The Painful Truth: All [kul] Terrorists are Muslims
by Abd al-Rahman al-Rashed
For certain, not all Muslims are terrorists, but sorrowfully we must say that most of the terrorists in the world are Muslims.
Those who kidnapped the schoolchildren in [North] Ossetia were Muslims.[1] Those who kidnapped the cooks and the Nepalese workers likewise were Muslims. Those who are committing rapes and killings in Darfur are Muslims, and so are their victims.
Those who blew up the residential building complexes in Riyadh and Khobar were Muslims. Those who kidnapped the French journalists were Muslims. The two women who blew up the two planes a week ago were Muslims.
Bin Laden is a Muslim, and al-Houthi is a Muslim.[2] Most of those who carried out suicide operations targeting public buses, schools, homes, and buildings throughout the world in the last ten years have been Muslims.
What a terrible record! Doesn't it tell us something about ourselves, our societies, and our culture?
These images, whether taken one by one or altogether, are hard, shameful, and disgraceful for us to look at, but instead of denying them and excusing them, we must acknowledge their reality, not compose articles and speeches proclaiming our innocence [bara'atina]. After we have acknowledged this malady [marad] it will become easy to treat ourselves. Self-cure begins with acknowledgement [i'tiraaf]. After that we must pursue our sons the terrorists, for they are the natural products of a perverted culture [thaqafa musshawa].
Listen to what the television sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi has said, publicly proclaiming a fatwa[3] permitting the killing of American civilians in Iraq. Consider a religious world that incites the killing of civilians, and a sheikh who, rejecting reverence for life, goads a young girl into killing civilians at the same time his own two daughters are off studying in the safety and security of Great Britain in the United Kingdom of Infidels [kafira].
How would such a father face the mother of the young man Berg[4] who was butchered because he had come to Iraq to work building cell phone towers? How are we to believe him when he tells us that Islam is a religion of mercy and tolerance while he transforms it into a religion of blood [diin dam]?
In the past, we used to consider leftists and nationalists dangerous extremists [mutatarifiin]. But, these extremists today have become a source of corruption that builds on the principle of violence and makes the vocation of killing easy. Back then, the mosque was a safe refuge where religious scholars called for peace and preached about praiseworthy morality.
Islam is being tyrannized by revivalist (jadd) Muslims. It is an innocent religion, which takes genuine pride in its texts prohibiting as harmful the unnecessary cutting down of trees, which characterizes killing as the greatest of crimes, and which stipulates that the one who harms even the least significant has harmed all. This is the Islam we knew before the appearance of the groups of condemnation [takfir] and the calls from mosques, and curriculums, and schools from which the political groups have raided ideas and then turned around and sabotaged their religion and its insights.
Surely, we do no honor to ourselves when from among us come those who kidnap pupils in school or journalists, or kill civilians, or blow up public buses no matter what agonies have been suffered by the avengers. There are those who mutilate Islam and there are those who give it comfort. We will not be able to clean up our reputation until we acknowledge the plain, shameful truth: which is to say that most of the acts of terror in the world today have been committed by the hand of Muslims. We must realize that we will not be able to reform the condition of our youth who are committing these repugnant crimes until we have confronted our sheikhs who from pulpits transform themselves into revolutionaries and send the sons of others off to wars at the same time they send their own children off to European and American schools.
al-Sharq al-Awsat
September 4, 2004
Translated by Ted Thornton
[1] Ossetia is a breakaway region of Georgia where in the town of Beslan hundreds of schoolchildren were kidnapped in early September, 2004 and many were killed. North Ossetia is primarily Muslim while South Ossetia is mostly Christian -- TT.
[2] Hussein al-Houthi was a militant Shiite Yemeni leader who was killed by security forces on Sept. 10, 2004. He had led a two-month long insurrection. - TT
[3] Legal opinion of an Islamic jurist. -- TT
[4] Nick Berg, the American communications engineer who was beheaded by insurgents in Iraq in the spring of 2004. -- TT
Other Notes:
See also "Arab Responses to Terror" (2003) and a piece by Suraya al-Shehry (June, 2004). Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi is a popular Islamic jurist regarded by some as a moderate and others as a radical. He appears regularly on television and is known throughout the Muslim world.