The Key to Defeating ISIS: Ahmadiyya Islam
While President Obama reveals his plan to obliterate ISIS with force, and Bill Maher continues his ignorant rant to tie ISIS to Islam, New York Times journalist David Brooks provides the correct counter to ISIS in his September 4 column, “But, ultimately, [ISIS is] a spiritual movement that will have to be surmounted by a superior version of Islam.”
Brooks is right. ISIS is bad ideology and the best cure for bad ideas are better ideas. The obvious question, therefore, is does a superior version of Islam exist today and if so, where is it?
In 1963, Islamic scholar and member of the worldwide Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, Mirza Tahir Ahmad, wrote a landmark book titled Murder in the Name of Allah.
This book dismantled the terrorist Mullah Maududi’s dystopian claim that Islam should conquer the world through violent jihad. Some twenty years prior in 1941, Maududi established his right-wing political party known as Jamaat e Islaami with the goal of establishing an Islamic State to conquer the world.
Unfortunately, by 1963 most Muslim leaders rejected Tahir Ahmad’s work and arrogantly argued that Maududi was right about Islam forcibly conquering the world. Thus, Maududi soon inspired Sayed Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood, then the Taliban, and then Al Qaeda. And now we see the most bitter fruit of Maududi’s labor — ISIS.
As journalist Kevin McDonald of The Guradian notes in his September 9 column:
When he made his speech in July at Mosul’s Great Mosque declaring the creation of an Islamic state with himself as its caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi quoted at length from the Indian/Pakistani thinker Abul A’la Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami party in 1941 and originator of the contemporary term Islamic state.
It is worth noting that Maududi had zero training on Islamic theology. Indeed, Prophet Muhammad nor the Qur’an validate al-Baghdadi’s or Maududi’s warped and self-concocted ideology.A Man of God – Mirza Tahir Ahmad, IV Caliph of Islam Ahmadiyya
Thus we return to David Brooks’ astute observation that ISIS can only be defeated by a “superior version of Islam.”
In Murder in the Name of Allah, Tahir Ahmad argued for everything a superior Islam would offer — i.e. everything ISIS is not. Tahir Ahmad demonstrated why apostasy and blasphemy laws are alien to Islam, why Islam condemns all forms of terrorism and religious compulsion, why mosque and state must remain separate, and why Islam condemns theocracy.
Source: themuslimtimes.org (Sept. 15)
