Will the moderate Muslims stand up, please!

The year 2015 started badly for the Muslim community worldwide. On December 16, 2014, we had witnessed in Peshawar the brutal murder of 134 school children by Tehrik-e-Taliban, Pakistan (TTP). It was an incident of unparallel brutality carried out by a terrorist group driven by a distorted ideology of Islam. Then on January 7-8, three French Muslim gunmen killed twenty people in two separate terrorist attacks before they were killed by the French anti-terrorist police. The Paris terrorist incidents sent shock waves across the western world that put the Muslim community in the West on the back foot.

Although, the mainstream western society continues to espouse the growth of a multi-religious, multi-cultural society in Europe, the terrorist attacks by the Muslim youths, born and brought up in European society, raised new question on whether the acculturation process was at all working. There was increasing anxiety in the society at large of the threat, as they saw it, of Islam pitted against western values. A western backlash against Muslims will eventually result in gradual reduction of Muslim immigration into Europe, Americas and Australia. We might witness silent discrimination against the Muslims in sensitive job appointments, in admission into top rated universities and scientific research institutes and in defence or nuclear related industries. Unless the Muslim community realises the danger posed by the extremists, they will soon be ostracised and isolated from the rest of the world.

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While the focus of the world was on Paris, the Boko Haram in Nigeria killed at least 2,000 people, mostly Christian women and children in their campaign of terror. Boko Haram, in their campaign for an Islamic state in Nigeria, has been burning down churches and schools, killing and abducting women and children. The world was shocked when they abducted nearly 200 girl students from a school in Northern Nigeria in April last year, converted them to Islam and then sold them into slavery. Most recently, Boko Haram have been using these girls, some as young as 9-10 years old, as suicide bombers. Beyond Nigeria, Boko Haram is expanding its terrorist operations into Niger, Mali and Cameroon. In Somalia, Al-Shabab, a terrorist organisation, has been fighting a brutal guerilla war for the last two decades to establish an Islamic State in Somalia. In neighbouring Yemen, there is a civil war raging between Shia tribal militias and Sunni al-Qaeda. Deep inside the deserts of Algeria and Libya, Islamist militias have set up parallel governments challenging the central authority. Although out of power in Egypt, Islamic Brotherhood continues to remain active in Egypt as elsewhere in the Islamic world. In Syria and Iraq, we have witnessed the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the most brutal of all terrorist organisations.

Born out of the Syrian civil war, ISIS aims to establish a Sunni Islamic Caliphate. For the first time a terrorist organisation was able to occupy and hold territories. ISIS had murdered thousands of dissidents, prisoners of war, even women and children. The Yazidis, who are followers of a pre-Islamic religion, have been subjected to most brutal pogrom by the ISIS. Their women and female children have been sold into slavery; some have been converted to Islam and sold in open auctions as wives and concubines of the ISIS fighters. ISIS has been able to attract a fairly large number of Muslim youths from Europe, USA and Canada. These “Home Grown Jihadists” emerged as a rude shock to the western world.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan-Pakistan border area has become a terrorist haven. When Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 1997, they closed down modern institutions like schools, colleges and universities. They introduced cruel punishments such as beheading, amputation and stoning to death. Women were barred from work and education. It was a return to the age of darkness that the world had not witnessed for centuries. Although pushed out of power, Taliban continue to remain active in the region. Meanwhile, many Jihadi organisations have come up in Pakistan, some with close links with the state apparatus. Terrorist organisations like Sipahi-e-Sahaba, Lashkar-e-Janghvi are involved in anti-Shia campaign; Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaishe Muhammad are engaged in terrorist activities inside India, there are others who consider it their religious duty to kill the Ahmedis and other religious minorities. In Pakistani province of Baluchistan, the Baluchistan Liberation Army is fighting protracted guerilla warfare. Along the Iran-Pakistan border a hard-line Sunni guerilla group known as Jandullah is fighting against the Shia government of Iran. Beside these, there are smaller terrorist cells in Russia, China, India, and closer at home in Bangladesh, all aiming to establish a global Islamic Caliphate.

While the Muslim communities everywhere are faced with terrorist threat from within and discrimination and marginalisation from without, they continue to live in a state of denial, blaming it all on the Western powers. They do not realise that their isolation is increasing and that that they are falling behind in the fields of science and technology, economic prosperity and overall human development compared to other religious communities. The prediction made in 1992 by Prof Samuel P. Huntington in his famous essay “The Clash of Civilizations,” that, eventually, Islamic Civilisation will confront the Western and Oriental Civilisations in a cataclysmic contest is increasingly becoming real.

While terrorists are ripping apart states, societies and families, our usual reaction has been that “Islam is a religion of peace. The terrorists are not Muslims, because a true Muslim cannot do such inhuman acts.” The terrorist organisations display their Islamic banner and symbols and quote frequently from the Holy Scriptures to justify their acts. They have even been able to garner some support, not only among the rural, uneducated, deprived communities, but among educated urban youth too. The majority of Muslims are unable to come up with a strong counter narrative. Time is running out for them to stand up to defend their faith. They cannot afford to let their religion get hijacked by few misguided maniacs. It's time to stand up and be counted.

The writer is Registrar, East-West University.