Here is an article by Manny Schewitz .
Every year in northern India, Muslims gather in Ajmer for the Urs festival to remember the death of Moinuddin Chishti, a Sufi Islamic cleric and scholar. This year, around 70,000 clerics who attended issued a fatwa condemning terrorism, but you’ll never hear about this from the conservative media or politicians who are trying to whip up hatred toward Muslims.
Sufi Muslims have suffered greatly at the hands of Muslim extremists around the world, especially in Pakistan. ISIS/Daesh is probably the most extreme, warped interpretation of Islam, and has had no problem with killing anyone, Muslim or not, who fails to go along with their suicide cult. They’re hated in nearly every country with significant Muslim populations, as a recent Pew Research poll has shown.
It shouldn’t be any surprise then that clerics who attended the Urs festival would issue this condemnation and ask the media to stop referring to these terrorist organizations as Muslims.
Via The Times of India:
Mufti Mohammed Saleem Noori, one of the clerics who passed the fatwa told TOI on Tuesday, “From Sunday onwards, when the annual Urs began, members of Dargah Aala Hazrat have been distributing forms among followers seeking signatures to show that those signing stand against terrorism. Nearly 15 lakh Muslims have recorded their protest. Around 70,000 clerics from across the world, who were part of the event, passed the fatwa.”
Noori said he would like to request the media to stop calling terrorist groups “Muslim organizations”.
Hazrat Subhan Raza Khan, chairperson of the influential Dargah Aala Hazrat, said that following the Paris attacks, it was decided that a fatwa should be passed at the Urs this year, so the message went out loud and clear that the Muslim community condemns terrorism. (Source)
I’m not sure what it will take for Islamophobes around the world to understand that the Muslim community as a whole is not responsible for the acts of terrorism committed by individuals who claim to follow Islam. I’m an atheist; I think all religions have been used over the past few thousand years to subjugate the masses, rationalize greed and hatred, and convince billions of human beings to trade their happiness in this life for the promise of everlasting joy in an afterlife that nobody has proven to exist.
Consider the fact that the Christian Bible is full of commandments to kill unbelievers, and even though Christians argue that those are the old laws that Jesus nullified, they still cite the Old Testament to justify their bigotry toward a variety of people. There are plenty of passages in the Koran that have been used to rationalize extremism, and they really aren’t that distinguishable from the texts of the early Bible.
The point is that throughout history, religion has been used to defend all sorts of horrific acts, and not just by radical outsider groups either, but as state-sponsored subjugation and genocide. The Inquisition that was sponsored by the Catholic Church killed, tortured, exiled or forced conversion on hundreds of thousands of Jews and Muslims for centuries, and wasn’t completely abolished until almost 200 years ago.
Christianity has also been used in modern America, a country that was supposed to be founded on freedom of religion, to justify slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, lynchings by the KKK, homophobia and even shooting up Planned Parenthood clinics.
Conservative shock jock pundits like Ann Coulter have made a successful career out of bashing Muslims, minorities and other people their followers have been taught to hate. Fox News regularly allows her on their channel as a contributor, and other right-wing media sources habitually use fear-mongering to promote traffic to their false stories that vilify Muslims.
The overwhelming majority of Muslims today reject ISIS and various terrorist groups. Asking a Muslim in Detroit or Berlin to speak out against the actions of ISIS/Daesh is both useless, and insulting, because the terrorist group couldn’t care less if most Muslims approve of their actions. We don’t go around demanding Christians reject the violent passages in the Bible, or lump them all in with David Duke or Kevin Swanson, so there’s no need to do that with everyone who follows Islam.