ASK MAULANA

Some Muslims may respond to displays of anti-Muslim sentiment by protesting against them and denouncing what they say is discrimination against them. What do you think of this approach to countering or overcoming anti-Muslim sentiments? These cases are due to the law of nature. The solution to them is not that countries pass anti-Muslim discrimination laws. There are only two options before Muslims. First, they should declare that they are not a single community. Rather, the case of every individual Muslim is separate and distinct. Thus, if anything happens with a Muslim, Muslims as a whole should not make it their own case but should look at it only as the case of a particular person. However, if Muslims cannot take this option and do consider themselves as a single community or ummah, they should condemn, in clear terms, those among them who engage in negative activities. If they do not condemn these persons, then the rest of the world would surely infer from the wrong actions of these particular Muslims that the entire Muslim community is responsible, because Muslims themselves say that all Muslims are members of a single ummah or community. Such instances of discrimination as you have cited in your question happen on a regular basis with secular persons, but the rest of the secular world does not look at it as a matter of the “secular community”. In the secular world, each person is looked upon as distinct. There is no “secular ummah”. So, when such cases happen with secular persons, the sentiments of secular people do not get hurt, because secular people do not regard themselves as a single community. They regard this as a problem pertaining to those specific individuals. But when such cases happen with Muslims, the sentiments of the entire Muslim community get hurt. What happens with one Muslim affects the whole of the Muslim community. This is why when one Muslim performs a wrong action, the world begins to doubt other Muslims too. In order to avoid this, either Muslims should very strongly condemn those individual Muslims among them who are doing wrong, or, if not this, they should abandon the concept of the ummah: that is, every Muslim’s case is his own and what he does has nothing to do with other Muslims.