S U B V E R S E

Muslims are different here

Thomas L Friedman


New Delhi: There are nine bodies — all of them young men — that have been lying in a Mumbai hospital morgue since November 29. They may be stranded there for a while because no local Muslim charity is willing to bury them in its cemetery. This is good news.
The nine are the Pakistani Muslim terrorists who went on an utterly senseless killing rampage in Mumbai on 26/11 gunning down more than 170 people, including 33 Muslims, scores of Hindus, as well as Christians and Jews. It was killing for killing’s sake. They didn’t even bother to leave a note. All nine are still in the morgue because the leadership of
India’s Muslim community has called them by their real name — “murderers” not “martyrs” — and is refusing to allow them to be buried in the main Muslim cemetery of Mumbai.
“People who committed this heinous crime cannot be called Muslim,” Hanif Nalkhande, a spokesman for the trust, said. Eventually, one assumes, they
will have to be buried, but the Mumbai Muslims remain defiant. “Indian Muslims are proud of being both Indian and Muslim, and the Mumbai terrorism was a war against both India and Islam,” explained M J Akbar. “Terrorism has no place in Islamic doctrine. The Quranic term for the killing of innocents is ‘fasad’. Terrorists are fasadis, not jihadis.”
To be sure, Mumbai’s Muslims are a vulnerable minority in a predominantly Hindu country. Nevertheless, their in-yourface defiance of the Islamist terrorists stands out. It stands out against a dismal landscape of predominantly Sunni Muslim suicide murderers who have attacked civilians in mosques and markets — from Iraq to Pakistan to Afghanistan — but who have been treated by mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera, or by extremist Islamist spiritual leaders and websites, as “martyrs” whose actions deserve praise.
Extolling or excusing suicide militants as “martyrs” has only led to this awful phenomenon — where young Muslim men and women are recruited to kill themselves and others — spreading wider and wider. What began in a targeted way in Lebanon and Israel has now proliferated
to become an almost weekly occurrence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
It is a threat to any open society because when people turn themselves into bombs, they can’t be deterred, and the measures needed to interdict them require suspecting and searching everyone at any public event. And they are a particular threat to Muslim communities. You can’t build a healthy society on the back of suicidebombers, whose sole objective is to wreak havoc by exclusively and indiscriminately killing as many civilians as possible. If suicide-murder is deemed legitimate by a community when attacking its “enemies” abroad, it will eventually be used as a tactic against “enemies” at home, and that is exactly what has happened in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The only effective way to stop this trend is for “the village” — the Muslim community itself — to say “no more”. When a culture and a faith community delegitimises this kind of behaviour, openly, loudly and consistently, it is more important than metal detectors or extra police. Religion and culture are the most
important sources of restraint in a society.
That’s why India’s Muslims, who are the second-largest Muslim community in the world after Indonesia’s, and the one with the deepest democratic tradition, do a great service to Islam by delegitimising suicide-murderers by refusing to bury their bodies. It won’t stop this trend overnight, but it can help over time. The fact that Indian Muslims have stood up in this way is surely due, in part, to the fact that they live in, are the product of and feel empowered by a democratic and pluralistic society. They are not intimidated by extremist religious leaders and are not afraid to speak out against religious extremism in their midst.
It is why so few, if any, Indian Muslims are known to have joined al-Qaeda. And it is why, as outrageously expensive and as uncertain the outcome, trying to build decent, pluralistic societies in places like Iraq is not as crazy as it seems. It takes a village, and without Arab-Muslim societies where the villagers feel ownership over their lives and empowered to take on their own extremists — militarily and ideologically — this trend will not go away. — NYTNS

Do not leave without commenting. I love a good conversation :).

Post Navigation