A Major Victory for Karzai -- The Ulema Shura [Council of Clerics] Acts

The Telegraph reports:

A crowd of 600 Afghan clerics gathered in front of an historic mosque yesterday to strip the fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar of his claim to religious authority, in a ceremony that provided a significant boost to the presidency of Hamid Karzai.

The declaration, signed by 1,000 clerics from across the country, is an endorsement of the US-backed programme of reconciliation with more moderate elements of the Taliban movement that Karzai has been pursuing ahead of the country's first parliamentary elections, due in September.

This is the same body that in 1996 had invested Muhammed Omar with clerical authority. Now they have taken it away from him. What is more:

With the assembled clerics seated on the marble floor before him, the head of shura, Maulvi Abdullah Fayaz, said: "Karzai is elected through free and fair election and religiously we have to obey his orders. None of the orders of the previous Emirs, including Mullah Omar, is accepted."

He said that following the Taliban, "accepting their orders and through their orders killing people and destabilising the country", was "against sharia law".

This is huge. The shura has given Karzai the legitimacy he needs to rule Afghanistan effectively. Once again, as in Iraq, we see religious leaders coming to the fore in times of crisis to provide moderate leadership.

But at the same time the clerics took a strong stand against liberalism.

The clerics demanded the construction of hundreds of religious schools, a prohibition of drugs, alcohol and "sexual films" and a call for women's rights to remain within the limits of sharia law.

This has to trouble some here in the West, expecially the limits on women's rights. And there were some bizarre aspects to the whole thing.

The shura also called for the arrest of Newsweek staff responsible for an article claiming that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay flushed a copy of the Koran down a lavatory, if it proved to be untrue.

This raises the question, especially pertinent now at a time when even justices of the Supreme Court are looking to other countries for legal guidance, should we, in the interests of international peace and justice, and as an expression of our sympathy for Islamic values, turn Michael Isikoff over to Afghan authorities for trial in Islamic courts?

Hmmmm.... gotta think about that one.

Read the story here.