Muslims must confront the monster of extremism within the community

As reports of horrific Orlando shooting emerged, I wrote a post on Facebook that could be read as condemnation of the incident and apprehensions that this may lead to rising instances of Islamophobic rants, and worse, attacks. 

Within minutes, a young practising Muslim woman expressed her frustration on my post:

"Do we Muslims again have to start the series of apologies for someone who bears a Muslim name. Sick of the hypocrisy!!! We shouldn't as no one cares anymore!!! People who want to see the truth will anyways try to look for it and for those who are blind will remain blind forever."

She is right in many ways as it is rather sad that the tragic event has given Islamophobic bigots from the states to India an opportunity to blame Islam and abuse its practitioners in the name of condemning the incident.

It is rather awkward that rightists, who otherwise regard homosexuality against nature and abuse LGBT community, are pretending to empathise with the Orlando victims.

But the incident is also yet another wake-up call for Muslims to recognise the rot within, the devils amongst us. It is a difficult task for often there are few differences. Some of the selfies of Omar Mateen circulating on social media are not of the "types" you would associate with religious bigots after all.

Of course, vast majority of Muslims, like majority of human beings, are peace-loving and they all disassociate themselves from a miniscule number of Takfiris, one who claims to be but are not really Muslims, that is, not follow the correct paths as taught by the Prophet.

We may all point in unison how such terrorists and enemies of humanity cannot belong to the religion of peace that Prophet Muhammad preached. And that often the majority of the victims of such madness are all Muslims. Don't misunderstand me; I am not blaming the sacred texts or the religion.

The fact that Islam is over 1,400 years old while the deadly form of terrorism - where innocents are being slaughtered for no known faults of their own - is a contemporary phenomenon, stretching hardly a few decades.  

The problems of the post-colonial societies, the neo-imperialist designs of the western hegemonic powers, the everyday racism and Islamophobia that immigrants suffer in the West, the injustices, for example, in Palestine or Xinjiang are all real and none can deny these.

Security agencies and the larger narrative around acts of terror is no doubt as flawed and biased in the way they loosely use words like jihad, Islamic State, Caliphate, et al and end up legitimising the very institution they hope to criticise. And these surely have negative bearing.

But equally true is the growing siege mentality, caused by feelings of injustice. The disenchantment, feeling of alienation among Muslim youth from the suburbs of Paris, Birmingham, Florida to Muslim pockets in Chennai or Kolkata are all real.

Consequently they hope to seek solace to all problems, social, political, economic in religion.

Meanwhile, the so called Muslim leadership appear to have their priorities misplaced fighting among themselves on who is more faithful and whose sect is closer to the teachings of God. They increasingly appear out of sync with time and are busier raising frivolous issues for narrow political gains. They express outrage at the drop of their caps and issue meaningless fatwa on most random of things.   

Most of mullahs and so-called Muslim leaders have themselves not studied sociology, psychology or other relevant social sciences and hence you hear some of them speaking about "lightly beating" your wives.

Expecting them to even understand what delinquent behaviour is, and the youth sub-culture is increasingly getting more violent is unreasonable. But the so-called liberal university educated intelligentsia too has miserably failed.

Disenchanted and alienated youth meanwhile hope to "go back to sources", often discarding centuries of scholarships; more importantly discarding the socio-political contexts.  Unregulated Islam through Facebook and YouTube, fuelled of course by some most regressive televangelists and Muslim missionaries, are doing little good to the volatile minds of youth.

Imagine, someone who grew up in the United States purportedly got agitated seeing young men hugging and kissing! The Orlando massacre after all had little to do with politics of any country, but everything to do with homophobia.  Islam after all, like all Semitic religions regard homosexuality as sin. In fact reports have emerged of how a Baptist Pastor celebrated the massacre.

Few weeks back, a gay editor and several other secular activists, writers and non-Muslims have targeted in past few months in Bangladesh.  And it is not just homophobia, on Friday, a policeman beat an octogenarian Hindu man in Pakistan allegedly because he ate food in front of him while he was fasting. What kind of abstinence is this that the man in uniform could not resist the craving for food; and worse could not control his anger!

But it is not any more about the malaise of some lunatics misinterpreting religion and justifying their madness in the name of Islam. The problem is also about how as a community we are not able to stand up against such barbaric acts and confront the growing monster within the community. We have, in the process, let out religion being hijacked by those misconstrued and deviant sub-culture.  

It does not mean that people are getting more religious, it only implies a sub-culture of delinquents is growing and they abuse name of religion. Sadly, however, neither the society at large nor the Muslim leadership appear alert, they are rather caught napping.

Islam, the holy Quran and other sacred texts are sources of inspiration for the majority of Muslims to be good human beings; and behave well with fellow citizens. But the same Quran is being misused by some to justify their narrow political goals or madness.

We Muslims love giving examples of the likes of Ummar ibn Al-Khattab or Ali ibn Abi Talib as ideal Muslims, besides Prophet of Islam. But a non-Muslim who hardly knows or meets any Muslim would form his opinion about Islam or Muslim based on what he sees in media or the kind of Muslim he meets.

Few days ago, thousands of people had gathered in America to mourn the death of the great boxing champion Muhammad Ali, who made 'being Muslim cool in the West'.

It is high time, Muslim community as whole should stop living in denial, acknowledge the rot within, introspect on the directions we want the community to take and finally confront the monster of growing extremism head-on before it is too late.