Middle East

The Sad Truth Is That All Terrorists Are Muslim

Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid, September 23, 2004

Students in Islamabad protesting against government-run raids to hunt Islamic clerics wanted for issuing a religious edict against the Pakistan army's offensive against Al-Qaeda-linked militants on August 29, 2004. (Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP-Getty Images)

It is certainly true that not all Muslims are terrorists, however, sadly we say that the majority of terrorists in the world are Muslims. The kidnappers of the students in [the city of Beslan in the Russian state of] Ossetia were Muslim. The kidnappers who killed the Nepalese chefs and laborers [in Iraq] were also Muslims. Those who perpetrate acts of rape and murder in Darfur are Muslims, and their victims are Muslim also. Those who blew up civilian housing complexes in Riyadh and Khobar [Saudi Arabia] were Muslims. Those who kidnapped the two French reporters [in Iraq] were Muslim. The two women who blew up those two planes a week ago [in Russia] were Muslim.

Bin Laden is a Muslim and [the rebel cleric in Yemen, Husayn Badr al-Din] al-Hawthi is a Muslim, and most of those who carried out suicidal acts against buses, schools, houses, buildings all over the world in the past ten years also were Muslims. What a terrible record—doesn’t that say something to us about ourselves, our societies and our culture?

These images are grim, shameful and despicable for us when we gather them and lay them out together in one day [here in this article], however instead of ignoring and justifying them we must first recognize the validity [of this sad truth] and not compose articles and speeches declaring our innocence. It makes it easier for us to treat ourselves if we recognize the sickness. [For] self-treatment begins first by recognition. Then it is incumbent on us to repudiate our terrorist offspring, as they are a natural result of a distorted culture. Listen to what television sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi said, publicly issuing a fatwa giving permission to kill American civilians in Iraq. Imagine that, a religious scholar urging the killing of civilians, a sheik who belies the wisdom that old age supposedly brings, inciting the tender youth to kill civilians, [and] all the while he has two daughters who are studying in the safety of British protection in the infidel United Kingdom.

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How can a father like him face the mother whose son [Nick] Berg was butchered because he came to Iraq to work on industrial towers? How can we believe him when he says to us that Islam is a religion of mercy and tolerance while he is turning it into a religion of blood?

Before this age of extremists, we considered leftists and nationalists as extremists, a source that undermined [our society] by their embrace of the principle of violence and their ease of adopting the vocation of murder; [whereas] the mosque was a place of secure comfort, and religious scholars were missionaries of peace and their sermons revolved around praiseworthy morals.

Islam is tyrannized because of the new Muslims. [It is] an innocent religion - evidence of which is indicated in its scriptures that forbid the cutting of trees for the sake of causing harm, and classified murder as the greatest of sins, and condemns someone who even tramples on an insect, and rewards a person who quenches the thirst of a cat. This is the Islam that we knew before the rise of groups that “infidelize” [declare other people infidels] brought about by the organizations, curriculums and teachers whose thinking has been overcome by the political [radical] groups and thus polluted their religion and minds.

It certainly doesn’t honor us that we are affiliated with those who take pupils as hostages in a school, and those who kidnap journalists, and those who kill civilians, and those who blow up buses (no matter what agonies these vengeful people may have suffered). These are the ones who disfigure and blacken the name of Islam. And we will not be able to improve our reputation until we recognize the clear and disgraceful truth: that most of the terrorist acts today in the world are perpetrated by the hands of Muslims. It is incumbent on us that we realize that we will not be able to reform the condition of our youth who commit these abominable crimes until we rectify the mentality of our sheiks who transform [themselves] into revolutionaries in their pulpits, sending other people’s children to wars while they send their children to European and American schools.

Translated by Worldpress.org contributing editor Peter Valenti.




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