For example, after the 9/11, the former JI Amir Qazi Hussain Ahmad stated that al-Qaeda was a figment of the Americans’ imagination. On the contrary, the then JI Secretary General Syed Munawar Hassan, the current chief of the party, said that al-Qaeda leaders were our brethren (Nawa-i-Waqt, October 13, 2002). Commenting on these statements, Prof. Ahmad said: ‘There is no contradiction between the two. The Muslims in al-Qaeda are our brethren. They should be punished if they are criminals!’ He sounded mightily reluctant to hold Al-Qaeda responsible for 9/11. He even refused to give any credence to Gulbadeen Hikmatyar’s statement that Al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11. (It may be added here that Hikmatyar is Jamaat-i-Islami’s favorite Afghan leader.) Instead, he finds “dozens of scholarly books” casting doubt on the official version more credible.
He justified the two-nation theory saying, the Hindus and the Muslims coexisted peacefully only under the Muslim rule and such an existence was otherwise impossible. ‘The colonial rule divided the Hindus and the Muslims…that resulted in the 1947 riots!’ He admitted that during the last 15-20 years, the Pakistani society had become increasingly intolerant. He conceded that the blasphemy laws were being misused, but he did not favor amending them. ‘The punishment for blasphemy is death – in Christianity, the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Quran and the precepts of the Holy Prophet Mohammad.’ The blasphemy does not apply to serious academic debate, he said. ‘It applies only to derogatory remarks.’ He dismissed the argument that the Barelvis consider the Deobandis and the Ahl-i-Hadith blasphemers. On the Kashmir jihad, Prof. Ahmad said that the JI has no organizational relationship with the Hizbul Mujahideen. ‘But of course, we do meet and whatever the Hizb is doing, it is its fundamental right.’ The JI India and JI Pakistan have different ideas on certain issues such as Kashmir though the source of inspiration for them was the same. He justified it saying that they became different and independent organization after the partition because the political situation had changed. He said that Israel was an illegitimate country, but did not support the annihilation of the Israeli Jews. In fact, he supported the idea of a single state in which the Jews and the Palestinians live together. He acknowledged that the US and NATO played some positive role in the Balkans, but they allowed the massacre of the Muslims to continue. Their intervention was aimed at preventing the revival of Islamic movements there
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