Mumbai's Muslims Refuse to Bury Muslim Terrorists

[New York Times] Thomas L. Friedman - The nine Pakistani Muslim terrorists who went on an utterly senseless killing rampage in Mumbai on 26/11 - India's 9/11 - gunning down more than 170 people, including 33 Muslims, scores of Hindus, as well as Christians and Jews - are still in the morgue because the leadership of India's Muslim community is refusing to allow them to be buried in the main Muslim cemetery of Mumbai. "People who committed this heinous crime cannot be called Muslim," said Hanif Nalkhande, a spokesman for the Muslim Jama Masjid Trust which runs the cemetery. M.J. Akbar, the Indian-Muslim editor of Covert, an Indian investigative journal, explained: "Terrorism has no place in Islamic doctrine. The Koranic term for the killing of innocents is 'fasad.' Terrorists are fasadis, not jihadis." The in-your-face defiance of Islamist terrorists by Mumbai's Muslims stands out against a dismal landscape of predominantly Sunni Muslim suicide murderers who have attacked civilians in mosques and markets from Iraq to Pakistan to Afghanistan, but who have been treated by mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera, or by extremist Islamist spiritual leaders and Web sites, as "martyrs" whose actions deserve praise. The only effective way to stop this trend is for "the village" - the Muslim community itself - to say "no more"; for the culture and faith community to delegitimize this kind of behavior, openly, loudly and consistently. India's Muslims, the second-largest Muslim community in the world after Indonesia, do a great service to Islam by delegitimizing suicide-murderers.


2009-02-18 06:00:00

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