“While most Muslims abhor violence, some terrorists are a product of a specific mindset with deep roots in Islamic history. If Muslims everywhere refuse to confront this, we will all be prey to more terror, writes Ziauddin Sardar.”
From the Toronto Star:
It is true that the vast majority of Muslims abhor violence and terrorism, and that the Qur’an and various schools of Islamic law forbid the killing of innocent civilians. It is true, as the vast majority of Muslims believe, that the main message of Islam is peace. Nevertheless, it is false to assume the Qur’an or Islamic law cannot be used to justify barbaric acts. The terrorists are a product of a specific mindset that has deep roots in Islamic history. They are nourished by an Islamic tradition that is intrinsically inhuman and violent in its rhetoric, thought and practice.
They are provided solace and spiritual comfort by scholars, who use the Qur’an and Islamic law to justify their actions and fan the hatred.
As a Muslim, I am deeply upset by the attacks, the more so now I know they were the work of British Muslims. But, as a Muslim, I also have a duty to recognize the Islamic nature of the problem that the terrorists have thrown up.
They are acting in the name of my religion; it thus becomes my responsibility critically to examine the tradition that sustains them.
The question of violence per se is not unique to Islam. All those who define themselves as the totality of a religion or an ideology have an innate tolerance for and tendency toward violence. It is the case in all religions and all ideologies through every age.
But this does not lessen the responsibility on Muslims in Britain, or around the world, to be judicious, to examine themselves, their history and all it contains to redeem Islam from the pathology of this tradition. To deny that the terrorists are a product of Islamic history and tradition is more than complacency. It is a denial of responsibility, a denial of what is really happening in our communities. It is a refusal to live in the real world.
The tradition that nourishes the mentality of the extremists has three inherent characteristics…
More here.