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I believe that Muslims have a duty to condemn terroism whenever and wherever it occurs. I draw this conclusion from a well known verse of the Qur’an that reads:

O you who believe! Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to God, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be against rich or poor: for God can best protect both. Follow not your lusts lest you swerve, and if you distort or decline to do justice, verily God is well-acquainted with all that you do. – Qur’an 4:135

We do not condemn terrorism because we are asked to by journalists or politicians, but because our Creator has asked us to stand up for justice and because it is right to do so. This means that we must condemn injustice wherever it occurs, whether the cause is popular or not. People ask us to comdemn attrocities such as those witnessed on 11 September 2001, and we do. But people can be fickle. They would rather we didn’t condemn other actions, in the spirit of patriotism and pride.

Take Winston Churchill, for example. He is considered a national hero in the United Kingdom, and bronze statues of the man can be found in many of our cities. His biography is almost always found on the bookshelves of people of a certain generation and his speaches are still invoked in times of hardship.

Yet in 1920, as secretary of state for war and air, Winston Churchill suggested that the RAF drop mustard gas from its planes in Iraq to put down a major revolt. As the wartime Prime Minister in 1943, meanwhile, he and Air Chief Marshal Harris conceived Operation Gomorrah, a terror bombing campaign which killed up to 50,000 civilians and left over a million Hamburg residents homeless.

Sure enough, over the past sixty years historians, politicians and even churchmen have found ways to justify the mass killing of civilians. Just as others have justified the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as shortening the war and avoiding the deaths of hundreds of thousands of others, so have the British been able to account for the targetted deaths of thousands of civilans.

But as a Muslim, whose religious law categorically prohibits the targetting of civilians in war, I am forced to condemn our great national hero. I am duty bound to say that there is no room for terrorism, whatever the end. The end, in Islam, can never justify the means unless the means are in themselves permissible.

I imagine that there are many that will condemn me for this stance: how could I say such a thing? But as I have said before, we do not condemn terrorism because other people ask us to do so, but because it is wrong and flies in the face of our principles. In the 1940s it was left to the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, to speak out against a clear wrong. In our era, perhaps that role is ours.