by Sheikh Umar Ahmad
The month of Ramadan is about to conclude and we are going to celebrate the Eid-2019 as a mark of the successful passage of this month, remaining steadfast in prayers and in fasting.
We are inching closer to say goodbye to this blessed month until next year. At the same time, Muslim Ummah is facing the brunt of religious intolerance from major power packed nations in the world, who negatively perceive Muslims as the only terrorists on earth. They spread hate crimes against Muslims, follow policies of deceit and deception and do every possible to destroy the image of Muslims in the world by framing policies that are at the heart of anti-Muslim cooperation.
No one accepts Islam as the religion of peace, everyone thinks of us as the fundamental extremists, spearheading this false notion of theirs, that we hatch terrorist conspiracies against other religious majorities in the world.
In Islam, there is no provision of forcefully converting any person to Islam unless and until he is not accepting it by heart and they think we are forcefully making anti-Muslims to accept our religion when we know it is otherwise true. We are not allowed to enter into the battlefield until a full war is declared against Muslims. But we do see a full-fledged war has been declared against Muslims and Islam. We have been left at the mercy of Allah as no other religion thinks of us as being the religion with equal rights as they withhold. Every time, anything happens in the world, it is presumed first hand to have been done by a Muslim terrorist.
Terrorism has no religion and no religion holds policies of terrorism in its manifesto. Every religion is based on the true spirit of spreading the message of peace and so does the religion of Islam. There are some terrorist organizations working in the world to malign the true image of Islam on the earth. They are not our product. No religion spearheads terrorism. They are in fact the conspiracy policies of those who wish to see Muslims be butchered in every part of the world, who work to destroy the true image of Islam and who want to interrupt the growth of Islam. Right now, Islam is the fastest growing religion being followed right now in the world.
Amid all these hate crimes the world over, the Muslims themselves are dividing merely on the pretext of little misunderstandings and confusions that have deeply affected the global consensus of Muslim majority nations. We see day in and day out, how the Muslims are subjected to the worst form of deceit, damage, and how they are butchered as like never before. Our hearts are bleeding every day on seeing this sorry state of affairs.
But we are sorry enough that we can’t control this religious imperialism, courtesy we are divided at the grassroots level. How far we have seen this bloodshed of Muslims happening while safeguarding their religion and how far more we have to see this. We are hapless right now but not enough that we can’t defend our religion. They can defeat us monetarily, socially, psychologically, but they must remember that they can’t defeat our conscience; they can never defeat our ideology.
Time has to come to make it clear to the world that we are not terrorists on earth, but we are the ambassadors of peace. The religion of Islam is the abode of love, compassion and tranquillity for everyone to live a peaceful and dignified life irrespective of his/her religion.
But for that Muslim world need to mend its ways. Muslim states need to work in coordination to shun away from this religious bigotry before they will work to shun this religious intolerance and hate crimes against Muslims world over. We see how the Muslim world stands divided at various fronts. It is not time to quarrel on murkier issues that do not pertain to Islam but we need to collaborate and corroborate on religious fronts, work in tandem and work as a unit to come clean to the world that we are not divided, we are not terrorists, but we carry the message of peace for the world. Give us a chance and you will find the world a better place to live in.
Let’s pledge this Eid to shun away internal and political dissociations among ourselves and to work in association to dispel away this notion of Muslims being the religious extremists spreading terrorism in the world that otherwise is totally baseless. Let’s come forward and celebrate this Eid with these things in mind to safeguard our religion and to safeguard our identity.
(The author is Doctoral Research Scholar (DST INSPIRE) at CSIR IIIM Jammu, (J&K). Ideas expressed in this opinion are personal).
