Of all religions, only Islam has spawned an evil stream of terror and criminality that runs against everything Islam truly stands for. A religion that brought a message of peace and kindness to all people, without exception, is being used to justify murder and mayhem. Hardly an hour passes without the dagger of terror stabbing our humanity in the back. Hardly a day passes without the name of our religion being sullied by thugs who have no qualms burning, bombing and killing without distinction men and women, old and young, Muslims and non-Muslims. It is like a wave of ritual killing has hit the land, clothed in a deceptive mantle of divine words twisted out of shape, taken out of context, distorted beyond belief. And the worst part is that they boast about it. Those mindless criminals who commit nothing but horrors are so pleased with their handiwork that they publicise it for all to see. Their sickening pride, as they mow down the innocent in a barrage of bullets and bombs, makes one wonder: Where did we go wrong? What kind of scourge has torn religious discourse out of shape, diverting values and disembowelling a culture that Muslims took centuries to put together? How was the divine turned into the grotesque, the honourable into the treacherous, the knowledgeable into the ignorant, and the tolerant into the butcher? We are all guilty. We are guilty by association and guilty by neglect. We are guilty for letting the disease grow in our midst, for not acting in time to keep religious discourse on the straight and narrow, to protect the masses from the lunatic fringe, to insist on purifying our faith from the sediments of hatred and isolating misguided interpretations from the body of our beliefs. Denial is no longer the answer. We cannot just dismiss the criminals as non-Muslims when they are clearly using the name of Islam in their acts of insanity. Looking at the global scene of jihadism one runs into the same sounds and shapes of madness: Boko Haram echoes the Islamic State (IS), horrors in North Africa and the Sahel mirror those in Iraq and Syria, and are copied in northern France and southern Australia too. It is the same mind-set, only the names of the groups change, and the names of the victims. Horror committed in the name of our religion puts us all on the line: defenceless, weighing options, looking for excuses. We try to look into the reasons, we look for the cause; we delve into our psyche to see how we allowed so much horror to be born. There is of course the cultural shock of adaptation, of a traditional culture trying to cope with modernity, of the young and alienated seeking a sense of belonging. But even the worst dislocation and dysfunction wasn't supposed to produce such horror — not at this scale, not with such brutality. Not that we cannot guess at the deeper causes, for these must by now be clear to all. The religious aspect of Islam has failed to keep up with the times, remaining mummified in the past. Religious discourse has ossified in out-dated patterns, because we failed to bring it up to date, modernise it and keep it harmonious with our way of life. A dualism existed, between old ideals and modern practices, and in the resulting confusion caused the mental cracks through which radicalism made it into our midst, rising from the ashes like a spectre of times past. This is how the radicals want it. They oppose modernity, denounce our way of life as heathen and fight us all, using the very items of communication that modernity conveniently provided. It is an irony, but the IT revolution made it all possible. The surge in communication that brought the world so much good turned into a weapon of evil in the wrong hands, and the radical militants are now using modernity to fight everything that modernity stands for, everything that humanity stands for, and everything their own religion stands for. We have allowed our religious institutions to get lazy, teaching the past without venturing into the future. We have allowed the conservatives to sustain a message of resistance to the requisites of modern life. We have allowed the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafists and like-minded groups to poison the minds of the young with ideas that are incompatible with our times. And the distorted mind-sets that formed as a result, the upturned discourse one hears from traditional scholars, added fuel to the fire. Instead of using our religion to enlighten the young, we used it to mummify their brains, to straitjacket their ideas, and — unable to deal with the dualism of ideals and practice — the young exploded in a blaze of extremist fire. Our tolerance for inane piety landed us in times where deranged militants denounce everything that is normal and try to annihilate the most basic aspects of modern civilisation. In the cyber world, militants are running riot with their insanity, trying to create a parallel world in which ancient times replace modernity and everyone acts in the standardised, inane form they imagine Islam is all about. In a way, this too is our fault. What have we contributed to modern civilisation in recent memory? Had we been part of human progress the young would have taken pride in our achievements. But as it is, we were only consumers of civilisation, not creators. And our young are somewhat justified to feel alienated. That their reaction is to destroy human civilisation, denouncing it as ungodly, is extreme. But we, as Muslims, have to take our share of responsibility. Had we maintained a healthy rapport with modern civilisation, had we allowed ourselves to embrace it by deed and not just words, our young would have been less befuddled. Islam, a religion that spread from India to Spain, used to pride itself on its science and philosophy, the very things the militants now denounce. If we're going to defeat the militants, we have to give the young a sense of pride in a religion that can cope with reality. Only this will bring them back from the edge of horror, from the parallel world inhabited by militants and misfits. The writer is managing editor of the quarterly journal Al-Demoqrateya, published by Al-Ahram.
