FARZANA HASSAN Muslims must confront Islamism

 

 

 http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/straighttalk/archives/2014/12/20141222-070141.html

MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER OF VICTIM OF PESHAWAR ATTACK

Credits: REUTERS/Fayaz Aziz

FARZANA HASSAN | TORONTO SUN

 

We can only weep for the scores of children massacred by the Taliban in Peshawar, Pakistan.Just a day before this slaughter, another Islamist took innocent cafe patrons hostage in downtown Sydney. Two of them were killed, along with him.

Not long ago, Islamist extremists took the lives of two Canadian soldiers in Ottawa and Montreal.
When will this religious madness ever end?

Just when we consider beheading by ISIS to be the worst inhumanity, we learn the Taliban butchers made pupils watch their teacher being incinerated.

In this competition of evil, we must now wonder who has cultivated the most brutal brand: Boko Haram in Nigeria, ISIS militants, al-Qaida or the Taliban?

Revenge prompted the bombings of the army-run Pakistani school.

"We selected the army's school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females," said the Taliban leaders who claimed responsibility.

They blame the Pakistani military for recent campaigns against them in their tribal refuge of Waziristan.

The concept of sharia offers the Taliban a doctrinal justification for such revenge.

Any attack on them can be redressed by another attack they consider to be of equal measure.

This is all part of the jihadi narrative that often makes victims of innocent people in the Muslim world.

But this attack was so heinous it was "condemned" even by the Afghani Taliban faction and the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Other Muslim organizations also expressed the required outrage, yet to what avail?

Australian imams issued a joint statement after the Sydney attack, saying they are "the first to oppose such violence".

However, they could not resist blaming Australia's policies.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on Monday issued a statement demanding Barack Obama revise guidelines allowing the profiling of Muslims and on Tuesday condemned the massacre in Pakistan.

But an appended article on its Facebook page scoffed at public demands for Muslims to constantly condemn terrorism, arguing these are bigoted because Muslims hate terrorism as much as anyone else.

But who, if not Muslims, must eradicate this curse?

The article suggested the Iranian cleric Man Haron Monis, who perpetrated the Sydney siege, must be seen not as one of the faithful but as a "deranged lunatic."

He did indeed commit a criminal act, but it was inspired by religious zeal.

The first requirement of a jihadi is that he or she must be Muslim.

Condemnations of these latest atrocities abound in the Muslim world, but many are vacuous and formulaic.

Islam has yet to come up with an adequate response to the curse of radicalism in its midst.
It will not do for Muslim spokespeople to keep redefining extremists as "un-Islamic."

Until Muslim leaders confront the Islamist nature of this cancer, they will remain part of the problem.
They denounce the symptoms of the disease, not the pathology that causes it.

They condemn individual terrorist attacks, but not jihadi doctrines.
It is the notion of jihad itself that the clerics must denounce as obsolete and vicious.
However, they will never do so, because according to them, it would be tantamount to denying Islam itself.

This concept enjoys wide acceptance among Muslims as a basic religious tenet; so much so it is often regarded as the "sixth pillar" of Islam.

If the widespread fury about the Peshawar massacre produces anything useful, perhaps it will finally cause Islam to look within itself.
If not, yet more innocents have died in vain.​