Great article, but I wish Dr. Al-Ansari would have taken it even further and identified the Iranian regime with its Islamic Revolution as the main culprit causing the current menace that's terrorizing the globe in the name of Islam. As long as that hateful regime is allowed to exist, the culture of hatred will continue to grow.
Dr. Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari, former dean of the shari'a and law faculty at Qatar University, has recently published several articles in Gulf papers about terrorism and its root cause. According to Al-Ansari, terrorism is the outcome of a culture of hatred in the Arab countries, and in order to eliminate it, the culture of hate must be eliminated."Terrorism is the fruit of hatred - hatred of life, hatred of civilization and the [modern] era, hatred of society and state, hatred of living people. The young people who have become tools of murder and human bombs are the sons of the culture of hatred, and the outcome of a fanatical culture and extremist ideology that sees life, its pleasures, and its beauty as unimportant. Ultimately the political, economic, social, and religious motives that push [the young people] to blow themselves up lie in a single main cause - and that is the culture of hatred."In this current era in which we live, we do not need everything that is in the books of our forefathers. Rather, we [need] religious laws that will embrace the individual as an individual, and will bring our young people to love life, culture, and the advanced arts."Second, we must stop praising and priding ourselves on 'tolerance,' when we continue to live without tolerance. If we are truthful, and if we are faithful to our principles, we must translate [the principles of tolerance] into actual behavior...
Reminds me of what PV stated in one of his previous posts:
To me, terrorism should be defined as a politically motivated hate crime -- singling out the civilian sector for some level of destruction, or to drive them away, in order to forward a political goal; not because of anything they may have done, but merely because they represent "the despised other" in the mind of the perpetrator.