recently-published book, The Last Girl.

Nadia Murad with her book The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State, 2017. Photo: Luiz Rampelotto/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

When we met again in 2016, when Nadia spoke at the UK House of Commons at the invitation of MP Brendan O’Hara, she was being showered with gifts.
As she became more famous, her story and that of the Yazidi genocide in general became easier for me to pitch to editors. But her message, in my mind, began to get lost. The terminology used to describe her – sex slave, ISIS hostage, sexual violence victim – was muddy and de-emphasised her and other survivors’ heroism.

What was lost was the reason that survivors spoke up: their wider concern for their community. Each of the escapees I met all conveyed this very clearly. They had made a simple calculation, waging that telling their story would help their families. Despite the intense personal toll, they persisted.

But instead of the stories of heroism in escaping ISIS captivity, the media focus shifted to the forms of sexual torture they had endured. As a feminist and a freelance journalist, newly let loose from the comforts of the newsroom, I found this disempowering in so many ways.

I had so much information I was expected to hand over to big-name media partners I knew well enough not to trust. Relationships I spent months building, with people I cared about, I was expected to hand over for a pat on the head and a day rate. I knew they wanted to make sexual victimhood horror stories and I felt complicit. If I couldn’t see the impact, what was the point? By that stage, no one could say they ‘didn’t know’.

If I couldn’t see the impact, what was the point? By that stage, no one could say they ‘didn’t know’.

A low point was discussing a potential documentary with a male commissioner who insisted that Nadia (still maintaining her anonymity at the time) and the other girls would have to show their faces whilst detailing their experiences of sexual violence.

Otherwise, he insisted, we’d be denying viewers “anything to look at.” We discussed videos of sexual assaults I had heard that ISIS fighters were sharing. I got home and decided this wasn’t a search I wanted to undertake. I didn’t get commissioned.

I eventually stepped back, but Nadia kept on going, writing her book, meeting Hillary Clinton when she seemed about to be the first female US president, touring the world advocating on behalf of victims everywhere including meeting Boko Haram survivors. All whilst learning English and German and, earlier this year, getting engaged.

Like other Yazidi survivors I met, Nadia considers herself lucky. She talked more about what happened to her family and her community, than what happened to herself. She was in captivity for far less time than other girls, she would say. She’s safe and well in Germany; she has many nice things. I wasn’t to worry about her; there were many others.  

Her Nobel peace prize deserves to be celebrated, but it cannot make up for the serious lack of international commitment to her cause. The tacit deal she made with us – with me, as with every journalist she spoke to – has been broken by our collective inaction.

Help to find those missing is still needed. Resettlement programmes must be supported along with adequate aid and meaningful education facilities in camps; medical treatment for the displaced, support for those who want to return to Sinjar; and some kind of dignified identification of remains that still lie decaying in open air mass graves.

By telling her story so bravely, Nadia has done her part – again and again and again. Now it’s time for the international community to do theirs.

Lara Whyte is a reporter and award-winning documentary and news producer focusing on issues of youth, extremism and women’s rights. Originally from Belfast in northern Ireland, Lara is based in London. She is 50.50’s special projects editor working with our feminist investigative journalism fellows and tracking the backlash against sexual and reproductive rights. Find her on Twitter: @larawhyte.

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net
 

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The media coverage of the terrorist atrocities of Friday November 13, 2015 in Paris would seem to promote an almost mythical image of the Islamic State (ISIS). What humanity needs, however, is to demystify ISIS as a criminal organization. And that need is particularly important in my community – the Muslim community.

The vast majority of Muslims almost certainly (we do not have exact figures) feel moral revulsion and outrage about the violence perpetrated by ISIS. Indeed, Egypt’s top Sunni cleric, to name just one example, was quick to denounce the perpetrators of Friday’s “hideous and hateful” attacks. However, the truth of the matter is that ISIS leaders and supporters can and do draw on a wealth of scriptural and historical sources to justify their actions.

Traditional interpretations of Sharia, or Islamic law, approved aggressive jihad to propagate Islam. They permitted the killing of captive enemy men. They allowed jihadis to enslave enemy women and children, as ISIS did with the Yazidi women in Syria. I am a Muslim scholar of Sharia. It is my contention that ISIS' claim of Islamic legitimacy can be countered only by a viable alternative interpretation of Islamic law.

Consensus leading to deadlock
The key to understanding the role of Islam in politics is that there is no one authoritative entity that can establish or change Sharia doctrine for Muslims on any subject.

There is no equivalent of the Vatican and papal infallibility. How Sharia is interpreted by the many different communities of Muslims (from Sunni and Shia to Sufi and Salafi) is, at base, the product of an intergenerational consensus of the scholars and leaders of each community.
Islamic belief and practice is fundamentally individual and voluntary in its nature. A Muslim cannot be accountable for the views and actions of others.

One positive consequence of this absence of any one religious authority is the fact that it is possible to contest and reinterpret Sharia principles.

On the negative side, however, any Muslim can make any claim about Sharia if he or she can persuade a critical mass of Muslims to accept it.

 One example of this is how Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini used the doctrine of “wilayat al-faqih”(or guardianship of the jurist) to claim the authority to launch the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979.

This was controversial because in doing so, he went against the consensus that authority for such a decision resided in the person of the 12th and last “living” Shia Imam, who disappeared (but did not die) in 874 and, it is believed, will reappear at the end of time as al-Mahdi. A more recent example is the creation of ISIS by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his self-appointment as Caliph or successor of the Prophet Muhammed, divinely charged with resurrecting a state that ended 1,400 years ago.

Things changed in the 10th century
For the first 300 years of its existence, Islamic thought can be characterized as dynamic and creative, with differing interpretations of the scriptures being discussed and debated among communities and generations. Ijtihad, or independent juridical reasoning, was explicitly endorsed by the Prophet Muhammed.

Zainah Anwar, the executive director of Sisters in Islam. Albert Gea/Reuters

Some modern Muslims, like the Sisters in Islam organization in Malaysia, are exercising ijtihad today to promote the human rights of women from an Islamic perspective. To those, then, who accept the Sisters' interpretation, women are accorded equal rights according to Sharia.
But the Sisters and others like them are in a minority.

For the first 300 years of its existence, Islamic thought can be characterized as dynamic and creative, with differing interpretations of the scriptures being discussed and debated among communities and generations. Ijtihad, or independent juridical reasoning, was explicitly endorsed by the Prophet Muhammed.

By the 10th century, a highly sophisticated body of Sharia principles, methodologies and schools of thought had taken shape and put down roots among Muslim communities across the ancient world, from West Africa to Southeast Asia. This phenomenon came to be known as “closing the Gate of Ijtihad,” to indicate that there is no theological space for new creative juridical thinking.

There was, of course, no “Gate of Ijtihad” to be closed, and nobody had the authority to close the gate even if one had existed. The metaphor, however, highlighted the contrast between the cultivation of diversity in the first three centuries of Sharia and the stalemate and rigidity of the study of Islamic law since then.

The “silver lining” of ISIS is that it is forcing Muslims to confront the consequences of archaic interpretations of aggressive jihad.

Moving from Mecca to Medina
The Prophet Muhammad was born and raised in Mecca, a town in western Arabia, where he proclaimed Islam in AD 610. In AD 622 he had to move with a small group of his early followers to Medina, another town in Western Arabia, in order to escape persecution and threats to his life. This migration not only affected where the revelations were made to the prophet – a fact that is noted in the Quran. It also marked a shift in the content of the Quran.

ISIS' harsh and regressive interpretation of Sharia draws on the Quran of Medina, which repeatedly instructed Muslims to support each other and to separate themselves from non-Muslims.

For example, in verse 3:28 (and 4:144, 8:72-73, 9:23, 71 and 60:1M), Muslims are prohibited from taking unbelievers (pagan or polytheist) as friends and supporters. Instead, they are instructed to look to other Muslims for friendship and support.

The whole of Chapter 9 – which is among the last revelations – categorically sanctions and authorizes aggressive jihad against all non-Muslims, including People of the Book or Christians and Jews (verse 9:29).

Yes, the term jihad is used in the Quran to mean nonviolent efforts to propagate Islam (see verses 29:8, 31:15 and 47:31). But that does not change the fact that the same term was also used to mean aggressive war to propagate Islam.

This latter interpretation was, in fact, sanctioned by the actions and explicit instructions of the prophet himself, and by his most senior followers, who subsequently became his first four successors and the rulers or Caliphs of Medina.

Legitimate or illegitimate?
A related difficulty in this whole discussion is that according to Sharia, jihad can only be launched by a legitimate state authority.

ISIS claims to have Islamic legitimacy, but what is the basis of that secretive claim? Who nominated them, and why and how should the Caliph of ISIS have authority over the global Muslim community?

Since this authority is based on an entirely open and free process of individual choice, ISIS’ claim may succeed to the extent it is supported by a critical mass of Muslims.

The danger is that passive acquiescence can be used by ISIS leaders as evidence of positive support.

After all, only a handful of Muslim majority states – and then only under Western leadership – have shown willingness to resist the military expansion of ISIS.

Meanwhile, the masses of Muslims and their community leaders are not – tellingly – turning to Sharia to justify their opposition to ISIS claims. Many Muslims have condemned ISIS for moral or political reasons, but this, likely, is discredited among ISIS supporters as “Western” reasoning.

An alternative view
What then is needed is an alternative view of Sharia, one that argues that the scriptural sources that ISIS relies on must be seen in their wider historical context.

These principles, in other words, may have been relevant and applicable 1,400 years ago, when war – wherever it was being waged in the world – was much more harsh than it is now. Exclusive Muslim solidarity (wala’) then was essential for the survival of the community and success of their mission.
But today, the opposite is true.

Modern international law as stated in Article 2 of the Charter of the United Nations of 1945 (a universally binding treaty) affirms equal sovereignty of all states regardless of religious belief, and prohibits the acquisition of territory through aggressive war.

While these principles have been violated by the major powers – recent examples include the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine in 2014 – it is impossible for any state, including those with a Muslim majority, to accept being forced into a self-proclaimed Islamic state, as ISIS claims to have an Islamic mandate to do.

But for an alternative view of Sharia to emerge and take root through modern consensus, Muslims must first acknowledge and confront the problem of having acquiesced to a traditional interpretation of Sharia and ignored alternatives that would condemn ISIS as un-Islamic.

One place to start is with the writing of the Sudanese religious thinker Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who proposed repudiating the specific principles of Sharia authorizing aggressive jihad, slavery and subordination of women and non-Muslims by relying on the earlier revelations from Mecca. For example, verse 16:125 says: “Propagate the path of your Lord in wisdom and peaceable advice, and argue with them in a kind manner” (see also verses 17:70,49:13 and 88:21-22).

As Taha explained in his book The Second Message of Islam, the Sharia principles based on the Medina revelations came about in response to the historical conditions of seventh-century Arabia.

Taha argued that today it is the earlier message of Islam based on the Mecca revelations that is applicable because humanity is ready to live up to those standards.

Despite – or perhaps because of – the desperate need for alternatives to traditional Sharia interpretations, Taha was executed for apostasy in Sudan in 1985, and his books in Arabic continue to be banned in most Arab countries.

And ISIS continues to recruit.

The self-proclaimed Islamic State can survive only by fighting a permanent war. It is my contention that it will either implode or collapse in a total civil war because it has no viable political system for peaceful administration or transfer of power.

But whenever it collapses and for whatever cause, the world can only expect a new ISIS to emerge every time one disappears until we Muslims are able to discuss openly the deadlock in reforming Sharia.

(The author is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law, Emory University , USA; the piece appeared on November 16, 2015 on https://theconversation.com/how-islamic-law-can-take-on-isis-50113; we are grateful for the Creative Common license that allows its re-publication)
 

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