Source: New Haven Register

By Sohail Husain MD

POSTED: 01/31/15, 1:55 PM EST |

If you are like most people, you don’t inherently hate anybody’s faith. You believe that religion is personal.

But, you also can’t avoid the recent headlines. They tell of a string of incidents involving the same suspect.

Firstly, basic civil liberties seem to be at stake. Two militant Muslims with alleged ties to al-Qaida gun down occupants in the Paris office of the satirist magazine Charlie Hebdo as retribution for publishing cartoons that degraded Islam’s holy founder the Prophet Muhammad. Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, a blogger faces a ghastly sentence of a thousand flogs for vague accusations of “insulting Islam.” Even the seasonal snowman is unsafe; at a whim, a Saudi cleric issues a fatwa that the white, rounded fluffy bodies are now banned.

In Syria and Iraq, ISIS continues a year-long campaign of terror against religious and ethnic minorities through public beheadings and cold-blooded murders. They hail to an autocrat who they dub the “Caliph,” or “Khalifa,” a title originally given to the spiritual leadership formed after the demise of the Prophet Muhammad 1,400 years ago.

Secondly, there is the onslaught against children and their right to an education. The Pakistani Taliban attacks a school in session in Northern Pakistan during broad daylight and kills 141 people, mostly children. In Nigeria, the Boko Haram, which literally means “Western education is forbidden,” abducts young schoolgirls, rampages several villages, blows up a large occupied mosque belonging to opponents, and declares its own Caliphate, which rules by a brutal version of Sharia governance.

A common element in each of each of these violent acts is that they were perpetrated by Muslim extremists and in the name of Islam.

Would it then be wrong to come to the conclusion that something is not right with the Muslim religion?

Well, this Muslim submits that you can certainly pin the blame on a group of misguided Muslims, but blaming Islam is the wrong thing to do.

Here’s why.

The Muslim holy book the Quran teaches that, “There should be no compulsion in religion, because truth is distinct from falsehood. (2:257)” Regarding just relations, the Quran instructs Muslims to observe absolute justice: “And let not a people’s enmity incite you to act otherwise than with justice. Be always just, that is nearer to righteousness. (5:9)”

Even a basic study of the Prophet’s life — which very few detractors of the Prophet have actually done — reveals that upon declaring his Divine mission, the Prophet suffered bitter persecution from his townspeople of Mecca for 13 years with complete forbearance. After migrating to the distant town of Medina, where he was made the chief, he was attacked by an army of Meccans. In an epic passage, the Quran mentions that God then gave the Muslims permission to fight back, not just to defend themselves, but to uphold the freedom of worship for all faiths; they were instructed to protect, “monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques, wherein the name of God is oft commemorated (22:41).” This is indeed a completely different Islam than what’s written in the operation manual or madrasa syllabus of extremists groups.

So as we shuffle to figure out ways to stamp out Muslim extremism, here are three crucial steps we often skip:

1. Don’t support extremism. Sounds simple, but we really do need to hold off from supporting extremists, irrespective of our short-term gains. In the ’80s, the U.S. administration nurtured the extremist group the Afghan Mujahedeen and even applauded them “Freedom Fighters,” because they opposed our archrivals the Soviets. Today, they have morphed into the Taliban. To avoid paying long-term losses, the best course is to unequivocally reject extremism.

2. Do support moderates. Yes, they are out there. In fact, they represent the overwhelming majority of good Muslim citizens in the world. I belong to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, whose spiritual head Hadhrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad is known as the Khalifa. His message is one of peace, which he has recently taken across the globe including to Capitol Hill. He believes in a separation of mosque and state and has been at the forefront of condemning extremism. Under his direction, my USA Community just launched a nationwide initiative called “Stop the CrISIS,” which features lectures at university campuses, aimed at providing an understanding of the true principles of Islam. The voice of moderate Muslims and their leaders need to be brought to the forefront.

3. Stop defaming the Prophet of Islam. Muslims revere the Prophet more than any other person and find it difficult to engage with people who make it a point to mock their beloved. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, several Muslim leaders, including my own, decried the incident as an affront to society and against Islam. We wrote extensively against the atrocity and went on air, as well. The response from several other circles, however, was less mature. It was to augment Charlie Hebdo’s capacity to more widely publish its derogatory caricatures of the Prophet. A magazine that by many estimates was on the verge of bankruptcy, with a circulation of barely about 60,000, received orders in two weeks that swelled in excess of 6 million. And the revived company’s first order of business was almost predictable: reprint caricatures of the Prophet. Over a hundred years ago, in response to similar attacks on the Prophet, the founder of my Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Hadhrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who lived in India during British rule, implored the Indian government to place a moratorium, for at a few short years, on derogatory statements against the holy personages of any faith. Instead, he suggested, religious groups should be encouraged to host interfaith dialogue with the purpose of learning about the virtues of one another’s founders. This policy would encourage tolerance and harmony; and you could still conduct a religious debate, but without insults. I believe we still have a chance. And I commend leaders such as Pope Francis for stating, when asked about the Charlie Hebdo incident, that free speech “cannot make provocations,” especially against people’s faiths.

So to blame Islam or the Prophet for the problem with Muslim extremists today would mean that we should also blame Christianity or Jesus for the Spanish Inquisition, a centuries-long program of systematic torture, expulsion, and forceful conversion of peoples (who were mostly Muslims of Southern Spain). Or we should hold Christianity responsible for the generational enslavement of millions of Africans by Christian slaveowners, who justified their actions using passages from the Bible. The abuse of religion is lengthy and extends even beyond Christians or Muslims.

Faith is definitely a personal matter. Its primary purpose is to elevate a person’s character. So definitely call out those who give religion a bad name. We have every right to blame Muslim extremists, but it is completely unfair to attack Islam or its noble Prophet.

Dr. Sohail Husain, a pediatrician, is a former president of the Connecticut chapter of the USA Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Youth Organization (www.alislam.org). Readers may email him atsohailzhusain@gmail.com.

 Reference