Terrorism is Not a Muslim Monopoly - Fact

"All Muslims may not be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims." This comment , frequently heard after the Mumbai bomb blasts implies that terrorism is a Muslim specialty, if not a monopoly. The facts are very different.

First, there is nothing new about terrorism. In 1881, anarchists killed the Russian Tsar Alexander II and 21 bystanders. In 1901, anarchists killed US President McKinley as well as King Humbert I of Italy.

World War I started in 1914 when anarchists killed Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. These terrorist attacks were not Muslim. Terrorism is generally defined as the killing of civilians for political reasons.

Going by this definition, the British Raj referred to Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad and many other Indian freedom fighters as terrorists. These were Hindu and Sikh rather than Muslim.

Guerrilla fighters from Mao Zedong to Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro killed civilians during their revolutionary campaigns. They too were called terrorists until they triumphed.

Nothing Muslim about them. In Palestine, after World War II, Jewish groups (the Haganah, Irgun and Stern Gang) fought for the creation of a Jewish state, bombing hotels and installations and killing civilians.

The British, who then governed Palestine, rightly called these Jewish groups terrorists. Many of these terrorists later became leaders of independent Israel — Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon.

Ironically, these former terrorists then lambasted terrorism, applying this label only to Arabs fighting for the very same nationhood that the Jews had fought for earlier.

In Germany in 1968-92, the Baader-Meinhoff Gang killed dozens, including the head of Treuhand, the German privatisation agency. In Italy, the Red Brigades kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro, former prime minister.

The Japanese Red Army was an Asian version of this. Japan was also the home of Aum Shinrikyo, a Buddhist cult that tried to kill thousands in the Tokyo metro system using nerve gas in 1995.

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Leaving Catholism for Islam

time comes in everyone’s life, or at least I hope it comes, when they realize that they have to not only believe what they believe in, whatever it may be, but get out there and proclaim it to the world. Luckily, that time came early for me. I am 17, and Islam is the belief that I’m proclaiming.

I was raised Catholic. Not internally as much as externally. I went to Catholic Sunday school, called CCD, but the Catholic view of God never played a major roll in my childhood. It was a Sunday thing. Anyhow, I started to enjoy Mass around 7th grade. It made me feel good to do the right thing. I was always a rather moral person, but I never really studied the fundamentals of Catholicism. I just knew that I felt good worshipping my creator.

I really liked Catholicism, but I always saw it as us (the Catholics) with Jesus worshipping God, not us worshipping God and Jesus as one. I saw Jesus (peace be upon him) as my example on how to be a good follower of and submitter to God’s will, but not as God himself.

Before I was confirmed in 8th grade, in the fall of 1999, I learned a lot about what Catholicism was. The Catholicism of the Church had a lot on viewing Jesus as God in it. Nothing like my “undivided God being worshipped by me with Jesus as an example” train of thought. It was like they just opened up a can of cold, illogical confusion and tried to feed it to me. It didn’t feel right.

I continued with Catholic church, and kept on worshipping. But I talked to many in the church about my feelings that Jesus wasn’t God but more of a Prophet, an example. They told me that I had to accept him as God and as a sacrifice, and so on. I just wasn’t buying it. I tried to buy it but I guess God withhold the sale for my own benefit. There was a better car out there for me. I continued at the church.

Sometime in mid-December of 1999, for no reason that I can recall I started reading up on Islam in encyclopedias. I remember making a list of bolded words in the entry for “Islam” in an old 1964 Grolier World Book that I found in my closet, and studying them. For some reason I was amazed by this faith and that it was all about God and that it was everything that I believed all my life - right here. Previously, I had accepted that there was no faith like I felt inside of me. But I was amazed that I had found this faith. I found out that “my” faith had a name, and millions of other adherents!

Without ever reading a Qur’an or talking to another Muslim, I said shahada (declaring your belief in no god but God) on 31 December 1999. As the months passed, I learned more. I went through many periods of confusion, happiness, doubt and amazement. Islam took me on an enlightening tour of me, everyone else, and God.

The transition was slow. I was still attending Mass five months into my change of faith. Each time I went, I felt more and more distant from the congregation, but closer and closer to Prophet Jesus and God.

During Ramadan 2001, the second time I fasted (the first year, I converted during Ramadan and did not fast), I went to the library during lunch period. It was better than sitting at a table with my friends, because I got work done in the library. I swear my grades went up. Anyways, I started talking to the only other Muslim at my school, John. We talked about Islam a little more each day. He’s an awesome brother and he took me to the mosque on the last Friday of Ramadan. Going was one of the best things I ever made in my life. God really answered my prayers this time. I thought I would be nervous, but I wasn’t at all. It was the most natural thing I ever did in my life. I felt home. I realized something before leaving. As I sat there on the floor, praying to God, I realized that the room was full of others but it was OK. See, at home when someone asks me what I am doing, I never say I am praying. I never admit it to anyone. It is too awkward. But there, at the masjid, I was praying to God in front of a score of other Muslims and I felt perfectly fine. Better than fine! I felt secure and safe. It was the most liberating thing since I accepted God into my heart that cold New Year’s Eve almost two years ago.

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Muslims Must Join the Oppressed

On January 26, 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradiction. In politics, we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality...We must remove this contradiction at the earliest moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this assembly has so laboriously built up”.

These historic words of Ambedkar in the Constituent Assembly spoke for all the poor of the country and Dalits in particular. What he had said 50 years ago, will hold good as India goes into the second millennium. He had also been prophetic in his assertion that persistent inequality will spell the demise of political democracy itself.

The thoughts of Ambedkar are most relevant today and his analysis of the Indian society needs to be understood by all those who are deeply concerned with the destiny of the people here. He has laid bare the inequities of this society and the theology which has been its driving force. His critique of this theology popularly known as Manuvada, professed by the upper castes of the land, must be known to all who cherish the democratic ethos.

Ambedkar characterised this society driven by caste as graded inequality because caste is an integral part of it. He found this caste-bound society bereft of social conscience and remarked on its moralistic unconcernedness.

Ambedkar’s rhetorical question, “A population which is hide-bound by caste, which flouts equality of status, which is infected by ancient prejudices and is dominated by notions of gradations in life. A population which thinks some are high, that some are low, can it be expected to have the right notions even to discharge bare justice?”

He made a fine distinction between class and caste, terming the former as non-social and the latter as anti-social.

Ambedkar pointed out the devastating impact of caste on the Dalit community, which showed itself in the most obnoxious practice of untouchability. He said, “Dalits - not that they have large property to protect from confiscation. But they have their very persons confiscated. The socio-religious disabilities have dehumanised the untouchable and their interests at stake are the interests of humanity”.

Apartheid of South Africa pales into insignificance beside untouchability and Ambedkar had to caution its practitioners thus, “To observe untouchability is a risk as dangerous as to bear live coals on their tongues”.

That this shameless practice should be prevalent even to this day is a crying shame. Ambedkar described the most sacred book of the Manuvadis as neither a book on religion nor a treatise on philosophy, but a mere justification for war based on the spurious logic which holds killing a body does not amount to killing the soul because the soul is immortal! Hence there is neither regret nor remorse over killing. Source-http://mymuslimnews.blogspot.com/2010/07/muslims-must-join-oppressed.html