Islam And Terrorism: When Will Muslims Understand What Needs To Be Done?
By Wus’atullah Khan, BBC Urdu
(Translated from Urdu by New Age Islam)
January 13, 2014
No matter what explanations you give or try to convince yourself, express your detachment from the issue or try to change the topic and convince people that there is a background to the killing of eleven journalists of Charlie Hebdo, a few thousand or millions of Muslims may be convinced but 75 per cent of the population of the world consists of non-Muslims too. How would you convince them that the reall issue is….
Yes, off course, a newspaper of Denmark had published some cartoons which were provocative to Muslims. Yes, Charlie Hebdo has also been publishing such provocative cartoons. Yes, a German newspaper too followed suit. Indeed, in the West, every day someone or the other commits a blasphemous act and this may continue in future.
Well, fine, what is the solution then? Should we kill everyone who does this? Do you expect the same respect and reverence for sacred Islamic personalities from non-Muslims as you do? And if someone does not do that, should he also be given the same punishment that is given for apostasy?
If this is the right attitude, where should I place the Sunnah of the prophet pbuh? How did the polytheists who taunted at the prophet in the streets of Makkah survive? What happened to the woman who regularly threw garbage at the prophet pbuh while he crossed his lane? (The prophet pbuh even visited her when she fell ill, right?) What prayer did the prophet pbuh do for those in Taif who stoned him bleeding from head to toe so much so that even God asked the prophet pbuh if he wanted, He would crush the whole community between the two mountains? Is there a single person who has not been taught and made to learn this lesson by heart in schools, or not repeated before the Friday prayers in mosques? What lessons did the ardent followers of the Sunnah of the prophet pbuh learn from these examples?
But he was after all a prophet and so his patience was also that of a prophet. We are not even the dust under his feet. How can we develop such a great patience? How can we tolerate that someone insults the prophet and we remain sitting helpless.
If we accept this logic, then we can say that if not during the life at least after the death of the prophet pbuh, some Sahabi or caliph should have killed all of them selectively; someone should have dug the grave for the old woman who used to throw garbage; some army should have destroyed Taif, even if they had become Muslims by that time. Why didn’t this happen? Didn’t they have the zeal? Was the love of the Sahabis and Tabayeen for their prophet pbuh any less than ours? Or did they swallow the humiliation for the fear that they might intentionally or unintentionally transgress and cause blasphemy against the prophet?
But these are handful of deviated lot who are maligning Islam. The majority have nothing to do with their deeds.
Though this is very true but the non-Muslims cannot grasp this point. And those who accept your logic and argument that all the terrorists are not Muslims, why do they ask why is majority of the terrorists Muslims? And why are all the Muslims helpless before the handful of terrorists? Why don’t you put up any resistance against those who distort your religion? Why don’t you expel them from your religion? (though they have expelled you from your religion long ago) In Paris, 3 million people hit the streets against the killing of only seventeen people. In Muslim countries, hundreds of thousands of people became the victims of these handful of terrorists. Families were annihilated. Did even one lakh people hit the streets in any Muslim country in protest? Are those providing refuge to them non-Muslims? Don’t those making compromises with them call themselves Muslims? Aren’t those supporting these terrorists overtly or covertly called Muslims?
If a Hindu, Christian or Jew commits terrorism, no one says that it is religious terrorism but it is said that it is his personal act. But whenever, the word Muslim is uttered, eyebrows are raised. See, he is a Muslim; he is an Islamic terrorist.
Yes, this is what is happening. But why was this impression created. After nine eleven, especially due to Al Qaida, terrorism has become internationalized. This is the reason for this impression. Yes, there are Hindu terrorists too. But till now, no Hindu terrorist exploded himself even in Pakistan, leave aside in the west. Indeed, Hindu terrorists were caught in India. The individual terrorism of the Jews has been confined to Israel and Palestine. No Jewish terrorist has been caught in Saudi Arabia till now. The American Christian is exploding bombs in Oklahoma, and not in Toronto and the Swedish Christian is massacring seventy people on an island near Stockholm, not in Sydney. No Hindu, Christian or Jewish terrorist has raised the slogan that he will not rest until he turns the entire world into a Hindu, Christian or Jewish world. If the non-Muslim world thinks that all this is happening in the name of Islam it is because an Uzbek is exploding himself in Islamabad instead of Ashkabad; an Algerian is exploding in Baghdad; a Saudi is crashing an aeroplane in New York; a Moroccon is exploding a train in Madrid; an Afghan is fighting in Syria; a Pakistani is firing in Mumbai; a youth from Bradford is bombing a tube rail station in London as well as taking Yazidis hostage on behalf of the ISIS in Iraq.
At a time when the Palestinians were kidnapping aeroplanes, someone remarked that it was Muslim terrorism. Palestinians are not Muslims but Palestinian terrorists in the eyes of Israel even today. When the Algerians were fighting against France, they weren’t branded terrorists; they were called Algerian freedom fighters, why? Those fighting for Kashmir may be terrorists in the eyes of India, but does the rest or the world call Hurriyat Conference or Syed Ali Shah Geelani terrorists? In Paris, the Muslim terrorist Ahmad killed the Muslim police officer Mirabeth on the road; The Muslim employee of the kosher market saved hundreds of the shoppers by shutting them inside the cold storage. During the protests, the protesters were also holding the posters of the two Muslim heroes. Why?
Extremism is growing among Muslims because the west has meted out historical and economic injustice to them.
If this is the logic, then the entire black race of Africa should run over the west with guns in their hands. No nation has suffered greater economic, geographical, political and historical injustice than they have. This still continues. But except Boko Haram and Somalia’s As Shahab, all have swallowed the pill of indignity. The whole Latin America should destroy the US because no other country has exploited Latin America more than Washington has done. Hundreds of Bosnian Muslims should tie bombs to their bodies and shatter the entire Russia because the biggest supporter of the Serbian killers is no other than Russia, and the Chechen Muslims should also do this.
And whenever the opportunity to show our alienation from terrorism comes, we waste it due to our apathy and insensitivity. For example, the presence of the king of Jordan, Abdullah, and the presidents of Mali, Gibbon and Nigeria and the brother of the Amir of Qatar was not as much necessary in the global unity demonstration as was the presence of the president of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider AL Abadi and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. But who will make them understand this and how…
Source: BBC Urdu
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-terrorism-jihad/islam-terrorism-when-muslims-understand/d/101035