After the recent outrageous terrorism acts in religious places in Pakistan, it’s been in the buzz that it is the Wahabi/Saudi version of Islam that is always violent and so intolerant towards other sects in Islam. While I agree that it wouldn’t be appropriate to put the entire blame bucket into the court of a particular sect, there are many scholars and bloggers from Wahabi sect who openly depict their radicalism by rejecting and denouncing all other faiths/sects.
My friend Syed Ali Abbas Zaidi who is a PYA (Pakistan Youth Alliance) activist, pointed out a Wahabi blogger openly blogging and suggesting the readers to demolish the shrines like Data Durbars and others as the author openly calls them the “centers of shirk”! By the way, shirk means associating partners with God Almighty. I’d like to put an excerpt from that piece of writing here:
We will remain in this mess, that we find the Muslim ummah today, until we wake up and demolish the “Centers of Shirk”, like data darbar and the likes of it, and believe in the Tawheed of Allaah Subhaanuhu wa Ta’aala the way the Sahaaba (may Allaah be pleased with all of them) believed in it.
May Allaah make us understand that our main problem in “Shirk”.
Allaah calls “Shirk” the greatest injustice (Zulam). Its worse than killing someone unjustly.
I’d like to ask a question to this very Muslim; who on the earth gave you the right to suggest demolishing of shrines which are not just the shrines but are regarded as the mosques where large number of people offer prayers, and hold other religious activities. The Data Durbar regularly serves the food called “lunger”, this is the food which is distributed thousands of poor daily!
This is not all, the followers of Sufi Islam has always been regarding the efforts and services of the great saints like Hazrat Data Gunj Baksh towards Islam. It is commonly believed that these saints have helped in spreading the peaceful message of Islam towards the masses with love.
You see! This is kind of a severe clash between the assessment of two different faiths; while one believes the shrines to be the centers of spiritual learning, the other believes it to be the centers of shirk and thinks it should be demolished. Therefor, we have to understand this! We cannot convert each other to gather everyone on one single faith/sect. Neither we can force no one to join/leave any particular faith/sect.
There’s a simple principle we all have to understand, not everyone can be converted into your faith! Good or bad, you HAVE to accept them! In case you want to justify the killing by telling me that your faith/sect is accurate and mine is not, let me remind you some golden verses from Qur’an itself where Allah says that there is no compulsion in religion which further describes that you cannot force anyone to join your religion!
Also, the very famous verse where Allah strictly prohibits the murder of any human being and calls the murder of a single human being equivalent to the murder of the entire humanity. Now this is a very very simple thing! You cannot even murder a non-Muslim so how can you justify killings of the Muslims whose faiths are slightly different then yours?
I completely agree that the majority of the Wahabi sect is peaceful and tolerant towards the other sects. It’s just a bunch of bad guys everywhere who somehow want to remain in the limelight or have the lust of power of being self proclaimed Khalifa or Ameer ul Momineed!
Update 1: Video report on Dr. Zakir Naik’s, famous Islamic orator of Wahabi origin! (Updated July 12, 2010)
