We are not paying the greater sacrifice in the struggle against fundamentalism. Moderate Muslims pay the greatest price under terrorism, radicalism, and fundamentalism.
They too are seen as people who need conversion to clearer thinking and understanding. It happened to half the Malian muslim population, in half the country, under the AQIM occupation (Al-Qaeda). Local peaceful Muslims who treat non Muslims of other faiths with a laissez-faire attitude, and not so strict with hijab were treated as bad, inadequate, fallen or failed muslims for not adopting their rigid fundamentalist stances.
I can share several stories of murdered imams, murdered for refusing to preach violent and abusive doctrines.
A full mosque of men who got up and walked out of a mosque in Timbucktu, when radicals arrived in the city and stood up to speak to the assembly on a Friday. When they stood up in place of their imam the men walked out in silent protest, not giving them the satisfaction of a listening ear. Keep in mind this arriving group of radicals had AK47s. Leaving was a risque.
Yet admittedly, others side with the radicals, and some take up the call and end up helping and hiding the radical elements working into their community, making it almost impossible to root it out. A divided community cannot easily stand without a cost.
Here is a story from Algeria.
"“Oh my God, oh my God,” the wizened Muslim woman in front of me says, looking skyward. “Ya rabi, ya rabi.” During Algeria’s dark decade, Fatma Bisikri’s husband, an Arabic teacher, went to do the grocery shopping in Ben Achour, the poorest area of Blida where they lived. He was stabbed and then shot to death by two masked terrorists. I think Fatma, now seventy-one, is finished with her story when she tells of running through the streets without her shoes to find her husband. But this is only the first chapter. Two years later, someone pounded on her door at night. She did not want her daughter to open the door, but her daughter did. Three or four armed men in the recognizable “uniform” of the fundamentalist armed groups—baggy seroual under a long qamis—pushed their way in. “I do not want to talk about this,” Fatma tells me in her small, strained voice. Then she keeps talking. I am grateful for the presence of my friend Lalia. There is too much grief to absorb alone here at the office of Djazairouna, the Association of Families of Victims of Islamist Terrorism. When Fatma Bisikri continues telling us her history, Lalia begins to cry. “Smhana, smhana.” “Forgive us, forgive us.” Fatma says the armed men dragged six of her nine children, aged thirteen to thirty, from the house. She held onto the legs of one fighter, sliding along, until he kicked her to the ground. Then she ran out after them, screaming: “Give me back my children.” The fundamentalists put a knife to her throat. “What are you looking for?” one barked. Even her maternal instincts could not overcome the fear they knew how to provoke. She retreated into the house. Not a single neighbor came out to help. There had recently been eleven killings in a home nearby. Terror had become mundane. At first light, in a torrential rain, Fatma Bisikri went to look for her six children. All too soon, she found them. The fundamentalists had cut their throats and dumped their bodies in a oued, a nearby riverbed. The smallest details are what make a crime against humanity all too personal. They are what finally make Fatma Bisikri sob. Not long before that macabre night, one of her young sons had been crying that they had lost their father and did not have new clothes for the Eid holiday, as other children did. His older sister, a teacher, managed to buy him new pants. He was wearing them when he was murdered. Why did this happen? Later, someone suggested to Fatma that it was because her daughter refused to stop teaching despite being ordered to do so by the local fundamentalists in their crusade against education. Or it could have been because people in the area had previously given succor to the terrorists, thinking they were fighting for religion, but then stopped helping them due to the jihadists’ local atrocities. None of these theories can answer the big why, or ease this mother’s continuing agony. After the murders, Fatma applied for a new place to live to get away from the mouth of hell her home now seemed to be. However, she has never been given other housing. So Fatma Bisikri remains alone in the same location with the view of the oued where she found her children’s bodies. She wants to sleep in a different place, but she has nothing. “Andi walou.”"
- Karima Bennoune. Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here.
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