The trouble with the Muslim society today

The suicide attacks in Saudi Arabia are only a confirmation of the internal chaos some of us have serially denied as our invention. It's not a conspiracy. It's neither the Jews nor Americans that blew themselves up in Baghdad, Islamabad, Maiduguri and Nairobi. It's us, the morally dead who read the sacred texts upside down and have thus become a threat to us, too.

What's happening to Islam is a badly managed process conflict; We are quick to excommunicate members without any formal and moral authority to execute such orders. By excommunicating a member for seeking to challenge a popular process, we create avoidable rebels.

Islam spread from the east to all parts of the world not because of swords, but because of of an outstanding intellectual scholarship and scientific breakthroughs it promoted in its golden age, between the 8th and the 12th century, allowing generations after generations of scholars to emerge and spread the message of the Prophet.

A few days ago, my brother Adamu Tilde raised valid points on the spread of atheism in the north of Nigeria and in diagnosing the syndrome, he attributed it to our tradition of excommunicating those who ask tough questions and challenge popular processes and consensuses. This we do, instead of engaging them in intelligent and decorous debates.

He was moved to make those observations in reaction to a post by Mubarak Bala, a self-declared atheist forced by self-appointed litigators of God to flee Kano for renouncing his faith.

Every Muslim we excommunicate for disagreeing with us, is an automatic enemy, and any unforgiving and vulnerable is a potential terrorist. The best way to tackle an indoctrinated or de-indoctrinated member is granting them a basic freedom to express their views and having them convincingly and openly crushed with superior intellect and reasons. Not threats. Not bullets. And definitely not bombs.

The trouble with the Muslim society as it is today is our reversal of the virtues upheld in the Golden Age of Islamic Civilisation. And unless we begin to debate with deviant adherents with decorum and love, and end this dangerous tradition of excommunicating them, more and more enemies will emerge to demonise and terrorise us.

A society where a believer sees lynching a "blasphemer" as a noble act, for which, quite unfortunately, he even expects heavenly rewards, is evidently doomed. We need to study our ancestors to save ourselves from the new-school evangelists of polarisation and sectarian discord.

Wishing every life ended in all attacks done in the name of God eternal rest, and mercy.