Muslims! you are complicit in the crime| Najmul Hoda

Muslims, I accuse you of duplicity, complicity and connivance by silence. There has been a mutation in the heart of Islam, and you are the mutant. You are refusing to wake up to the danger. In private, you gloat over such horrors. In public you maintain that it has nothing to do with Islam, that it is the wrong interpretation of the religion, that these terrorists are some misguided elements, that there is not even the question of misinterpretation, or of misguided elements romping the center-stage, but it’s all a Jewish-American conspiracy.

How brazenly you absolve yourself of any sense of guilt? How you never feel any qualms of conscience? You know, why? Because you are complicit in the crime. You are refusing to rise and speak against that which should be acted and spoken against. No, don’t blame me for suspecting your ‘impeccable credentials’ by asking you to shout from the rooftop. But being one myself, I know how good the Muslims are with their tongues (no pun). Your culture does not know understatement. Every language that you speak—from Arabic to Urdu, and now English too—is ornate, florid and extravagant. Your expressions are loud, bombastic, expansive and hyperbolic. How come when it comes to condemning such a shame that you become subtle, nuanced and barely audible? To me this obfuscation is the proof of your complicity.

Tell me, if there is no problem with you and your Islam why such things are happening in your and its name?

If it is only about interpretation, can we say that there is no religion per se–only interpretation–and that interpretation is religion?

And don’t you think that This Interpretation is The Islam—the most genuine, the most authentic? The interpretation which fills you with the sense of the right and the duty to establish God’s sovereignty on earth! The interpretation which makes you believe that you have the sole right over salvation and paradise. That those who are different from you are destined for fire. And that there is no harm in expediting their passage to hell. This cavalier dispensability of humanity is the core and the crust of the ideology of Islamism—the political Islam, the hybrid monster, the chimera of utopia.

Actually, you have no religion, only ideology. No spirituality, only ambition. Your idea of unity and purity is based on excommunication. When did God come on earth to invest you with the power of excommunication in order to make licit for you the blood you wanted to spill?

Do you know that in Quran there is no notion of Takfeeriyat, i.e., calling others kafirs in order to make their blood licit?

Do you know that there is no concept of apostasy in Quran? Do you know that going back on Islam (i.e., apostasy) was not a crime during the Prophet’s life?

Do you know that in the Treaty of Hudaibiya there was a clause that those who renounced Islam would not be messed with? Do you know that the most famous apostate, Abdullah bin Sarh, was made the governor of Egypt by the Third Caliph? And here you are declaring [even] the Muslims to be kafirs in order to kill them.

But a more fundamental question is, according to which verse in Quran, you have been entrusted with the responsibility to Islamise the entire world, and kill those who do not acquiesce? Remember, both Islam and Kufr are created by God. According to Quran, God has no problem with either kufr or kafir, at least not in this world…and definitely you have no divine sanction to decide upon it. If you read Quran (I doubt you did), you would recall how many times God says that He decides who to bring to Islam and who not to, that whatever differences people have here shall be settled in the Hereafter.

So, don’t act more royal than the king, and more divine than God! Call a spade a spade before it falls on your neck.

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Najmul Hoda, IPS is an alumnus of Department of History, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh. He is currently serving as Deputy Inspector General (DIG) in Chennai.