I’ve become increasingly enamoured of the writing of Dan Burmawi an ex-Muslim who converted to Christianity. He tells it like it is about Islam having lived an Islamic life and in Islamic communities. He has written a short but very informative piece on the position of Jihad in Islam. In this piece he talks about the ‘cognitive dissonance’ of individual Muslims with regards to Jihad and how they know that Jihad is a an Islamic commandment but try to ignore it because jihad is horrific and they hope that if they ignore jihad then jihad will not touch them.
Being someone who is able to separate individual Muslims from the ideology of Islam Mr Burmawi’s piece illustrates clearly that although there are Muslims who do want nothing to do with extremism and jihad they keep silent about it because they fear the outcomes of questioning Islam. This silence is as Mr Burmawi said a major factor in the creation of a passive support network for jihad. The question for me is how to get Muslims, especially those Muslims in the West to break that silence?
Mr Burmawi’s entire piece is worth a read and here it is.