Muslims are not terrorists
ABOUT two weeks ago, gunmen seized four Malaysian seamen off Sabah's Semporna district and fled towards Tawi-Tawi province in the Muslim autonomous region in southern Philippines.
The kidnappers are believed to be members of the Abu Sayyaf. According to the United States Counterterrorism Center, the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) is the most violent Islamic separatist group in southern Philippines, claiming to advocate an independent Islamic state in western Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago.
The group split from the Moro National Liberation Front in the early 1990s, and currently engages in kidnappings for ransom, bombings, assassinations, and extortion.
The ASG operates mainly in Basilan, Sulu, and TawiTawi provinces in the Sulu Archipelago and has a presence in Mindanao.
Terrorism has surfaced as the biggest menace of the current times, particularly in the past few decades. It is unfortunate that Islam, the religion of peace, hope, harmony, goodwill and brotherhood, had been badly tarnished by the perpetrators of various terrorist acts and barbarism as seen in recent years.
Unjustly, Islam and Muslims are deemed by most of the world population to be the root causes of this upsurge of terrorism all across the world.
Every time an act of terror or shooting occurs, many of my Muslim friends and relatives would closely watch the news with extreme feeling of alarm, praying that the suspect is not Muslim.
This is not because these terrorists are likely to be Muslim but rather because in the instances where they happen to be, we see exaggerated mass media coverage, reports and extreme unwarranted hatred towards Muslims.
Hence there are constant reports that certain countries, Sabah is not excluded, are considered at high risk of terrorist attack.
There is no doubt that this is far from accurate. I believe the reports are the result of ignorance on Islam and mere propaganda than anything else that caused a considerable majority of the world's population still blaming Islam and Muslims.
This is mostly because of the “bad press” deliberately being created against Muslim by the tremendous impingements of world media.
People with power and influence in the U.S. have been saying some very unbelievable foolish things about Islam and about Muslims since September 11.
Some of it is rooted in conscious outright malice, and ethnic prejudice that spills over into religious bigotry. But some is rooted in sheer historical and geographical ignorance.
One may be appalled to know that this is a country, in which only a small minority of high school students can readily locate Afghanistan on the map, or are aware that Iranians and Pakistanis are not Arabs.
Personally I am tired of condemning the terrorist attacks to people who are calm and apathetic when Muslims are killed by these same radicalized terrorists and fed up of hearing the word “terrorist” not being used when the suspect in a terrorist attack is a non-Muslim.
I am also flabbergasted by the “mentally near retarded” excuse being recycled when the suspect in a terrorist attack is a nonMuslim or Caucasian.
Above it all, I will not be apologetic to repeatedly say it loud and clear that Muslims are not terrorists. It is time we silence this Islamophobia with facts.
One of the best ways to authenticate or reject this claim for a common person is to see what the actual teachings of Islam are. Is it really a religion that promotes violence and terrorism, or is the reality totally opposite to this misconception?
According to the Islamic Holy Book - the Quran, God has bestowed honour on every individual irrespective of skin colour, race, nationality, etc. Freedom is one of the great favours of God and its deprivation is a great misery.
One convenient way of observing and analyzing all this is to learn what the Holy Qur'an, the religious Scripture of Muslims, has to say about the meanings of “Islam”.
The word “Islam” is derived from “salaam”, a word meaning peace. It also relates to a person submitting himself to the will of The Mightiest in order to seek eternal peace and tranquility. The crux of this observation is that the very origins of Islam are inclined towards peace and harmony.
Quran can best bear witness to Islam's inclination towards peace, justice, and harmony amongst human beings while negating and discouraging violence, terrorism, and injustice. Islam prohibits violence and promotes peace and justice. This becomes very evident if one vows to read the following:
“O ye who believe! stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to Allah, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be (against) rich or poor, for Allah can best protect both. Follow not the lusts (of your hearts), lest ye swerve, and if ye distort (justice) or decline to do justice, verily Allah is wellacquainted with all that ye do.” (Surah 4, Verse 135).
“God advocates justice, charity, and regarding the relatives. And He forbids evil, vice, and transgression. He enlightens you, that you may take heed.” (Surah 16, Verse 90).
“And if ye do punish them, punish them no worse than they punished you: but if ye show patience, that is indeed the best (course) for those who are patient.” (Surah 16, Verse 126).
These are just a few references from the Holy Qur'an. You may find many more of them that promote nothing else but peace and justice.
I am not extolling that the peace-loving attitude and behavior of Muslims is not a myth. It is an absolute historical truth that is very evident from their deeds when they were in command of different areas of the world where multiple religions were practised.
For example, Muslims ruled Spain for about eight centuries. No significance evidence is found that suggests Muslims used force or unnecessary means to oppress non-Muslims living there.
India is another place that was once ruled by Muslims for a period of over 1,000 years. Currently, about 80% of the population comprise nonMuslims. If Muslims had used force to convert people from other religions, the country would have been quite different.
Arabia had been under Muslim influence for 1,400 years, yet there are about 14 million Coptic Christians found in that region. Had Islam used the sword for its propagation, the situation would have been very different.
To draw an analogy, when a drunk driver causes a car accident, we never blame the car manufacturer for the violent actions of that driver. This is because we understand that we cannot blame an entire car company that produces safe vehicles just because one of their cars was hijacked by a reckless person who used it to cause harm.
So what right do we have to blame an entire religion of over 1.6 billion peaceful people just because of the actions of a relatively insignificant few?
Similarly, according to the FBI, 94% of terrorist attacks carried out in the United States from 1980 to 2005 have been by nonMuslims. (Ref: https://www.fbi. gov/stats-services/publications/ terrorism-2002-2005).
This means that an American terrorist suspect is over nine times more likely to be a non-Muslim than a Muslim. According to this same report, there were more Jewish acts of terrorism in the United States than Islamic, yet when was the last time we heard about the threat of Jewish terrorism in the media?
For the same reasons that we cannot blame the entire religion of Judaism or Christianity for the violent actions of those carrying out crimes under the names of these religions we have absolutely no justifiable grounds to blame Muslims for terrorism.
Hypothetically speaking, even if all terrorist attacks were carried out by Muslims, we still could not associate terrorism with Islam.
There have been 140,000 terror attacks committed worldwide since 1970. (http://www.start. umd.edu/gtd/ ). Even if Muslims carried out all of these attacks, those terrorists would represent less than 0.00009 percent of all Muslims.