Dr. Abdulrahman Al-Shalash

Al-Jazeera

 

Late Sheikh Muhammad Bin Othaimeen was once asked about the position of Shariah on men who go to fight overseas without taking the permission of their country’s ruler. “Anyone who goes for jihad on his own will have disobeyed the ruler,” replied Bin Othaimeen. This proves that participation in wars overseas without proper permission is a sin. Sheikh Salih Al-Fawzan maintains the same opinion in all his answers to similar questions. One of the his replies was: “He who disobeys the ruler and his parents is not considered a jihadist but a sinner.”



The ruler of our country is the King and in some countries it is the emir, sultan or president but not the emir of a terrorist group or the head of a terrorist gang. There is a consensus among Muslims scholars on this important fact, a fact which clearly states that those who have left their countries to participate in fights or to kill themselves are sinners. Sheikh Al-Fawzan does not consider them to be martyrs.



They have sinned because of their ill intentions. Over the past few years, many people who have been brainwashed have been searching for ways to travel to foreign conflict zones. One way is traveling to another country and then joining a terrorist group. Some of these people have even bribed border control personnel in these countries in order to let them pass. Paying a bribe is a sin in Islam, and by doing so, they have violated Shariah.



A group of young men, who fought as jihadists abroad and then returned to the Kingdom, confessed to authorities that they carried fake passports while some of them used the passports of their brothers. In a recent televised interview, one of them said he used his cousin’s passport to travel and his brother, who died in Syria, used another person’s passport.



The question is what were those young men thinking when they decided to go for jihad using fake passports and violating Shariah? Did they not know that they were disobeying the ruler and their parents? How could they expect to get a reward from Allah for doing so and how could they think that they would go to Paradise in the company of true martyrs when they had committed these sins?



I am quite certain that those young men and others who followed in their footsteps do not have sound minds or they would have realized that they were making a mistake. They were simply like puppets who received orders and implemented the orders without hesitation or any form of thinking. If they had a shred of logic in their minds, they would not have left their families to fight alongside groups whose real goals they knew nothing about.