If the disbelievers besiege the mujahideen and threaten them with weapons of mass destruction if they do not surrender, should the Imam of the Muslims choose to surrender or continue fighting?

The questioner : If the Muslims engage in the prescribed jihad and their enemy threatens them?
Abu Layla : I have finished, my Shaykh, with the issue.

The Shaykh : Yes, exactly.

The questioner : And their enemy threatens them that if they continue fighting, the enemy will strike them with weapons of mass destruction that would annihilate them completely, like, for example, a nuclear bomb and things like that?

The Shaykh: Yes.

The questioner : What is the obligation of the Muslim ruler in this situation?

The Shaykh : First, your question is, I mean, hypothetical and not realistic. The reason, unfortunately, is that there is no Muslim ruler. And second, we say that regarding any question of this type, considering that, praise be to Allah, we belong to the Salaf and we take pride when we say we are Salafis, and from the methodology of the Salaf is that when a scholar from them was asked a question that could potentially occur, he would hasten to direct the questioner to:The questioner : “Has this issue occurred?” He would say: “No.” He would say to him: “Wait until it occurs, and when it occurs, you will find someone to give you a ruling.” The reason for this is of the utmost scientific precision. This is the school of thought, and if the jurists had adhered to it, they would not have fallen into problems. They would imagine matters and then answer them, imagination upon imagination. And I started in my time with an answer that I considered a joke, but then I clung to it because I liked it. A questioner asked meThe questioner : a question, and I found it to be of this type or of this nature. I said, “My brother, this is not a realistic issue; this is a hypothesis.” He insisted on the question, so I thought and answered him, saying, “It is permissible, hypothetically, or it is not permissible, hypothetically.” What is the benefit of this answer? There is no benefit. But in reality, answering hypothetical issues may expose people to problems. I remember clearly, during my travels in the northern Syrian countries, in a place or town west of Aleppo called Idlib, a gathering brought me together with a group much larger than this one. And for the first time, the gathering was large. The Mufti of the town was present, and I don’t know what the officials were. The Mufti of the town was engaged in a long discussion with me. He claimed, some of it true and some not, that Al-Albani, for example, is a mujtahid and that he attacks the Imams. And from this talk that you always hear, the important thing is that he entered into this topic with me. I was only concerned with the point related to a question like yours. He said to me, “You claim ijtihad.” I said, “No, I am a follower and not a mujtahid, nor a muqallid; rather, I am a follower.” After explaining the difference between ijtihad and following and taqlid, I said to him—he is the Mufti—I said to him, after he insisted and showed his position that there is no ijtihad, “What do you do, my Shaykh, if a question comes to you and you do not find its answer in the depths of the books that you follow?” And I know that the system of the traditional school is that they are told it is not permissible to issue a fatwa except with what is in the depths of the books, and not with ijtihad, and that the door of ijtihad was closed from the fourth century. This is their text, unfortunately. And one thing reminds me of another, also unfortunately. The Mufti of my country, Albania, visited us in Damascus. He is of a very strange degree of knowledge; he speaks classical Arabic better than the natives and cites verses from pre-Islamic poetry. I was truly amazed by him. You do not know that he is a non-Arab except for his dialect and his non-Arab accent. Despite this, he says there is no ijtihad. So I raised the following question to him. I said to him, “What do you do, my Shaykh, if an issue comes to you?” He said, “There is nothing, nothing that has occurred or will occur that its answer is not found in the depths of the books.” Look at this call; it is very dangerous. There is no incident that requires a Shari'ah ruling, whether it has occurred or will occur, that its answer is not found in the books of fiqh. I said to him, “Professor, the meaning of your words is that, hypothetically, if we suppose that the Qur'an was lost and the Sunnah was lost, we would not lose anything.” He said, “Indeed.” Look, he said, “Indeed,” because everything we need is found in the books of fiqh. Here is the point. I said to him, “Then what is this great favor that Allah bestowed upon His servants when He said to them: What is this favor, since you are saying that if the Qur'an were lost, nothing of Islam would be lost?” The man was stunned and rambled to me in Albanian, which I did not translate: “Who is the devil that inspired you with this meaning so that you threw me onto my head?”

The questioner : ...

Another questioner: ..

The Shaykh : “If you had understood it, I would have understood it through you.” The point is, we return to the Idlib case. When I said to him, “When an issue occurs, what do you do in it?” He said, “Like what?” I said to him, “For example, if a questioner asked you, ‘Is the prayer valid in an airplane?’ What is your answer?” He said, “The prayer is valid in an airplane.” So I caught him. We say in Syria, “He is from his own noose.” Why? That is what his own hands brought upon him. I said to him, “You have now fallen into what you denied in me. This is one thing. Second, you contradicted your school of thought. The man was stunned. I said to him, ‘How?’ I said to him, ‘Here, you have exercised ijtihad. What is your evidence that the prayer in an airplane is valid? This is a new issue, and there is no answer to it in the depths of the books from which you issue fatwas, because what do the books of taqlid say? They say it is obligatory for the mufti not to issue a fatwa from his opinion and ijtihad, but only from the book. And this issue has no explicit text. So on what did you rely?’ He said, ‘On qiyas (analogical reasoning).’ I said to myself, ‘Hooray, what is it?’ He said, ‘They mentioned that the prayer on a ship is permissible, so I analogized the prayer in an airplane to the prayer on a ship.’ I said to him, ‘Then you have become a greater mujtahid, because the four proofs of the Shari'ah are the Book, the Sunnah, ijma' (scholarly consensus), and qiyas, and the most precise of them is qiyas. So if you are good at qiyas, it means you have become a mujtahid. So why do you deny ijtihad to others? Then you are a mujtahid. This is one thing. And if only, when you exercised ijtihad and were correct, you had agreed with your school of thought. But how is it when you have contradicted the school of thought? Here is the point. Now he said, ‘How?’ I said, ‘He said, al-Rafi'i, in his great commentary on al-Wajiz by Imam al-Ghazali, listen now to the imagination: “If a man prayed on a swing that is not suspended from the ceiling and not supported from the ground, his prayer is invalid.” ... His prayer is invalid, do you see? I said to him, ‘This airplane itself, and especially the helicopter, stops; it is not suspended and it is not supported. How do you say the prayer is valid? And this is contrary to what the jurists have stated explicitly.’ He said, ‘I have not seen this text.’ I said to him, Go back to the book Sharh al-Wajiz by al-Rafi'i and you will find this phrase verbatim. The man was stunned. The point is, we do not want to search in imagination and in hypotheses. And I should advise students of knowledge to strive to deal with reality, and this reality is enough for us and more than enough for us. As for us supposing this and that, I say to every incident, a new story, when this Muslim Imam exists.