(Wikimedia Commons; click to enlarge))
Nobody can legitimately charge me with despising Islam or hating Muslims, let alone with demanding the internment of American Muslims in camps. (See this post from yesterday, for example.)
I adamantly insist that ISIS and al-Qa’ida and their ilk represent a grotesquely deformed and evil caricature of the religion of al-Ghazali, Salah al-Din, Ibn Rushd (Averroës), Muhammad Abduh, Jalal al-Din Rumi, Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya, al-Biruni, Ibn Khaldun, Farid al-Din Attar, al-Khwarizmi, Ibn Tufayl, and my contemporary Muslim friends and acquaintances.
But — I’m sorry — it’s sheer, reality-denying, head-in-the-sand nonsense to suggest that the mass murder in San Bernardino had no connection whatever with Islam, that it simply reflects America’s own allegedly endemic culture of violence.
Tashfeen Malik, who evidently pledged her allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed “caliph” of the so-called “Islamic State,” shortly before she and her husband opened fire, came to the United States only in July 2014. She was born in Pakistan and raised in Saudi Arabia. She may well be the one who radicalized her husband and trained him as a bomb-maker and a killer.
It’s utterly absurd to suggest that this was simply yet another monotonous example of American gun-violence, unbeholden to any “foreign culture,” or to insinuate that, by the time he launched his assault on his unarmed victims, Syed Farooq was as American as apple pie.
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