The claim that these self-identified Muslims who subscribe to a terrorist ideology are not Muslims is no longer a blue-sky defence of Islam. It’s not just a coincidence that these terrorists don’t quote the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita to justify their bestial disruption and pollution of the human civilisation.
As I once shared elsewhere, what the terrorists perpetrate may be a deviation from orthodoxy but they are Muslims. By education, inhibitions, associations and aspirations. Qualifying them as non-Muslims is not only a cheap escape from this maddening reality that begs for our honest confrontations but also questions the authenticity of our own faith too. For instance, Islam is unambiguous in its condemnation of polytheism.
In fact, polytheism is the shortest and smoothest highway to apostasy but so many Muslims, like members of other faiths, patronise marabouts and seers to seek solutions for their social and spiritual problems, and to ‘protect’ their future, in spite of their knowledge of the consequences.
My point is, let’s drop this hypocrisy of who qualifies for a Muslim or not, as mastered by the self-appointed litigators of God, to ponder and dissect the reasons these terrorists always attribute their cruelty to Islam, demonising you and I, advocates of interfaith harmony and world peace. Let’s admit the obvious, that we have a doctrinal challenge, which breeds these bloodthirsty ideologues.
The terrorists are deviants who, like you and I, believe they are the actual Muslims. Let’s admit that it’s neither lack of education nor prevalence of poverty that breeds them. It’s a doctrine, our everyday reality.
Let’s admit that being a Muslim doesn’t mean being spiritually and behaviorally upright, being a believer is what makes one so. Islam is not a secret cult, and apostasy in a world where the “Islamists” have turned the Muslim identity into a political is now contradictory, and should be declared with caution.
Without a doubt, indoctrination is an institutional lapse we must deal with. We do not owe anyone an apology for any evil perpetrated in the name of our Islam, because we are the worst victims of their terror.
This civilisation is neither secular nor Christian, as interpreted by the terrorists in their poor grasp of global social anthropology.
This civilisation is human, ours, built by intercourses of ideas by humans from various races, religions, nations and continents, through several centuries. It may not be perfect, but it’s better than any that seeks to formulate an “us against them” division to dismantle what our ancestors died to achieve.
The world must unite to deconstruct the doctrines and disarm the clerics responsible for these misleading interpretations of Islamic texts.
Because, even in our neighbourhoods and at schools and offices, there are indoctrinated cults of clowns who subscribe to a belief that you must to be a cleric to discuss the issues the threaten your existence.
Another dangerous group of all those who identify with Islam is the cult who quote verses from the Quran and cite favourable portions of the Hadith, applying parochial or sentimental hermeneutics, to excommunicate people from the fold of Islam. This is so because, depending one one’s understanding of these texts, whether literal or implied, is what gave birth to terrorism.
We are witnesses to the birth and rise of terrorist groups who have multiplied the number of Islamophobes on the face of the earth. We have witnessed the monstrosities of Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabbab, Boko Haram, ISIS, and whatnots, who, armed with their terrifying superficiality, quote the Qur’an and the Hadith to justify their killings of dissenting Muslims. The murdered Muslims, they said, were stray, and enemies of the version of Islam.
Some of have become famous in blaming Western countries like the United States and its institutions like the CIA as founders of these terrorist groups, but is the West responsible for the home-bred groups like the Boko Haram to which we are firsthand witnesses? The membership card for Islam has been in contention and a subject of fatal contests among empires and scholars with the passing of the Prophet, resulting into several schools of thoughts and sects, all proposing the “logical” Islam, with some forming murderous groups and ideologies to excommunicate and exterminate perceived abusers of Islam or infidels.
My point is, Maliki isn’t a school of thought in Christianity, neither is Hanafi one in Buddhism. My point is, Shiism is a sect in Hinduism, neither is Wahhabism a sectarian movement of the Judaism. My point is, Al-Qaeda has never promoted its evils as Christian, neither have members of ISIS ever claimed to be fighting for the establishment of a city guided by any book other than the Qur’an.
We have to own the root of these groups, which is Islam, our version of it, the all-encompassing religion of love and peace, to determine the exact dissidence that has resulted into this global tragedy. And that starts with acknowledging that the Islamist terrorists may be Muslims by identification and ideological corruption, but they don’t practise Islam. They abuse it. Until that day, my prayer remains the same: May God save us from us!
