My alienation from FOSIS, and from the Islamic movement, centred around the question of absolute certainty. Doubts arose when The Muslim published the ‘unanimous verdict of the Pakistani ulema’ – a fatwa – that socialism is kufr (unbelief) and that ‘any help rendered to a socialist is haram’ (forbidden). The word kufr literally means ‘obliterating, covering’ or ‘concealing benefits received’ or being ‘ungrateful to God’. But in contemporary parlance kufr has also come to signify ‘the enemy’ and the term is often used to differentiate ‘Us’ from ‘Them’; to divide the world into two perpetually
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