I just read this on the Washington Post website and think that most of us need to join this school of thought. Islam is not served by the people who commit these acts or those who support them. Add your comments below.

Ramadan is the ninth month in the Islamic calendar and serves as a spiritual boot camp for Muslims. In this month, Muslims fast from dawn to dusk everyday; abstaining from food, water, sex and anything unpleasant and immoral. One is not allowed to get angry, speak rudely or even think of bad things. The purpose of the month is to take a break from deep entanglements in mundane affairs and make a systematic and concerted effort to reconnect with the divine and work on improving one’s personal moral character. 

For me, Ramadan is about returning to the fountain of truth and drinking from it as deeply as possible. It is not the parched throat but rather the parched soul that is my concern, so I study the Qur’an and contemplate on it. Other Muslims adhere more closely to rituals. I believe that while rituals discipline, knowledge is more transformative. But to each his own. The goal in Ramadan is really is to find a way, ritual, spiritual or intellectual, to get closer to God.

Unfortunately, for some Muslims, murder and mayhem rather than prayer and fasting have become the way to celebrate Ramadan.

On September 6, in the first week of Ramadan, two suicide bombers killed over 50 people in Peshawar, Pakistan. On September 13, five bombs killed over 30 in New Delhi, India. On September 15, a female suicide bomber blew herself up at a Ramadan fast breaking ceremony killing 22 people in Diyala, Iraq. On September 17, a truck bomb and some militants attacked the US embassy in San’a, Yemen killing 16 people. And on September 20, a massive truck bomb killed over 60 people in Islamabad, Pakistan.

All of these attacks have been conducted by people who call themselves “Jihadis”, this they claim is their struggle in the path of God. One cannot imagine to what extent the minds and the hearts of these people have become poisoned that in the month of Ramadan, when even frowning is undesirable, they chose to murder and maim indiscriminately. The most incomprehensible aspect of these atrocities is that a vast majority of their victims are the very people on whose behalf these wars are waged!

If they want to fight and die for God, they are welcome. There are over 200,000 American soldiers, in Iraq and Afghanistan, who are there specifically to oblige them, why not go and fight them.

These cowards, who call themselves Jihadis, run and hide from soldiers seeking to fight them and instead target helpless and unarmed civilians. They repeatedly confirm that they have no regard for social order, for law, for human life and even for the sacred injunctions from the God whose pleasure they seek through violence. Read more »

On the 4th of June, 2007, Tony Blair gave speech at the “Islam and Muslims in the World Today,” below is the text of his speech and great reading for every Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

I would like to thank Cambridge University and their partners, the Coexist Foundation and the Weidenfeld Institute for Strategic Dialogue for hosting this important conference.

As many of you will know, the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme is at the forefront of innovative teaching and research in terms of the study of world religions, their inter-relations and their relations with secular society.

The first and most obvious question about this Conference here in London is: why? The first and most obvious answer is that Britain is today a country of two million Muslims in a Europe that has over 20 million Muslims. I would like to pay tribute to our British Muslim communities today. In overwhelming part, they make a significant positive and growing contribution to modern Britain.

We have successful Muslims in all areas of our national life - business, sport, media, culture, the professions. We have our first Muslim MPs, first Muslim Members of the House of Lords; hopefully the next election will bring more and hopefully also the first women Muslim MPs.

Secondly, and again obviously as a result of what is happening in the world today, there is an interest and appetite across all sections of society to know more about Islam in all its diversity. This is not, repeat not, about equating interest in Islam with anxiety over extremism. But it explains, in part, the desire to learn about what moves and motivates our Muslim communities. Read more »