Somali Muslims who fail to perform daily prayers will be killed in accordance with Qur’anic law under a new edict issued by a leading cleric in the Islamic courts union that controls Mogadishu.
The requirement for Muslims to observe the five-times daily ritual under penalty of death was announced late on Wednesday and appears to confirm the hard-line nature of the increasingly powerful Sharia courts in the capital.
”He who does not perform prayers will be considered as infidel and Sharia law orders that that person be killed,” said Sheikh Abdalla Ali, a founder and high-ranking official in the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia.
”Sharia law orders the killing of any Muslim person when he fails to perform prayers,” he said in an address at the opening of a new Islamic court in Mogadishu’s southern Gubta neighbourhood.
Ali added that it was the duty of every Somali to implement the provisions of Sharia law, which when fully accepted would allow ”everybody to enjoy life based on peace and prosperity”.
It was not immediately clear who would enforce the regulation or how, but the courts have well-armed militias that routed a United States-backed alliance of warlords in June after four months of bloody battles for control of Mogadishu.
Members of such militia shot and killed two people in central Somalia late on Tuesday while quelling a protest against a ban on watching the World Cup at a local cinema, and have in the past been tasked with carrying out court rules.
Muslim militiamen have also presided at several public executions ordered by the Islamic courts in recent months and some Mogadishu residents have complained of harassment at their hands for not dressing properly.
The US supported the vanquished warlords in a bid to stem what US officials described as the ”creeping Talibanisation” of Somalia by the courts that Washington accuses of harbouring extremists, including al-Qaeda members.
The Islamists flatly reject the charges but have vowed to impose strict Sharia law across the overwhelmingly moderate Muslim country in what many see as a direct challenge to Somalia’s largely powerless transitional government.
The Islamic courts have signed a mutual recognition pact with the government and are due to meet with senior officials in it next week in Sudan, but remain at deep odds with the administration on several key issues.
Among them is the deployment of a foreign peacekeeping force to help the fledgling government restore a functioning central authority to Somalia, which has been in the throes of chaos for the past 16 years.
President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi are strong advocates of peacekeepers but the Islamists have vowed to resist and fight against any foreign troops on Somali soil.
On Wednesday, Yusuf and Gedi renewed appeals for an urgent deployment in talks with visiting Arab and African officials at the government seat in Baidoa, about 250km north-west of the capital.
The team of about 30 military experts and diplomats from the African Union, the Arab League and the east African Inter-Governmental Authority on Development was sent to assess conditions for a possible deployment.
The delegation was in Mogadishu on Thursday awaiting talks with Islamist officials, who are expected to reiterate their opposition to the peacekeeping mission that has been endorsed by the AU.
The Horn of Africa nation of about 10-million was plunged into anarchy with the 1991 ousting of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, whose fall ushered in more than a decade of lawlessness in which warlords ruled a patchwork of fiefdoms.
The Islamists now in control Mogadishu have moved to fill the power vacuum by restoring some order in areas they control. — AFP
