Ad nauseum. Someone tell K Shanmugam please. There is a false assumption at work here, namely the notion that as long as the vast majority of Muslims oppose jihadism everything will be fine. Recent history has shown that this assumption is not only false but dangerous.The second point to be made is that statements such ‘they don’t represent me’ are only useful if they are a precursor to a sustained effort to challenge and undermine jihadism... Such statements tend to be another way of saying ‘this is none of my business because I don’t agree with them’. By merely declaring jihadists not representative of Muslims at large, many Muslims are in fact refusing to take ownership of the problem and merely performing a PR exercise. This is the reason why we have not seen any large-scale Muslim led effort to challenge extremist ideology in Europe since 911. Muslims either go into conspiratorial mode or convince themselves that it is not their problem when faced with jihadi excesses. And yet the very same people will then say they are concerned about Islamophobia and the Palestinian cause because it affects fellow Muslims and that they have concerns about the global Muslim community. How can one be concerned about the global Muslim community and not want to tackle jihadism which, in the grand scheme of things, has killed far more Muslims that anyone else? Rather than offering such shallow condemnations, we as Muslims need to stop being solely concerned with the image of Islam and Muslims and recognise that challenging jihadists and associated extremists proactively will do more to rehabilitate the image of Islam than shallow ‘not in my name’ statements.
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 02:17:08 +0000
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