I’ve become increasingly enamoured of the writing of Dan Burmawi an ex-Muslim who converted to Christianity. He tells it like it is about Islam having lived an Islamic life and in Islamic communities. He has written a short but very informative piece on the position of Jihad in Islam. In this piece he talks about the ‘cognitive dissonance’ of individual Muslims with regards to Jihad and how they know that Jihad is a an Islamic commandment but try to ignore it because jihad is horrific and they hope that if they ignore jihad then jihad will not touch them.
Being someone who is able to separate individual Muslims from the ideology of Islam Mr Burmawi’s piece illustrates clearly that although there are Muslims who do want nothing to do with extremism and jihad they keep silent about it because they fear the outcomes of questioning Islam. This silence is as Mr Burmawi said a major factor in the creation of a passive support network for jihad. The question for me is how to get Muslims, especially those Muslims in the West to break that silence?
Mr Burmawi’s entire piece is worth a read and here it is.
Dan Burmawi is a bit off with his million Jihadists number. It is possibly accurate if you only count those who are actually involved in sword-Jihad, but there are many more who actively support Jihad (in all its forms aimed at the Kuffar) even if they are not personally violent or directly involved with ISIL etc.
In addition for every active sword-Jihadist there is usually at least one person enabling and facilitating this in terms of logistics etc., or supporting them through donations to “charities” including Zakat (of which 1/8 should be devoted to sword-jihad according to Sharia).
My own research on this, conducted roughly a decade ago showed that a reasonable estimate of the numbers of those Muslims who are either active sword-Jihadists and those in the organisations but not actual “fighters” ranged from 1-3 millions.
Add in those that are active supporters of sword-Jihadists, but not “signed up” members of Jihadist organisation and that gave numbers in the range of 5 millions.
Behind that was a truly huge number of Muslims who were at least sympathetic to the aims of the Jihadists, if not (always) their methods and who may offer indirect (and often deniable) support through “Islamic charities”.
Finally, as Burmawi says, there are those who” just refuse to condemn it” and turn a blind eye and deaf ear when it is preached in their mosques.
All together, this amounts to the overwhelming majority of Muslims worldwide.