Reforming Islam
Majid Nawaz makes the sensible point that as well as taking the necessary security steps to defeat terrorism, some of the values of Islam need to be reformed and brought into the 21st century.
No other modern religious faith extols the concept of martyrdom and jihad or encourages the cold-blooded murder of innocent people (e.g. Salman Rushdie) or condones the killing of apostates including those who decide to become ex-Muslims.
So, far from blaming Muslims for terrorism we all have a role to play in engaging with the Muslim community and isolating the Islamists who reject democracy and freedom of expression and try to justify violence in the name of their religion.
Read what Majid Nawaz has to say via following link to The Times.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4720138.ece
We need to pull up Islamism by its roots
By Maajid Nawaz - The Times
Police and security services have their role but we have to stop radicalisation in the first place
There is little room for doubt that Europe is in the midst of something akin to a jihadist guerrilla war. Up to 100 fighters have left for Iraq and Syria from Brussels alone. Belgium is in danger of becoming the new “Londonistan”.
The political climate that is unfolding has long been demanded by al-Qaeda ideologues. A leading al-Qaeda strategist, Abu Musab al-Suri, who used to live in London, called for this insurgency in Europe more than a decade ago. In his book Call for an International Islamic Resistance al-Suri outlined the benefits of provoking civil war between Muslims and non-Muslims so that communities begin to self-segregate for their own protection. Jihadists believed that by stirring up religious tension people would retreat into their own safe spaces as they inevitably started to identify other citizens primarily by their religion to test where their loyalties lie.
The inevitable backlash in the West against terrorist attacks perpetrated by Muslims — the mutual religious mistrust that this would breed, the war-weary isolationism from the Middle East that it would create among policymakers and the retreat into populist identity politics across society — could only ever serve those who wished to divide the world into Muslim and non-Muslim zones. As we Muslims are a minority in the West al-Qaeda sought to force us to flee any populist backlash. Jihadists wanted the world to be so angry with Muslims that whether we intended it or not we would come to be seen primarily as Muslims first. Islamist propaganda ensured that many Muslims had already adopted this medieval mode of identification. Once the seeds of division were sown the only sanctuary left to Muslims would be the jihadists’ “caliphate”.
Police and security services have their role but we have to stop radicalisation in the first place
There is little room for doubt that Europe is in the midst of something akin to a jihadist guerrilla war. Up to 100 fighters have left for Iraq and Syria from Brussels alone. Belgium is in danger of becoming the new “Londonistan”.
The political climate that is unfolding has long been demanded by al-Qaeda ideologues. A leading al-Qaeda strategist, Abu Musab al-Suri, who used to live in London, called for this insurgency in Europe more than a decade ago. In his book Call for an International Islamic Resistance al-Suri outlined the benefits of provoking civil war between Muslims and non-Muslims so that communities begin to self-segregate for their own protection. Jihadists believed that by stirring up religious tension people would retreat into their own safe spaces as they inevitably started to identify other citizens primarily by their religion to test where their loyalties lie.
The inevitable backlash in the West against terrorist attacks perpetrated by Muslims — the mutual religious mistrust that this would breed, the war-weary isolationism from the Middle East that it would create among policymakers and the retreat into populist identity politics across society — could only ever serve those who wished to divide the world into Muslim and non-Muslim zones. As we Muslims are a minority in the West al-Qaeda sought to force us to flee any populist backlash. Jihadists wanted the world to be so angry with Muslims that whether we intended it or not we would come to be seen primarily as Muslims first. Islamist propaganda ensured that many Muslims had already adopted this medieval mode of identification. Once the seeds of division were sown the only sanctuary left to Muslims would be the jihadists’ “caliphate”.
