By M. Ali Lakhani
Indeed this community of yours is [but] a single community, and I am the Lord of you all: be then conscious of Me! Yet they fragmented their religion, each group exulting in their own [tenets]. But leave them alone, lost in their ignorance, until a [future] time [when they will be shown the error of their ways]. –Koran 23:53-55
Beware! Whoever is cruel and hard on a non-Muslim minority, or curtails their rights, or burdens them with more than they can bear, or takes anything from them against their free will; I [Prophet Muhammad] will complain against that person on the Day of Judgment. –Hadith
In the wake of the “9/11” and “7/7” attacks in the USA and Britain, the recent attacks in Paris, and the spate of barbaric attacks conducted by avowedly “Muslim” killers and theocratizing terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab and the so-called “Islamic State”, there is a deep suspicion about Islam and a fear of Muslims in the West. The suspicion and fear are driven in part by academic and intellectual arguments such as the Lewis-Huntington thesis of “A Clash of Civilizations”, but mostly by events and images in the news—‘suicide bombings’, public stabbings, beheadings and immolations; the destruction of antiquities from the patrimony of humankind—acts, often carried out in the name of Islam, that are clearly beyond the pale of all civilized norms.
Click here to read (PDF): Looking Beyond Islamophobia
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