Study: Radicalized Muslims Have Little Actual Knowledge Of Islam...
Extremists and Islamophobes alike have attempted to paint violent factions within Islam as the true expression of the faith. But a new study gives credence to what countless Muslim leaders, activists and scholars have argued: that groups like the self-proclaimed Islamic State are Muslim in name alone. A group of German scholars at the Universities of Bielefeld and Osnabrück analyzed 5,757 WhatsApp messages found on a phone seized by police following a terrorist attack in the spring of 2016. The messages were exchanged among 12 young men involved in the attack. The attack itself was not identified in the report. Deutsche Welle noted that the timeframe suggested it may have been a bombing at a Sikh temple in...
Top Ten Ways Islamic Law Forbids Terrorism...
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 21, has been convicted on all counts in the Boston Marathon bombings. Dzhokhar and his brother Tamerlan were from a mixed Chechen and Avar family. Dzhokhar was born in Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian republic that had been part of the Communist Soviet Union. Being from a Soviet background, the Tsarnaevs were probably originally more or less atheists, whatever they said later. Even Soviet Muslims from the Caucasus and Central Asia who identified as “Muslims” mostly did so before the 1990s as a matter of ethnicity, not piety. Most Soviet Muslim men drank copious amounts of vodka. Few knew how to pray in the Muslim manner with prostrations. Being deracinated appears to have left the Tsarnaev boys...
Islam Requires Muslims to Protect Christians...
Five years ago, I lost close friends in one of the most gruesome terrorist attack on Pakistani soil. In twin attacks on two Mosques in Lahore, 88 Ahmadi Muslim worshippers were killed at the hands of the Taliban. It was a painfully bloody day. This last weekend, I woke up to sad news from Pakistan that made me relive some of that pain. Fourteen worshipers were killed, and more than 70 were injured, when two Taliban suicide bombers blew themselves up outside churches in the Youhanabad neighborhood of Lahore, Pakistan. These attacks on Pakistan’s Christian community are not a sporadic event. They are a part of a very tragic trend. Just over a year ago, another suicide attack...
There’s No Place for Terror in the Teachings of Islam...
Every Muslim is in utter shock about the senseless, appalling and cowardly attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, and the other senseless violence against innocents we have seen since in Copenhagen and Libya. Let us say it plainly: These horrific acts are a complete violation of Islamic law and norms, and the perpetrators are in no way representative of Muslim people or the religion of Islam. God upholds the sanctity of life as a universal principle. The Koran states in 4:29: “And do not kill one another, for God is indeed merciful unto you.” Islam views murder as both a crime punishable by law in this world and as a major sin punishable in the Afterlife. As Prophet...
Muslims Pray in Solidarity with Christian Victims of Terror...
A small group of muslims staged a picket in the Cape Town CBD on Wednesday to show their solidarity with christian families who lost loved ones in recent attacks by muslim extremists. “We are here to show Christian families we too are heartbroken about their loss,” said Qutb Hendricks, one of the picketers gathered outside the St Georges Cathedral. The picketers who were from all over the country were taking time out of their holiday. “Islam is a peaceful religion. The likes of jihadi like Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab are twisting Islam for their crimes,” said Hendricks. The picketing followed the massacre of 148 Kenyan students over the Easter weekend by al-Shabaab militants. It also coincided with the...
Islam, As Truly Found in the Qur’an...
Vice President Joe Biden spoke truth to power at last week’s White House conference on fighting violent extremism when he said that we have no military means with which to wage and win such a struggle of conflicting ideals. At the same time, President Obama has asked the Congress for war powers with which to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. He wants to use more U.S. military force against a religious movement of Sunni Muslims. This is not the right way to end this conflict. Military force is a very limited instrument that comes with inherent shortcomings, as we have learned after years of inconclusive fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. I learned this fighting...
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