Imams from UK negotiating with terrorists

The BBC has a [profile](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3689172.stm) of the two representatives of the British Muslim community who have gone to Iraq to negotiate with the terrorists holding Ken Bigley hostage. It has been asked whether their word will cut any ice with these people, and my answer is: probably not.

I don’t know much about Daud Abdullah, but Dr Musharraf Hussain is a Hanafi from Nottingham, and is known to be of the Bareilawi persuasion. His shaikh was Muhammad Karam Shah who was a very well-respected imam in Pakistan, and another of his students is Muhammad Imdad Hussain Pirzada who runs an Islamic school, Jamia al-Karam, in Retford near Nottingham. Of course, people of this persuasion are strongly pro-Sufi as well, they support Mawlid and Tawassul … in other words they are rock-solid Ahlus-Sunnah.

As for who is holding these hostages, the likely answer is either Ba’athists, or renegade Wahhabis, or some other extremists who don’t respect the normal Islamic rulings on these matters, nor those who give them. If you say “Ya Rasoolullah” (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam), some of them don’t regard you as a Muslim; if you follow a madhhab or celebrate the Mawlid, you’re a heretic. One wonders if they will ask the two imams about their aqida before listening to their fatwa on hostage taking? Of course, there is nothing wrong with these imams enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong, as the Sahaba did with the original Kharijites, but remember that a lot of the Kharijites didn’t listen.