Originally Published in San Jose Mercury News As a Muslim, I condemn the horrific attack that occurred in Paris as inhumane and un-Islamic. I express my heartfelt condolences and prayers to the families of the victims. It is very troubling that there has been a rise of such horrific acts being carried out in the name of God and Islam. There is no room in Islamic teaching for such violence. The...
Originally posted in Advisor and Source Newspaper And so the carnage continues. A Bengali blogger, Oyasiqur Rhaman, was hacked to death on Monday morning by three assailants after posting satirical comments against extremist Muslims. These so called “Muslims” should be punished by the full extent of the law, and those that have been promoting and influencing people to commit such...
Originally posted on The Tribune Five years ago, I lost close friends in one of the most gruesome terrorist attacks on Pakistani soil. In twin attacks on two major Ahmadi places of worship in Lahore, 88 worshippers were martyred by the Taliban. It was a painfully bloody day. This weekend, I woke up to sad news from Pakistan that made me relive some of that pain. Fourteen worshipers were martyred...
Originally posted on The Tribune NEW JERSEY: The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has claimed responsibility for the attack on two churches in Lahore. In 2013, a similar church attack in Peshawar claimed more than 80 innocent lives. These extremists defy the teachings of the Holy Quran which instructs Muslims to protect all places of worship, explicitly mentioning churches. The perpetrators of...
Originally posted in San Jose Mercury News Just miles away from Ground Zero, three Muslim men plotted to leave this country and join ISIL, the so-called “Islamic State.” As a Muslim, news like this is disheartening but it serves as a vivid reminder that radicalization, unfortunately, remains a pressing problem even in the United States. It is time for us to act, but more than just...
Originally posted on Huffington Post The so-called Islamic State (IS) continues to demonstrate the most barbaric and heinous forms of torture, killing of innocent people for the world to witness in horror. The recent killings of Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto of Japan, the burning alive of Jordanian pilot Moaz Kasasbeh and the cold-blooded killing of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya highlight the new...
Originally posted in The Baltimore Sun Recently, a Sun poll asked readers whether “avoiding the phrase ‘Islamic extremism’ when referring to certain terrorist groups take[s] away their power as religious leaders, as the president contends?” (Feb. 19). There are about 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and a majority of them disagree strongly with the actions and ideologies...
George Washington once said, “Discipline is the soul of an army.” Indeed, our founding father knew what discipline meant when just a handful of Americans had to earn the freedom that we hold dear today. The soul of that revolutionary army is what created the soul of America today. A very little known fact from that time is that part of the soul of those early patriots were the souls of American...
The terrible news of four Marines and a sailor shot to death in Chattanooga doesn’t come as a surprise. While details remain sketchy, the story line in similar attacks is all too familiar: A young man born and bred in the West with a seemingly normal life and a future falls prey to an extremist ideology and goes up in flames taking down innocents with him. What little we know about Muhammad...
The devastating terrorist attacks in France, Tunisia and Kuwait by Islamic State-inspired groups in the sacred month of Ramadan exposed the doctrinal flaws in their so-called Islamic caliphate. The world is in dying need of absolute peace and justice for all mankind, and claiming to be God’s representative on earth while carrying out the massacre of innocent souls is an affront to the Islamic...