Mar. 2 2010 - 12:25 pm

Can somebody give me a hallelujah? Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri (pictured), the leader of Minhaj-ul-Quran, a global Muslim group that is said to have hundreds of thousands of followers, issued a fatwa on Tuesday. By now, we’ve come to expect that such religious edicts will call for the killing of some novelist or cartoonist who has supposedly besmirched the Koran, but Tahir-ul-Qadri has quite a different target in mind: terrorism.

Specifically, he wants to put an end to suicide bombings:

Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a former Pakistani lawmaker, says the 600-page fatwa bans suicide bombing “without any excuses, any pretexts, or exceptions.”

While one applauds his stand against violence, the use of a fatwa to achieve one’s social and political aims leaves a lot to be desired. After all, with so many conflicting fatwas flying around–one that commands killing versus one that forbids it–how is the layperson supposed to figure out which carries the true moral authority of Koranic wisdom?