{"id":2296,"date":"2009-12-27T18:35:19","date_gmt":"2009-12-27T18:35:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2009\/12\/27\/anwar_al-awlaki_trauma_and_extremism"},"modified":"2009-12-28T10:43:56","modified_gmt":"2009-12-28T10:43:56","slug":"anwar_al-awlaki_trauma_and_extremism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2009\/12\/27\/anwar_al-awlaki_trauma_and_extremism","title":{"rendered":"Anwar al-Awlaki: trauma and extremism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently we heard that the Yemeni-American Muslim preacher, Anwar al-Awlaki, may have died in air strikes in Yemen, although other reports said he was miles away from where the strikes happened and was safe.  Some people said &#8220;good riddance&#8221;, including <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mujahideenryder.net\/2009\/12\/24\/dozens-killed-in-yemen-air-strike-on-al-qaeda-suspects-al-awlaki-may-have-been-amongst-them\/\">some commenters<\/a> on the &#8220;Muhajideen Ryder&#8221; blog.  This provoked a predictable flurry of acrimony.  (More: <a href=\"http:\/\/ginnysthoughts.wordpress.com\/2009\/12\/27\/on-anwar-al-awlaki\/\">Ginny<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>For my part, I&#8217;ve never listened to Awlaki&#8217;s lectures, since I&#8217;ve maintained a strict policy of taking knowledge only from reputable Sunni scholars whose own teachers are well-known, i.e. not those with dubious scholarly credentials.  I don&#8217;t want a repeat of my experience of repeating things I heard from a certain London-based preacher and finding out that they were nonsense.  Still, he was known as a moderate even after 9\/11, but since his imprisonment in Yemen from 2006 to 2007, his pronouncements have taken on a rather extreme quality, as typified in his &#8220;Nidal Hasan is a hero&#8221; blog post last month.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think we should be celebrating even if Awlaki has died.  This is not, after all, a mass murderer.  We should not be falling over ourselves to excuse his positions on grounds of <em>al-wala w&#8217;al-bara<\/em> or anything else when he embarrasses us with a stupid diatribe at a sensitive time, i.e. after a Muslim has sprayed bullets around an army base.  His change in position may well be the result of his experiences in prison, in which case we might have a little understanding, but his words should in no way be taken as guidance and we should not be struggling to defend them in public.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently we heard that the Yemeni-American Muslim preacher, Anwar al-Awlaki, may have died in air strikes in Yemen, although other reports said he was miles away from where the strikes happened and was safe.&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-extremism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-B2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2296"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2297,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296\/revisions\/2297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}