If the study of human suffering at the hands of fellow human beings is your area of interest, Toronto this weekend was the place to be.
Two different “ethnic” community groups that could not have been more distinct from each other in terms of culture, cuisine and language, met separately to share their pain and hear from speakers trying to heal the wounds that refuse to heal, despite nearly a century of torment.
Unaware of each other’s events, Armenians and the minuscule Kashmiri Pandits met separately, one on Sunday, the latter on Friday night.
Both groups have suffered immensely at the hands of my co-religionists, many of whom show no collective recognition, let alone remorse, for the crimes committed in the name of the supremacist Islamist doctrine of world domination.
The Armenians came to listen to Hisyar Ozsoy, an MP from Turkey’s opposition Halkların Demokratik Partisi (HDP), one of the few political parties that acknowledges the “Armenian Genocide” committed by the Ottoman Islamic Caliphate at the dawn of World War I in 1914.
Too many Muslims show no recognition of, let alone remorse for, crimes committed in the name of Islam.
For over 100 years many Turks, be they nationalists, Islamists or right-wing fascists, have denied the existence of any such genocide.
On Sunday morning, the Indo-Canadian Kashmir Forum met in Mississauga to hear from visiting Indian scholar Susheel Pandit about the history of the ethnic cleansing in Kashmir over 700 years, where the indigenous Hindu Pandit community was slowly driven out, finally culminating in the 1990 exodus.
That was when Pakistan-backed Islamist militants committed mass murder and house burnings to end thousands of years of Hinduism in the Kashmir valley.
At both events, I met fellow Muslims who see the truth and risk their lives to express solidarity with the victims of crimes committed in the name of Allah and Islam.
The Kashmiri Pandits and Armenians are not alone.
Ask the Kurds, the Baloch, the Saharans and Darfuris, all of whom are Muslim, yet have suffered ethnic cleansing, cultural genocide and occupation by supposedly superior Muslims -- Arabs, Persians, Turks and Pakistani Punjabis.
All I can say to my fellow Muslims is, ‘We have met the enemy and he is us.’
Today we Muslims face a crisis like never before.
With Saudi Arabia and Qatar at each other’s throats ... [and] dictators flexing muscle in Egypt and Pakistan, all I can say to my fellow Muslims is to echo the cartoon character Pogo when he said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Allow me to share with you a quote about the depth of the ossification that has rendered too many Muslim minds irrational, unreasonable and in need of anger management.
In 1974, the Cornell-educated Indian Islamic scholar Hashim Amir-Ali translated the Qur’an and published it in its chronological order, the way it was revealed, as against how it was collated many years after the death of Prophet Muhammad.
He wrote in the preamble:
The Qur’an is read parrot-like in most Muslim homes. ... The religion that passes for Islam today – the Islam of the masses and of the ruling classes in every Muslim country – is the Islam of the Middle Ages and not exactly the Islam of the Qur’an or the Prophet. ... The lines of thought laid down a thousand years ago have vitiated the entire course of Muslim thought and history. It is this legacy of the past that has to be faced today.
Tarek Fatah, a founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress and columnist at the Toronto Sun, is a Robert J. and Abby B. Levine Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
