The rising death toll, the blood and the gore hurt but the searing and tearing hurt like a thorn lodged in the very heart. These monstrosities are committed in the name of the faith of Islam, a faith that declares the sanctity of innocent life to be greater than the sanctity of the Ka’abah itself. Like the humiliated Muslim woman from Madina 1,400 years ago who was disrobed in the marketplace and exclaimed in distress, the believer’s bloodied heart cries out, “Waa Islamah” (alas, for my Islam)! When indiscriminate violence uses religious beliefs and ideals to seek cover, it viciously defaces them. A grotesque wrong has been committed against Islam by extremists and fanatics, and our collective inability to reject it in clear terms has had grave consequences. Responses to Islamist extremism from Islamic scholars have often been ambivalent and ‘politically correct’ rather than passionately censorious of this being done in Islam’s name. This has been for two reasons: the clergy’s preoccupation with fiqh intricacies and minutiae of denomination and sect, and sympathy for the original motives of religious militants who launched a defensive struggle against occupation and unwarranted militarism against Muslims. By all means, selfless sacrifice for a higher cause (justice and truth) is the highest and most beautiful thing that the human being is capable of. Islam verifies this, through the doctrine of jihad and the esteem in which those who undertake it are placed, but there is a lot of murkiness out there, especially on this side of the Durand Line. The original impetus for the struggle has spiralled into no more than naked violence for an ideological power struggle, and the damage done by fanatical groups in the name of Islam is irreparable in its psycho-social consequences. It is these psycho-social consequences that are the gnawing, deep hurt. I struggle as a teacher of Islam with confused young minds full of questions, confusions and bitterness. There is deep resentment and unease over the failure of Muslim religious leadership to provide clarity and answers. Among those still struggling to hang on to faith, there is a seething, muted anger over traditionalist scholars’ failure to rescue the narrative from politicised and ideologised contemporary jihadism and Salafist fanaticism. There is today a clear trend of disenchantment towards religion in Pakistan’s middle and upper middle classes, the gravity of which is yet to be recognised and to meet which we are utterly unprepared. The media has often played the role of agent provocateur, stoking controversy around serious subjects of Islamic jurisprudence. Sensationalist talk shows deal in half-truths and untruths, relaying featherweight opinions on issues of gravity by scatterbrained demagogues and con artists. Clarity remains elusive as young minds are confused over these matters of complexity. Given the fact that the source of all information for most these days is primarily, if not solely, the popular media, it is not surprising that many growing up post-9/11 have come to associate religion with regression, backwardness and even evil, thinking we would do better without it. When you pit a madrassa graduate religious scholar against a squealing and irate liberated English-speaking woman giving him a couple of minutes to explain away the barrage of allegations of misogyny often born of a superficial understanding of religion and society, you make Islam seem incapable of withstanding the secular-liberal assault — you reinforce the idea that religion, being a thing of the past, needs to be cast off for progress that apes the western model. The struggle is not entirely about the physical elimination of violent religious groups through military strategies. There is a greater and more formidable challenge to face: undoing the terrible damage that the religious-ideological underpinnings of extremist groups have done to Muslim societies, and to hearts and minds. Our failure to rescue religious discourse from its abusers, who have the audacity to pose as its defenders, to win it back and restore its pristine essence is a huge blemish on the pages of our history. History’s verdict shall be unrelenting and merciless. Islam in this society faces an unprecedented crisis. And yet, hackneyed and simplistic as it may sound, in the heart of this darkness there is the first flicker of hope. At the heart of crisis is often opportunity, if we learn the right lessons: religious violence is a hydra we created with our silence towards grave injustices against our own people on the dictates of the ‘global bully’, thinking the unholy alliance would bring us boons. We then nurtured this hydra and owned it with our silence towards the crimes it committed against other innocents in the name of Islam. And now the genie cannot be bottled back again. A realisation is slowly sinking in even though we took far too long to learn: extremists use religious sources to justify their ideology, hence the responsibility on religious scholars to spearhead a progressive interpretation of Islam rooted in its sources is great, and that this has to come from the highest authorities on religion venerated by the generality of Muslims. Traditional Muslim scholars need to assert, as Sheikh Hamza Yusuf puts it, that indiscriminate violence in the name of Islam is “neither from religion nor sanctioned in any reading from our pre-modern tradition. It is a modern phenomenon, and those practising it have learned it from nihilistic elements in western tradition who innovated from Marxism and Asian philosophy like the kamikaze.” The current crisis is also gradually bringing home the realisation that denomination and sectarian orientation are secondary when the attack is on the very soul of Islam, and that the reply has to be proclaimed with a single voice. It is helping us understand that our condition cannot be traced to an externalised enemy to give us a comforting sense of ‘we the good and true versus they the evil and false’. The pulpit has to assume responsibility to set the record straight and disseminate the eclipsed tradition that has no equivocation regarding the rejection of fanaticism and violence against innocents, and the sanctity of human life. As the crescendo of the salvaging voice for Islam rises, the narrative will be rescued from the unworthy and undeserving. It has been a long, hard way but in Pakistan there is a clear shift in public opinion against the Taliban and other religious hardliners. With their atrocious acts, these groups have dug their own graves, as the human heart’s innate moral criterion balks at such an inversion of basic morality in the name of religion. In the heart of darkness, holding on to hope is still possible. The writer is a freelance columnist