Islam's Faithful

"The women they hurt -- the mothers, the sisters. Our religion is not supposed to be like this."

No, it isn't, is it? But it is and it is used to further the aspirations of those who feel that the Muslims who deplore the violent atrocities committed by dedicated-to-violence jihadists do not reflect the values of the religion they worship, nonetheless. Muslims appear not to be capable of understanding that it is other Muslims who confer upon their beloved religion the realized impression that Islam is a religion of violence, oppression and violations held firmly now by the West.

Their rejection of reality has resulted in agonized, self-defeating and self-protecting charges of "Islamophobia". Yet viewing those who have studiedly transformed Islam back to its post-medieval roots as a conquering tribal religion whose persuasively violent migration from the Middle East to Africa to Europe and Asia through brutality and oppression as barbaric throw-backs to their ancestral heritage seems too difficult a mental exercise for sensitivity-injured Muslims.

Even when they are themselves subjected to the malign and viciously degrading violations of their own human rights through bloody mayhem visited upon them, they deny that these are the actions of Muslims. Just as the fanatical Muslims deny that those whom they prey upon are true Muslims. There is something quite intrinsically wrong with Islam among those who profess to have faith in it, when sectarian animosity is so great that Sunni and Shia murder one another.

Naming one another as heretics, insults to the true religion, each assembles their collective clan, tribal and sectarian hatred to attack the other, and no amount of bloody carnage seems to satisfy their animus. Islamic precepts teach followers that the sin of leaving Islam for another religion is so great it transcends murder and the punishment meted out must be death. Seen as an appropriate punishment for the Amidaya and Sufi, for example.

In northern Mali, for the time being, the French military has rousted the al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb-affiliated Islamists and Tuaregs who had initiated their robust strategy to take possession of the greatest expanse of terrorist-controlled territory in the world in the Sahara desert, crossing the African continent. For almost a year they imposed their rigidly strict Sharia impression of the true nature of Islam on a people whose culture and traditions knew nothing of raging Islam.

Ancient manuscripts and monuments unique to their culture and their version of Islam, and pre-dating Islam, have been destroyed. The Sidi Yahya mosque dating from the 15th Century is bereft of the remains of a mausoleum held by the zealots to be an idolatrous monument deserving of destruction. Ancient Christian churches and Judaic Synagogues, along with sacred shrines and giant statues of ancient deities like the Bamiyan Buddhas equally deserving of destruction.

Timbuktu's ancient neighbourhoods now boast large tracts of land deserted, destroyed and abandoned. The city has assumed ghostlike aspects of closed shops, with blacked-out streets, a city silenced and traumatized through the ordeal it has suffered. Memories of young men used as warning with hands severed as illustration of punishment meted out to those who would be less than pure Muslim.

Women flogged for failing to dress modestly; an uncovered face sufficient to deserve such admonishment. The banning of music and public entertainment. The version of Islam that cut a wide swath from Afghanistan-Pakistan through Africa and the Middle East. And which has seeped into Europe, into North America, biding its time, awaiting opportunity. With the larger Muslim population denying such an unbelievable abduction and interpretation of their faith.

Defending those whose atrocities target them equally with the infidels, the Jews. "Our religion is not supposed to be like this". Muslims do not perform such unspeakable acts of brutal carnage.  They do not wear suicide vests and blow themselves up in mosques, churches and synagogues. They do not consign innocent people, women and children to early deaths.

Who then does, shouting as they do "Allahu Akbar!"?