Washington, September 27: Shocked by a series of terror arrests, American Muslims are joining hands in condemning any attacks against their country.
“Everyone here unequivocally condemns this,” Driss El-Akrich, a doctoral student in public administration at the University of Illinois at Springfield, told.
“For somebody to claim they are doing this in the name of Allah, they are betraying the values of the faith they are claiming to serve.”
A 29-year-old Muslim revert was arrested Wednesday in Illinois on charges of plotting attack against a courthouse in the state.
Police said the young man left an explosives-laden van near the courthouse and used a mobile phone to try to detonate the vehicle.
“I had to listen to it (the news) again and again,” Javed Cheema, director of Horace Mann’s project management office, said.
“I couldn’t believe this was happening in my hometown.”
The arrest came four days after three Americans of Afghan origin were arrested on charges of preparing a 7/7-style attacks in New York.
On Thursday, police arrested a 19-year-old Jordanian on claims of trying to bomb Dallas’s 60-storey Fountain Place skyscraper.
Un-Islamic
Muslim leaders denounced the attack plots as un-Islamic.
“Every Muslim young, old, woman knows this is not of Islam,” said Sheikh Ahmed Fauzi, imam of the Islamic Society of Greater Springfield’s mosque on Stanton Ave.
Fauzi said he was saddened by the news of the plotted attacks in the name of Islam.
“If you read the Qur’an, you do not commit crime,” Fauzi said during the Friday sermon.
“You do not spread crimes throughout the earth.”
Muslim leaders are worried that such individual acts would have a negative impact on the Muslim community as a whole.
“I didn’t know to be more angry, scared or frustrated that this was being done in the name of Islam,” said Cheema, the director of the Horace Mann’s project management office.
“It puts all of us in a bad situation. The community has been very, very welcoming to us.”
American Muslims, estimated at between six to seven million, have been in the eye of storm since the 9/11 attacks.
They have become sensitized to an erosion of their civil rights, with a prevailing belief that America was targeting their faith.
A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that American Muslims are still discriminated against other than any religious groups in the US, eight years after the 9/11 attacks.
-Agencies