Pranab Mukherjee is largely repeating himself. “Term ‘Islamic terrorism’ wrong : Pranab,” from the Press Trust of India, December 29:
Kolkata, Dec 29 (PTI) Describing as “unacceptable” the term ‘Islamic terrorism’, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee today said a “disinformation campaign” has been launched to vitiate the atmosphere and asked the people to protest it.
“Not only is this expression Islamic terrorism unacceptable, there should be protest against it. Islam has nothing to do with terrorism. The patriotism of Muslims is no less than others in the country,” Mukherjee told a programme to mark 200 years of the Bengali translation of the Quran here.
He said deliberate attempts were being made to vitiate the atmosphere but Islam, which preached love and communal harmony, was against terrorism. “Terrorism is against humanity.” He said universal brotherhood was the basis of Islam which attracted people all over the world to it.
Mukherjee said that after 9/11, people in Europe and US coined the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’ and tried to project it was a conflict between Islamic and Christian civilisations.
Challenging those who described Islam as a religion of fundamentalists, Mukherjee asked them to show which part of the Holy Book encouraged fundamentalism.
The danger of fundamentalism depends in large part on what the fundamentals are; Qur’an 33:21 upholds Muhammad as the supreme example of human conduct. Given the open-ended calls for violence against unbelievers in the Qur’an (e.g., 9:5), along with the biographies (Sira) and accounts of Muhammad’s sayings and actions (ahadith) that are accepted as sound (sahih) by Muslims (e.g., Bukhari, Muslim) it becomes clearer why armed jihad just doesn’t want to go away.