Muslims: Who is listening to the Moderates?

       Recently the muslim Deobandi clergy who congregated in  UP had clearly said that taking innocent lives is terrorism and it is not permitted in Islam to take the lives of innocents.
     
       Unfortunately this news of condemnation of terrorists and terrorism in the name of Islam never got a mention in any news paper or journal out side India.   
        
       That is a major  problem. The western press is simply not interested to learn of anything positive about Islam.
       
       Surprisingly there was no mention in papers even from Pakistan, a selfstyled Muslim ‘moderate’ country or Bangladesh Malaysia or Egypt, Iran or Iraq.
      Muslim countries themselves need look towards moderates  if they want others outside to look and listen to the good people practicing Islam. 
      
Am placing an article by Haroon Sidique for your perusal
 colrama
 Haroon Siddique
There was a distinct lack of interest when one of the world’s most senior Islamic clerics condemned extremists.
Rightwing politician Geert Wilders, whose film the Dutch government is currently considering banning, has said there is no such thing as moderate Islam.His view is an extreme one, but how many times have we read or heard calls for moderate Muslims to speak out about wrongs supposedly carried out in the name of Islam?

Politicians including Tony Blair and various commentators – here’s a Telegraph leader – have urged the moderate voice of Islam to make itself heard above the din of extremist preachers.

Last week, one of the most respected clerics in Shia Islam, Lebanon’s grand ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, condemned the perpetrators of an attack against pilgrims in Iraq as “murderers and animals” and called for the repudiation of a school of thought that it was permissible to spill the blood of Muslims “who embrace another doctrine, or believe in alternative political views”.

While in this case the victims – as well as the attackers – were Muslim, Fadlullah, one of the Muslim world’s few Grand Ayatollahs (they have the authority to make legal decisions within the confines of Islamic law for followers and lower-rank clerics) was condemning the phenomenon of “takfir”, which sees some militant Muslims regard non-believers as a legitimate target.

If you do not remember reading or hearing about his comments that is probably because you did not. His words, reported by Reuters, might have been expected to be picked up by the same media which regularly feature writers bemoaning a lack of moderate Muslims. But there was no mention of his strong words in the British papers, their websites or that of the BBC.

Admittedly, Fadlallah’s comments were made in reference to an attack that would not have raised much of a stir outside of Iraq, immune as we have become to the violence still blighting the country.

But can you remember such a senior figure in Islam, especially one who has called for a boycott of Israeli and US goods, ever hitting out at “silence in the Islamic world over these criminal operations which annihilate children, women and the elderly, from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Iraq”?

The intention of this post is not to hurl wild allegations of Islamophobia at the press – a number of media organisations picked up on Turkey’s attempt to create a modern interpretation of Islam, and it even made it on to the Sun’s discussion board.

But if a leading Muslim cleric had called for a holy war against moderates, would the media not have told us about that?

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