My heart goes out more than words can say to the victims of the shooting and their families. I can't imagine the nightmare of going to a club for a night of letting loose and being with friends, only to be faced with terror and gunshots. I also cannot imagine the panic of friends and family waiting for the news that their loved ones are safe. Life will be forever altered for everyone involved in this.
I wanted to be honest about my initial reaction to hearing that the gunman called 911 to declare his allegiance to Daesh. The internet tells me I'm not alone in how I felt, and also that a lot of people persist in that gut reaction, making choices from a place of fear without stopping to take a breath. That breath, that pause for reflection, is vitally important in situations where tensions and emotions run high. It's why we need people who are level-headed to be the decision makers in a crisis. I really want to emphasize this.
For anyone who hasn't read it, I would highly recommend clicking over to the statement from the mods at /r/Islam about the events at Pulse Nightclub. It links to a number of Muslim scholars who categorically condemn the attacks (and other users have posted innumerable links below that). If that's not convincing because of a lingering suspicion that this is a façade and the majority of Muslims harbor Daesh sympathies, then please consider this:
Your fear is what the terrorists want.
No, that is not a cliché to help you summon your courage.
The following is a statement from the Daesh magazine, Dabiq1:
As the world progresses towards al-Malhamah al-Kubrā [the great battle before the end of the world] the option to stand on the sidelines as a mere observer is being lost. As those with hearts diseased by hypocrisy and bid’ah [heresy] are driven towards the camp of kufr [disbelief], those with a mustard seed of sincerity and Sunnah [traditions] are driven towards the camp of īmān [faith]. Muslims in the crusader countries will find themselves driven to abandon their homes for a place to live in the Khilāfah [Caliphate], as the crusaders increase persecution against Muslims living in Western lands so as to force them into a tolerable sect of apostasy in the name of “Islam” before forcing them into blatant Christianity and democracy... Eventually, the gray zone will become extinct and there will be no place for grayish calls and movements. There will only be the camp of īmān versus the camp of kufr.
I'll paraphrase from Reddit user /u/maxwellmaxwell: Daesh is counting on the West to respond to attacks like the one in Orlando, violently. When we do, and ultimately devastate the Muslim-majority nation to which we direct our response, its civilians will find themselves living in a war-torn shell of their former home, with friends and family killed off by faceless drone strikes and no prospects for the future. This will only increase the pull of extremism. If for no other reason than that it pays.
Equally important, it will alienate Muslims from their non-Muslim neighbors. As /u/maxwellmaxwell posted, "If you can get angry, scared people to scream at a stranger for wearing a hijab or deface a mosque or vote for a politician who promises to do horrible things to Muslims, you can put a wedge between people in the hope of creating more extremists and forcing Muslims to make a choice between Islam and the West instead of doing what Jeffersonian democracy has historically prized: celebrating one's own culture and beliefs while remaining part of and contributing to the greater society."
Islam is not some mysterious force impelled by dark magic. Its history and tenets are well-known, its holy book is freely available. Anyone can read for themselves that these attacks do not represent what Islamic belief is. Anyone can spend five seconds on Google and discover terrorism is rooted in a very specific social, cultural, and economic context. And yet, it's like we fear terrorists the same way we feared a lunar eclipse before the advent of astronomy, reading into it all manner of omens and auguries. I believe no small part of our anxiety is derived from the eschatological narrative into which conservatives have zealously inserted a religion of billions, and I get it. This country is saturated with people who are both uncritical and unwavering in their certainty of the apocalypse in which they are living, and it's easy to be influenced by the hysteria when events like this play so easily into their rhetoric. But we cannot let that happen. It may sound trite but please, do not give the terrorists what they want. Do not turn on your neighbors and transfigure us into a country bitterly divided by religion, a division our founders came here to escape. That is not who we are.
Attacks like this are not some insurmountable menace portending the end of the world. They are acts of desperation and cowardice, and we give them credit when we incorporate them into a grand scheme of prophecy and horsemen. This too will pass, and we need to proceed with a long view of history even though, or especially because, the terrorists have grandly placed themselves at the end.
#orlandostrong
Note: If you are unfamiliar with Islam and are looking for an introduction, I can't recommend enough Reza Aslan's No god but God. Which I will probably discuss in a separate post sometime in the future.
Note: If you are unfamiliar with Islam and are looking for an introduction, I can't recommend enough Reza Aslan's No god but God. Which I will probably discuss in a separate post sometime in the future.
2 Dabiq Issue 7: From Hypocrisy to Apostasy - The Extinction of the Gray Zone [Warning: images and content are disturbing].
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