Since 9/11, many have asked where “moderate” Muslims stand—as a collective entity, not isolated voices of individual Muslims—on global terrorism and suicide bombings perpetrated by their co-religionists.
Following last month’s London bombings, the gap between much-belated condemnations of terrorism by official Muslim spokespersons and imams (clerics), and passive conduct of Muslims in general as violence mounts has snapped the credulity of a great deal of people in the West.
Patrick Sookhdeo, writing recently in the British weekly, The Spectator, described the funeral held in absentia for the London bomber, Shehzad Tanweer, in his family’s ancestral village outside of Lahore, Pakistan. He noted:
“Thousands of people attended, as they did again the following day when a qul ceremony was held for Tanweer. During the qul, the Koran is recited to speed the deceased’s journey to paradise, though in Tanweer’s case this was hardly necessary. Being a shahid (martyr), he is deemed to have gone through straight to paradise. The 22-year-old from Leeds, whose bomb at Aldgate station killed seven people, was hailed by the crowd as ‘a hero of Islam.’ ”
Britain is now facing (as Canada inevitably will also) the public policy question of how to deal with native-born terrorists, while preserving multiculturalism as a working ideal in which so much effort has been invested over the past several decades.
It is now abundantly clear the source of Muslim terrorism is situated within the body politic of Islam and its adherents, irrespective of how many times, on the one hand, some Muslim spokespersons try to obscure this reality and, on the other, politicians of whatever stripe for electoral purposes behave as ostriches with their heads in the sand.
The young Muslim men born in the wards of British hospitals, who grew up playing cricket and soccer, came of age in a highly liberal, open, tolerant and pluralist society.
But they got programmed into becoming militants, some eventually into suicide bombers, by Islamists proselytizing in Muslim-organized centres, listening to imams preach a fundamentalist and sectarian version of Islam, and watching inflammatory anti-West, anti-Israel, and anti-Hindu television programs produced by the likes of al-Jazeera.
Public relations exercises mounted by Muslim organizations in Britain, as in Canada and the U.S., with imams as their leading spokesmen (since they are all men) condemning violence in abstract generalities can only delude the most gullible, uninformed segment of the population in liberal democracies.
Historically, the role of imams in preaching a version of Islam for violent political ends is indisputable.
From Ayatollah Khomeini’s role in unleashing a religious-political movement in Iran, to the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman’s responsibility in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, or from the fatwa (religious ruling) of Sheikh Qaradhawi (the popular Egyptian cleric based in Qatar) that it is permissible for Muslims to engage in suicide bombings against Israelis and American soldiers in Iraq, to his followers repeating the same here in Canada—imams and their acolytes have done their share in shaping the mentality of jihadis (Muslim warriors).
If imams in the West are to be a part of the solution in eradicating Muslim terrorism, by ending without any further excuse the bigoted preaching of political Islam in the guise of religious sermons, it must be preceded by unequivocal public admission of the role so many of them have played in the making of Muslim terrorists.
Only then might the public in liberal democracies view favourably the arduous efforts required by imams to heal wounds for which they bear great responsibility—wounds caused in part by poisonous words spoken within the sanctity of mosques.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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