The Painful Truth: All World Terrorists are Muslims

It’s hard to follow world events nowadays without being slapped in the face, quite often, with news so horrific and disturbing, it makes you both physically and mentally apprehensive, especially as a Muslim.

Horrendous crimes are happening one after the other in so many different places… to so many different people… I feel awkward saying this, but it’s becoming hard to keep track of all of them.

What’s sad and embarrassing is that all these terrorist acts are being committed by Muslims.

I was reading an article written by Abdulrahman al-Rashed in the Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat. In the article, al-Rashed lays the blame squarely on the corrupt religious leaders who encourage those terrorist acts.I took the liberty of translating some parts of the article into English. My translation could be a bit off, so to those of you who understand Arabic, I encourage you to read the original article. (The direct link to the article is not available, you should find it in the archive under sept. 4, 2004) To all others, here it goes:

Unquestionably, not all Muslims are terrorists, but with all sorrow we say that the majority of terrorists in the world are Muslims. The student kidnappers in Ossetia are Muslims. The kidnappers and killers of the Nepali cooks are Muslims. Those who practice rape and killing in Darfur are Muslims and their victims are Muslims too. Those who bombed the civilian complexes in Riyadh and Khobar are Muslims. Those who kidnapped the French journalists are Muslims. Those who bombed the two airplanes last week were two Muslim females.

Bin Laden is a Muslim and Al-Huthi is a Muslim, and most of those who carried out suicide bombings in buses and schools and houses and buildings around the world in the past ten years are Muslims.

What a bad record we have. Doesn’t it say something about ourselves, our society, our culture?

Those images are indeed harsh, shameful, and degrading to us when we gather them and put them all together in one day, but instead of denying and justifying them, we have to first acknowledge their validity and not to garnish articles and speeches claiming our innocence.

After admitting this sickness, it’s easy for us to cure ourselves. Self-medication begins with confession. After that we have to track down our terrorist sons because they are the end-product of our corrupted culture. Listen to what the television sheikh Yousif Al Qaradawi said, he publicly preached the permissibility of killing American civilians in Iraq. Imagine, a religious man encouraging the killing of civilians! A sheikh in his old age encouraging young men to kill civilians while having two daughters studying under the protection of British security forces in the “infidel” UK. How can a father like him confront Berg’s mother whom her son was beheaded because he came to Iraq to work on communication towers? How can we believe him when he says that Islam is a religion of mercy and tolerance if he turns it into a religion of blood?

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Islam is an innocent religion ... It describes killing as the greatest of crimes, and it condemns those who even step on an insect and it rewards those who quench the thirst of a kitten. This is the Islam we knew before the emergence of those fanatics and their campaigns ....

It doesn’t dignify us to have those who take students as hostages, and those who kidnap journalists, and those who kill civilians, and those who bomb buses…associating themselves with us no matter what pain those avengers have faced. They are the ones who disfigured and spoiled Islam.

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