Seriously.
I saw this *New York Tomes * article, “Opium Harvest at Record Level in Afghanistan” According to a UN official, rebel elments of the Taliban and the opium farmers in the south have united to vastly boost opium production.
I’m curious if there would be any religious stumbling blocks to making such an alliance. Is it ok to encourage your enemies to bad bahavior so long as you don’t indulge?
OK, OK - I’ll bite. What did he say?
Oh, you said seriously. But there’s got to be a punchline here…
I seem to recall the Prophet saying that Jihad was okay.
I don’t recall him actually saying how it was to be done.
There’s nothing in the Qur’an about keef, therefore some Ottoman ‘ulama’ (Islamic law scholars) of the Hanafi school ruled that hashish is allowed. Only wine is specifically prohibited in the Qur’an. Opium, though, I don’t know about. I always thought it was ruled haram (forbidden) in Islamic law and I never heard of any exceptions to that.
I have my local Pakistani Muslim friend above my shoulder. He says there is NO EXCEPTION when it comes to Opium. It is not allowed. I am quoting him as I am typing this:
The Koran allows nothing that harms the body. He also states that Hashish is not allowed in Islam. The thing is is not allowed. If they are harvesting opium, it is wrong. Why is the Taliban doing it? I don’t know. If they are trying to make it as a source to buy weapons, it is wrong and not allowed. Basically you are killing human beings with opium, whether using it or harvesting. There is no legal purpose to opium, whether it is spiritual or not.
For the warlords, opium is about money first, and the possible destruction of the infidel is probably second.
IIRC “If a gallon will make you drunk, then one drop is forbidden.” . I once objected to the depiction a Muslim drinking mead (fermented honey) in The 13th Warrior. I was told that mead is not explicitly prohibited, though it does fall under the general ban on intoxicants. If the ban only explicitly mentions liquid, then some Muslims will use the technicality that hashish is not drunk, but smoked. As FormerMarineGuy says, a less semantic reading is that hashish is an intoxicant, and is forbidden.
Some of their beliefs are different than ours, but money talks EVERYWHERE.
Although, if this surplus translates into street prices, woo hoo! What a great time to be a junkie!
Obviously, that was sarcastic…
But seriously- the surplus crop has overshot world opium demand by 1/3? And that’s just what is grown in Afghanistan? Now, that’s farming! 
I wonder if some imams have allowed certain loopholes for immoral and/or illegal actions (such as opium production) if it’s in the service of Islam or for the enrichment or protection of Muslims at the expense of “infidels”. The same rationale exists for many (if not all) Muslims for a permissible form lying and doublespeak known as “taqiyya,” which is lying or dissimulating to infidels for the protection or benefit of Muslims.
Regardless, opium production is said to be up by 59% in Afghanistan this year, and as we all know the Afghans are a very religious people, so clearly something’s up.
I see serious problems with this as worded. What if “benefit to Muslims” means more profit would accrue to a Muslim-owned firm if they cheated in business? Would Islamic law sanction that?
During the time of the early caliphate, a Jew sued the fourth Caliph, ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib (the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law), over some disputed property–and won. I’ve heard this story cited as an example of how justice is supposed to be impartial in Islamic law, including regarding infidels.
The only version of taqiyah I’ve heard Muslims themselves cop to that it’s permissible to deny Islam and pretend to be non-Muslim if it’s necessary to save your life in a situation where otherwise you’d get killed for being Muslim. This is a very restricted level of lying. May I ask for a cite for your expanded interpretation–a cite from a primary source in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), not an Islamophobic web site, please?
Oh, and speaking of cites, I googled for hours to find a source for the Ottoman fatwa permitting hashish, but it never made it online, or at least not within Google’s crawl. I read it in a printed book years ago, wish I could remember the title, sorry. Oh, and FYI there’s a chapter titled “A Note on the Use of Wine, Hemp, & Opium” in the book Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy by Peter Lamborn Wilson, which has lots of titillation for Muslim intellects with a taste for matters dirty, decadent, and débauché.
I forgot to mention- I spent a year in Afghanistan as a soldier. I think there’s a misconception about Islam here; the belief that every asshole in the region is a “good” Muslim. Remember- a billion Muslims did NOT act like assholes today. Only a handful did. Most of them are everyday folks just trying to keep their families fed. I taught a Muslim how to brew his own Mead. He was tired of the high prices for booze in Kabul. Yes, drinking is forbidden…but how many Christians and Jews do things their bible tells them not to? Here in Austin, I met a car dealer from Iran. He’s an atheist. Can’t stand religion. He says it has caused more harm than good. Most Muslims are just like us; some are nice, some are assholes, some are criminals.
I have a muslim friend who has insisted, at length and with passion, that according to the religion she was taught, alcohol is forbidden, but marijuana is okay. I take it opium is probably okay as well.
I do not know details about which sect of Islam she is an adherent to.
-FrL-
I’m sure you’re right about the conservative, narrow definition of taqiyya being limited to preventing
. However, what casual Googling reveals is that taqiyya/taqqiya/taqiya turns up all over the place, including a lot of western-run “islamophobic” sites in English in which people, many of whom logged in under Arabic names, discuss the meaning and application of the word. And they’re not restricting their arguments to what’s sanctioned by high-level sources of Islamic clerical reasoning or jurisprudence.
Which brings me to my point, that your insistence on going by erudite sources (“fiqh”) elides the real-world possibility that a commonly-held belief or meme in the Islamic world can and will be latched onto by many Muslims as a rationale for a behavior, whether or not all the grand high poobahs agree with that interpretation or not. That’s the famously non-hierarchical, no one central authority on doctrine, open-source nature of Islam; it doesn’t have an equivalent of the Vatican. It also doesn’t matter what the highest clerics say; as long as one imam somewhere will issue the necessary permission or fatwah, you’re free to act accordingly.
Here’s an example of what I mean: a couple of years back, a high-level Al-Queda operative secured advance permission by an Egyptian Sunni cleric (a really notorious firebrand “infidel”-hater) for acts of nuclear terrorism against the West (or maybe it was more narrowly limited to acts of nuclear terrorism against the United States and/or Israel; as if it really matters in any moral or ethical sense.) Point being, a number of very high-level imams can deplore this and declare it un-Islamic, etc. etc., but it’s all water under the bridge, as far as the terrorists are concerned. They found a friendly cleric to issue them a “get out of hell free” card and they’re running with it.
As for the [hundreds of thousands? million-+?] Afghans currently imbricated in the opium trade – what do you think is more likely, that all of these impoverished farmers are engaged in activity that they believe offends their god and risks serious punishment in the afterlife, OR that at least a few of the local imams have quietly given them permission to grow poppies so long as they do not deliberately try to push it on fellow Muslims?
And can you show me a cite proving that no Muslims ever take advantage of local interpretation or the non-hierarchical nature of Islamic theology to do essentially as they please, so long as one imam somewhere may be said to sanction it?
(bolding mine)
What about the production of morphine for legal medical use?
Yeah- they are poor and starving. I heard a report on CBS radio yesterday that many of the new farmers in the last few years are widows who have lost husbands and sons in the wars and turned to opium farming as the last way to make enough money to survive.
And it’s not just opium. When my brother came back from his tour of duty in Afghanistan, he had pictures of pot plants so big, it would make the best High Times centerfold look like a burnt roach in an ashtray.
Why didn’t the American military do something about it? Way outside of our jurisdiction.
I’ve also heard that it’s because they don’t want to make Afghanistan’s meager economy crash. Illegal drugs are such a huge part of it it that it could collapse with a serious eradication program.
Hakim Bey* wrote a great essay, “The Utopian Blues,” about why the musician is so often a “lowdown” figure in “‘high’ cultures.”
http://www.gyw.com/hakimbey/utoBlues.html
and says:
“In the Levant, Turkish sufi music leaked out of the tekkes and into the taverns, mixed with Greek and other Mediterranean influences, and produced the wonderful genre of Rembetica, with its witty odes to whores, hashish, wine and cocaine.”
When I was a kid, I listened to Rembetiko music from Greece with no idea of its background… In those days the LP sleeves hinted at low-life origins of the music, but were too middle-class polite to attribute it to whorehouses. The same attacks were made on ragtime, blues, and early jazz by the snooty white musical establishment–before all those African-American musics were finally incorporated into the establishment, years after their creators were dead.
I don’t remember any hashish songs in the rembetiko records I heard as a kid, but the stuff available back then must have been somewhat sanitized for the middle-class customers. Just to note that it was Turkish Muslims who got Greek Christians to smoke hashish and sing songs about it. Like in the movie Mediterraneo, except for that movie’s anti-Turkish prejudice. This Turk shows up on a Greek island, gets the Italians stoned on hashish, and steals their boat while they’re sleeping it off. The Greek priest goes, “I told you–Do not trust the Turks!” Um, dude, that ain’t nice.
*Hakim Bey (open secret) is the other name of Peter Lamborn Wilson, anarchist provocateur.