"Victor[y] Or Martyrdom!"

"Canadian Muslims are law-abiding citizens and no one should get involved in international wars on the belief and excuse that they are helping their Muslim brothers. Canadian Muslims who might do this are promoting disloyalty to their government."
"Any Canadian individuals taking up arms and fighting foreign governments are actually breaking the laws of their own country. We believe that any Canadian citizen who takes up arms should do so only in the legal context of the Canadian law and government."
"[The] narrow bigoted dogmatic distortions of the purveyors of violence and terror] do not speak for Calgary Muslims."
"[Canada's imams are prepared to take part in] meaningful discussions, to engage in preventative strategies and to find meaningful solutions to this growing threat in our country."
Decree, Canadian Council of Imams

AP Photo/Militant Website, File    ISIS fighters marching in Raqqa, Syria in January 2014. The country's conflict has been a magnet for foreign jihadists.

"But of course it is a kind of Islamic opinion about this issue [radicalization of Calgary Muslim youth]."
"If we are not able to approach them or to guide them in the right way they may be tripped up by someone. And it affects the whole community."
"The community needs direction in such a situation."
Calgary Imam Mohammad Iqbal Nadvi

Not only are Calgary's Muslim populations perturbed by the revelations that a number of young Muslim Calgarians have been radicalized and recruited as jihadists but the community of Canadian imams have also involved themselves in decrying the activities of young Muslims like Damian Clairmont, Salman Ashrafi and others who have left Canada to engage in the conflicts that are wracking the Middle East and North Africa.

At a meeting that took place several weeks earlier, a decree was drafted and then issued proclaiming that anyone who takes part in overseas wars is breaking the laws of Canada and in the process also violating Islamic principles. Western jihadists from all over Europe and North America have flocked to the battlefields that Syria, Somalia, Libya and Iraq have become. Joining up with Islamist militias like Al Shabab, ISIS and Boko Haram, young Canadian Muslims have committed themselves to jihad and martyrdom.

Former Calgarian Farah Mohamed Shirdon, posing under Abu Usama wrote on Twitter several weeks back: "Beheading Shias is a beautiful thing". On another occasion he had triumphantly tweeted: "Victor or martyrdom!". It is estimated that approximately one hundred Canadians are serving abroad with Islamist extremists, according to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Canadians took part in the siege of January 2013 at an Algerian gas plant, as well as November 2013's suicide bombing in Iraq, killing 19.

The imams decided  to issue their Islamic ruling, hoping to educate Muslims and to unequivocally affirm their commitment to countering terrorism. On the other hand, while some Muslim men may have been recruited within Mosques by radicals bent to that purpose, many of those who have converted to fundamentalist Islamism shun established mosques. Radicalized Muslims have not been shy about publicly disclosing their loyalties. They have set up large, well-publicized conferences where radical, or at the very least, fundamentalist Islamism has been celebrated.

No overtures from the collective Islamic clerical authorities condemning such overt instances of political Islam that dominates the attention of the young, rendering them ripe for going a little further toward committing to violent jihad appears to have taken place, other than by anti-Islamist activists such as outspoken and constantly threatened Tarek Fatah has come to the notice of observant bystanders to the situation unfolding within the Muslim community, however.

Just as a struggle has surfaced in North Africa and the Middle East between mainstream Islam and extremists using social media to recruit impressionable young Muslims to jihad, successfully recruiting an endless stream of new jihadis, in Canada a similar contest appears to have resulted from within the broad Muslim community. Social media contacts confronting Muslim men looking for meaning in their Islamic approach to life have been hugely instrumental in affirming their sinister choices.

Police and Security agencies do their best to identify and track radicalized Canadians hoping to interrupt their plans to travel abroad to join jihad. Mohamed Hersi, arrested in 2011 in the ct of leaving Canada for Somalia was the first person to be convicted of the effort of leaving Canada with the intention of joining a terrorist militia in Somalia, the infamous Al-Shabab. From the following of young Somali men giving him moral support, it doesn't appear that his arrest and trial has been taken seriously.

In a morally forgiving and seemingly generous interpretation of what leads young men to leave the comfort and security of home for the battlefields of Islamist purity reflecting the Medieval era in its brutal disregard for human life and security, Imam Madvi stated his opinion that those drawn to extremist groups were 'saddened' by 'injustices' in the Muslim world, angry at the lack of response they perceive by the West.

An interpretation directly at odds, in fact, with realities that even the most removed bystander recognizes as actually occurring, which the recruits themselves clarify when they state their hatred of all things smacking of liberal democracy, in favour of the hardline oppression of Islamism, forcing its ideology, politics, and social structure on the wider world which has opened its welcome mat to Muslims fleeing the very human rights abuses they are newly prepared to impose upon others.