What I hear on the news about how people are responding to the tragedy does not help me find peace. Imams had to understand modern French society and interpret the Qur’an to make it relevant to today’s Muslims it said and theologians must do more to refute Daesh’s ideology.
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Prejudice against Muslims is real in the United States. Donald Trump, for example, is open to a “database system” to track Muslims.
The opinions expressed in this article are exclusively those of the author and are not necessarily those of World Religion News. However, I believe strongly the voices of Muslims decrying how their faith has been twisted and corrupted by religious fanatics must be taken seriously and trusted by those outside the Muslim community. I remember the absurd controversy during the 2010 midterm elections around a mosque being built near Ground Zero in NY. It was a helpful way to encourage dialogue between myself and fellow students at Providence College, many of whom did not know a Muslim personally. This enemy is supposed to present a constant threat to this country.
Jeb Bush: “Radical Islamic terrorism“. I know that crimes against Muslims are rising. She too lays claim to a legitimate history of tolerance and intellectual inquiry among Muslims that can be traced to the early years of the Arab caliphate, when the Fertile Crescent was one of the most tolerant places in the world before the Crusaders laid waste to it.
What then are we Muslims to do? He just needs to remind his party that there’s more to politics than winning-that some victories aren’t worth the cost to the country. “They represent evil and war”. Rather, they are complicit in the terrorists’ efforts. Should Muslims push back against extremism more than they have been-a challenge posed not by Republican politicians, but by President Obama?
“We urge public officials and presidential candidates not to scapegoat American Muslims and not allow Islam to be demonised by Islamophobes or by the anti-Islamic actions or terrorists”, said Nihad Awad of CAIR. And by integration I don’t simply mean a case of Abdul or Cherif or Aicha getting up every morning to go to work with other citizens of Belgium or France or Denmark, but an embracing of the civic and social and constitutional values of these countries – what might, by useful shorthand, be called the Western “way of life”. The overwhelming majority of victims of terrorism over the last several years, and certainly the overwhelming majority of victims of ISIL, are themselves Muslims.
“If there’s a rabid dog running around in your neighborhood, you’re probably not going to assume something good about that dog, and you’re probably going to put your children out of the way”, Carson said Thursday in Alabama, speaking about Syrian refugees. But I fear the suffering is not over. That’s not American. That’s not who we are.
How are we trying to defeat terrorism when we are rejecting people from our own community?
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The French Ministry of the Interior has received several complaints of Islamophobia, including degradation of mosques, physical violence and hateful speech toward Muslims. Taking advantage of these bad circumstances in order to further self-interested goals is inexcusable.
