It's Us Against Them.

Ini adalah e-mail dihantar oleh seorang Muslim dari Bangladesh kepada media. Ini adalah salah satu contoh prajudis/bias yang berakar umbi dalam jiwa sebahagian Muslim di seluruh dunia. Corak pemikiran mereka adalah "it's us against them" atau "kita sentiasa betul dan orang lain sentiasa salah".

 

The Khutba or sermon delivered in Friday prayer is 'Wajib' i.e. obligatory for all Muslims to listen to. The Imam of the mosque delivers it from the pulpit before the start of the main congregational prayer. The Khutba has two parts - the first part consists of sermon on a subject of religious importance and the second part is a prayer seeking divine blessings on the Holy Prophet (pbuh), his family and companions and the prosperity and well-being of the Islamic world.

Because the Khutba is delivered in Arabic, only few in Bangladesh can understand or pay attention to what the Imam is saying. As the Khutba ends, the Imam calls on all to line up for the congregational prayer. This routine remained unchanged until about 8-6 years ago when I noticed changes coming up in the second part of the Khutba.

Around this time, I found out that the Imam of the mosque, in an upscale area of Dhaka where I used to pray, start adding new sentences towards the end of the Khutba. The words such as 'Mujahid' 'Jihad' 'Kuffar' 'Mushriq' 'Yahud' and 'Nasara' caught my attention. One day, I asked the Imam to give me a Bangla translation of the second part of the Khutba. After much persuasion, he acceded to my demand.

The translation proved my apprehension right. The sentences that the particular Imam was adding roughly translated like this, "Allah, make the Mujahids victorious in their Jihad in (Here sometimes places such as Palestine, Kashmir, Iraq etc. are added).

Allah, make us victorious against the Idolaters, Mushriq, Jews and Christians." I asked the Imam, "Why should we be saying things against members of other religions in our prayers?" I added, "I do not know if we have Jews, but we have Hindus, Buddhists and Christians as citizens of Bangladesh. What victory are we seeking against them?" Despite my urging, he refused to deviate from the practice. When I asked, "Why in the past I did not hear those sentences in the Khutba and even now many Imams do not utter those sentences?" To this he had no answer except that what he said was right. When I brought this to the notice of the Head of the Mosque Committee, he apparently was surprised, but later advised me not to rock the boat. Anyway, when I went for Hajj in 2002, I found that the Imams in the Holy Mosques of Mecca and Medina were saying exactly what our local Imam used to say praying to Allah for the victory of the Mujahids in their Jihad against the Kuffars (Unbelievers), Mushriqs (Idol-worshipers), Yahuds (Jews) and Nasaras (Christians).

I then realised that our local Imam was only following a Saudi tradition. In the rural areas, especially where the Imam is from an older school of religious teaching, the Khutba still follows the old tradition i.e. ends with the prayer for the Muslim Ummah.

While we are desperately trying to project a moderate face of Islam in Bangladesh, should we continue to allow these new inroads into traditional Muslim prayer? We should not do anything that hurts the sentiments of any community however small or weak they might be. I hope our Islamic scholars, as well as the Religious Affairs Ministry, will look into this.

Source: Daily Star Newspaper, September 7, 2005 Unquote

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